The good news (in fact, the best news I’ve heard in weeks): Free Radical is still around.
The bad news: I had been spending the week playing Haze as a sort of tribute to commemorate what I assumed was going to be the studio’s last day of existence (it was supposed to be today). Now I feel like I’ve worn a black veil to a birthday party.
Don’t get me wrong: I love TimeSplitters and when people keep their jobs, so I’m very thankful that Crytek swooped in at the zero hour to save what was left of the company. At the same time, I can’t un-play Haze. So let’s look at it anyway and discuss the role it played in how Free Radical got to this point.
The primary reason I bothered with Haze at all is because TimeSplitters: Future Perfect is among my favorite last-generation console shooters, a loose and wacky take on the genre that acted as the perfect tonic for space marine fatigue. Haze feels like it wants to accomplish that same goal (that is, to be veer far away from the cliches introduced by Halo) from a different angle, but it lacks a refinement of execution. Actually, scratch that—it’s littered with problems.
Haze actually does have a solid shooter design at its core, though it’s built on shaky technology. Weighing the gameplay down more, however, are the erratically made design decisions that were probably meant to differentiate the game but end up making it feel haphazard. The primary offender here is the way Nectar, the super soldier drug used by the game’s PMC Mantel, is handled. It actually makes Mantel soldiers in many ways inferior to the non-drugged rebels: sure, taking it makes targets glow brightly, but the downside is wearing a suit that glows brightly for real and all the time. There’s no indication that Nectar is making anyone stronger, and the only real advantage—the ability to snipe with automatic weaponry—is completely negated in the single player game by the rebel abilities of playing dead (this is like being able to take cover in an open field). Characters on each side feel equal in strength and have a parity of skills, which plays counter to Haze’s fundamental conceit.
There are other problems, like suicidal AI and an opening few hours that are absolutely unbearable. The reason those hours are unbearable, I think, is one of the keys to explaining Haze’s market failure. As a sergeant of Mantel, your character is forced to hang out with the witless meatheads of his platoon. They are intolerable douchebags who say things like “It’s like taking candy from a crippled baby,” but the real problem is that they are clearly analogous to space marines, and space marines were designed to play to the jingoistic sentimentalities of the audience. Haze takes some steps to paint these characters as good but unwitting, drugged victims of corporate concern. Those efforts fail. For most of the game they come off as unsympathetic monsters, and it all feels vaguely distasteful.
I think Haze misread its audience with the fundamentals of its story. And then it went PS3 exclusive, which limited its audience and doomed it to maybe a third of the sales of a multiplatform shooter. In a world where a developer is only as good as their last game, these two things together weakened Free Radical to the point where a couple of project cancellations could, and did, completely deflate it. The worst part is that with better technology and a more nuanced read of the Mantel conflict, a Haze sequel actually could have been good. Free Radical may still be around, but whatever they do next, it won’t be Haze 2.
Related Links:
Free Radical, Creators of GoldenEye, Close Doors
The Strange Case of Hype
The Sky is Falling: Gaming Industry Job Cuts Roundup
