drugs are bad, mmkay?
Haze is about as subtle as Rush Limbaugh on a cheap vodka bender. The mantel troops are drug addicted sociopaths, brain washed 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, then have all their lines written by rich white kids who wear their pants around their ankles and think Jack Ass 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 game play 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 Mexican) 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. I only got my head around this travesty of a plot when I remembered that Haze was published by Ubisoft, a French company. *rim shot*
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 for 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 super man with confidence issues. As a trooper he killed the rebels with east, 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 not releasing it or working on the game play 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!"
I kid, I have no idea if Free Radical likes dinner roles or wears funny hats.
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 a below average shooter, not upped the ante and put out a below average, offensive shooter. 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.