Once upon a time, there was a developer named Free Radical, and the company was pretty much untouchable when it came to shooters on consoles thanks to the Hall of Fame worthy GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64. The label on that box may have said ‘Rare, Ltd’, but it was the team that would later work on the game Perfect Dark and then founded Free Radical Design. Since that initial, massive success, the company gone on to create one hit FPS after another, always with a uniquely skewed perspective on the genre.

Until now.

Haze is Free Radical’s take on the horrors of war, or the misuse of power, or a parable about the Iraq War, or frankly who the hell knows because the entire thing from the storyline on down is a clunky mess—like a rusted out old car. And just like a rusted car, the game apparently would have been more expensive to save than to trash - so it was tossed onto the junkyard of gaming store shelves. The car metaphor continues to be apt, in fact - because playing this game is a lot like being in a car. A car packed full drunken frat boys, all of them screaming in your ears as you try to drive down an obstacle course. That, by way of metaphor, is a reference to the characters you’ll encounter if you’re unlucky enough to play this game. Some of them are teammates, some of them are scenery, and all of them run the gamut from utterly reprehensible to ridiculously stereotypical cardboard cut-outs.

And that’s one of the first great failings of Haze - you quickly force yourself to tune out every hideous character you run into, as a means of maintaining your sanity. In so doing, you miss out on their various expository moments, but frankly, you’re not missing out on much. Of course, if you don’t focus on the story, you’re free to concentrate on the meat and potatoes of a FPS - the shooting. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do too well there, either.

By far the most hyped element of the game was the ‘nectar’ system. In the world of Haze, nectar is the ultimate performance enhancing drug, sort of a combination of steroids and LSD. When you’re on it, you move faster, aim better, take more damage, heal faster, and every enemy you encounter is highlighted by a convenient orange glow. This is handy, since most combat in the overly-cluttered environments quickly becomes a game of whack-a-mole. Unfortunately, you only get to use nectar for a couple of hours, after which point you’re on your own.