Political commentary is just fine for Fox News and its ilk. I do not enjoy it, nor am I informed enough to care, and can avoid it entirely just by skipping a channel. It has its own bloviated space, and that’s fine so long as it leaves me and one of my favorite pastimes alone. Things were nice and separated until Haze arrived, because it is the video game equivalent of either a radical right wing recruitment video or a liberal left wing smear campaign. I am well aware of the opinions held by the rest of the world about America, its government, policies, religious hypocrisy and eating habits. I get enough of it on the evening news; the last thing I need is a below-average shooter tarted up with a topical pseudo-political message. It’s just in poor taste.
Haze is about as subtle as Rush Limbaugh on a cheap vodka bender. The Mantel troops are drug-addicted sociopaths, brainwashed by the nectar and the media into believing they are heroes doing good for the world. Imagine the characters from Kane & Lynch rolled in with the cast from Army of Two, and then have all their lines written by rich white kids who wear their pants around their ankles and think Jackass is high comedy. The Mantel soldiers couldn’t be any more stereotypical and offensive if they tried. They don’t see the atrocities they commit (literally); they are conditioned by the nectar to not see the bodies of their victims. This is at least an interesting idea, but it is never used intelligently in either gameplay or story, coming into play mostly in the by-the-numbers multiplayer.
The troopers are only the tip of the iceberg. The Mantel Corporation is actually a giant pharmaceutical conglomerate that invaded a small (probably South American) country. The only reason that they invaded was because there was a supply of nectar plants there and they wanted to corner the market. Add to that soldiers misinterpreting Old Testament scripture and bizarre references to being carnivores, and the message is clear: the US military, big business, drugs, God, and meat are all bad. They turn you into mindless killing machines in silly yellow masks that only follow orders and eat babies while badly rapping the same phrase over and over.
To be fair, the rebels aren’t much better. They are militant hippies that don’t mind fighting and murder so much, setting up improvised explosive devices on the corpses of the enemy. I only spent an hour or so as a Mantel trooper before defecting to the “right” side and fighting as a rebel for the rest of the game. They were just as obnoxious, yelling “Remember the promise!” when no one else was in the room. The main character, Carpenter, is clearly some kind of superman with confidence issues. As a trooper, he killed the rebels with ease, and then as a rebel without the nifty armor and drugs, he killed the troopers with ease. Haze is such a mess that it isn’t even consistent with itself.
What seems to have happened is that somewhere along the way, Free Radical realized that they had a below-average shooter on their hands, and they didn’t have a lot of money left to fix it. Instead of leaving the game unreleased, or working on the gameplay problems, they scraped the bottom of the barrel for the cheapest writers and voice actors they could find. I can see the board meeting going something like this:
“How do we distract people from our plain-looking shooter with cliché vehicle sections, cookie cutter levels and a generic, reluctant hero protagonist?”
“Paste on a poorly written, offensive plot that mocks the American military?”
“You, sir, get a promotion! And a baguette!”
Despite what it looks like, I am not trying to take the high road with this. My socially liberal, economically conservative, borderline libertarian leanings are as meaningless as they are unelectable. What I am saying is that political propaganda has no place in a video game, especially in one as ham fisted, unsubtle and bad as Haze.
Ubisoft and Free Radical should have taken the loss and just released the game without trying to up the ante, because they ended up adding only offensiveness. Yes, the PS3 is starved for exclusives, but this I could have really done without. Seriously, Turok was better then this, and that was about a native American in space killing dinosaurs with a bow and arrow.
