Like taking candy from a crippled baby...

The title of this review is both indicative of everything that is wrong with this game and a decent summary of how easy it is to knock Haze. It's a phrase the hideously asinine Mantel troopers utter when in battle and is something that can lead me down virtually all the critical paths I want to take to lay into this game.

Firstly, the story is appalling. The game is incredibly short, so dramatic twists feel contrived, motivations are never explored and the dialogue is inexorably heavy handed in an attempt to short-hand everyones character traits: Mantel are brain damaged quarterbacks and 'The Promised Hand' (their enemies) are mexican freedom fighters, with no stereotype left un-mined.

Sadly, while mining the stereotypes, they wrote 4 lines of dialogue for each army, which your squad-mates regurgitate every 4 seconds. Towards the end of the game, I actually muted them and turned on the subtitles because if I heard the phrase 'REMEMBER YOUR PROMISE TO MERINO!' one more time, I would have snapped the disc in half.

This leads to the impression that the people you are fighting with are utterly moronic. Utter moronism is actually confirmed after the first half an hour of play, when you realise how terrible the AI is.

Your squad constantly walk into your line of fire, charge towards machine gun nests and rocket launchers, enemy soldiers stand, waiting for you to headshot them or charge headfirst at you, displaying absolutely none of the tactics you expect from an 'elite fighting force'.

All the while screaming one of four catchphrases at you.

So...what about the mechanics of the beast? Surely they have got something right?

Wrong.

As you probably saw in the details, the game runs at a paltry 576p. When Halo 3 went sub-hd, it was to ensure the lush graphics could keep a stable frame rate. No such luck here on both counts.

The textures are horrendous, the frame rate chugs when anything big happens and everything is draped in a coma inducing brown. Special mention, however, has to go to the flamethrower effect that is actually worse than the flame effects in Goldeneye on the N64.

Its just impossible to see where all the time and effort went into the game. Its seven hours long, the story is crap, the voice acting is crap, the graphics are crap and the multiplayer, the final insult, is crap and this is the team responsible for the, largely, excellent Time Splitters series.

So, yeah, this game is terrible. I only played it because I forgot to take it off my Love Film list and I still feel cheated.