It's easy to sympathise with Haze. When details of the game first emerged, the promise of some clever control mechanics and a commentary on the way war justification can be achieved through sanitisation had some heralding it as the game that could finally cause Halo's slip from first person divinity. As developers Free Radical discovered though, sometimes losing the propaganda war can make the actual war irrelevant, even if you have a series as well respected as Timesplitters already on your C.V.

First there were raised eyebrows over the developers' decision to reveal ahead of time the game's central twist: the traitorous acts of your character, Shane Carpenter, (a name that surely guarantees a role in an Australian soap) who defects from the private army of Mantel Global Industries to join the rebel Promised Hand Group after he uncovers the truth about Nectar, Mantel's revolutionary nutritional supplement that gives their soldiers capabilities that border on the superhuman. This was followed by the game being delayed, then dropping completely off the Microsoft map and, by the time its release date was finally confirmed, many of those who originally praised the title had turned on it. Haze, it seemed, had become the kind of socially unacceptable thing you purchased in a back alley rather than a games store, and that would cause the police to raid houses where multiplayer matches were taking place. This is a real shame because Haze is actually quite fun - just not, in all likelihood, in exactly the way its creators intended.

One of the main reasons Free Radical gave for deciding to reveal so much of the story was their desire for Haze to stand up on its gameplay rather than a solitary plot point. They wanted to show off exciting rebel abilities like playing dead and using the Mantel troopers' own Nectar administrators against them to make them overdose - and to do this meant divulging the information. In one way the choice seems like a bad one, because there's nothing in the rest of the plot that comes close to the drama surrounding your desertion. Apart from the intriguing but not completely unforeseen ending, the storyline sits in the background, providing little more than a reason to get you from one location to the next. In another way, however, it seems like a wise decision, because much of the characterisation and voice acting is so poor that not even the plot twist could save it.

The majority of the combatants on both sides have one-dimensional personalities. The Mantel soldiers are meatheads whose frat boy whoops and hollers poison the battlefield like audible nerve gas, while The Promised Hand are far too righteous and devoted to a leader, Gabriel Merino, who's a cross between Col Kurtz from Apocalypse Now and Noel Edmonds. Long before the end of the game you'll swear that if you hear one of them shout "Remember your promise to Merino" one more time then you're going to kill them all, go back to Mantel, and demand that they dose you up to the eyeballs with Nectar forthwith.

While the lack of opportunity for erudite conversation may not come as a surprise, the fact that, when it comes to fighting, those around you are all a couple of bullets short of a full clip, should. If you were being kind, you would say that the A.I. in Haze is energetic and enthusiastic. If you weren't then you'd probably conclude that it's as dumb as a post. If those on your side aren't standing directly in front of you when you're trying to shoot, and those on the other side aren't taking up incredibly vulnerable cover positions, then they're generally running headlong at one another. It's tactical naivety from the Braveheart school of war and, when you consider that this is meant to be a hardened guerrilla faction fighting some drug enhanced super-troopers, it's worrying how often the battlefield looks more like an episode of It's a Knockout. Watching a comrade's kamikaze impersonations would also be more entertaining if you didn't know that, shortly after he's disappeared off into the distance, he'll have managed to acquire so many holes that he can now camouflage himself as a piece of Swiss cheese, and you're going to have to use all the benefits of your regenerating health system to find and revive him. If sadness does strike and you fail to reach or, more likely, choose to ignore a downed squad mate, then dry those tears soldier because, as if by magic, a replacement often appears from around a hill or behind a clump of vegetation in a "Dr. Livingston, I presume?" moment.

Even the clever play dead ability doesn't escape unscathed from this artificial idiocy. Early on there isn't a problem; the way Nectar focuses Mantel troopers minds' by blocking corpses from their sight creates a loophole you can exploit by hitting the deck when you've taken a lot of damage, only to pop back up seconds later, with the element of surprise now on your side. Later on, however, the enemy gets wise to the trick; but instead of continually shooting the ground until they're happy the turncoat who's been cutting a one-man swathe through their army is dead, or at least taking cover until he reappears, they just call out that they know what you're up to before wandering off a short distance to just wait around for a lead lobotomy. It's stupidity of the highest order - yet it's still not the worst example in the game.

In one mission for the rebels you have to escort the group's last missile across a bridge. It's vital you succeed so all the big Promised Hand members are there - you, Merino, all those other ones who look alike. Naturally you would have expected the group to select their top driver to pilot the giant flatbed truck carrying the warhead, but within only a short distance of setting off, he's managed to run over and kill half your squad. It's hilarious and it makes you wonder whether the group have only got one missile left because their second best driver missed the bridge completely and drove their other missile straight off a cliff, instantly becoming Mantel Employee of the Month.

It may well seem that all this is just jumping on the 'Haze is awful' bandwagon - and initially it's very disappointing. But if you can get over this and start to view the game as a kind of B-movie pantomime then it actually becomes entertaining and strangely endearing; especially as the rest of Haze is of a much higher quality. While the game never gets any more difficult than moderately challenging, the variety and pacing isn't far off being brilliant. The lush jungle you start in is followed by the dust, heat and darkness of a copper mine, then the beauty of a tropical beach, the bowels of a container ship and the bright, white concrete of a derelict hotel, the contrasting environments blending together almost seamlessly. While Haze isn't going to win any graphical awards - and there are some frame rate and pop up issues to boot, the latter particularly with textures - the PhysX technology has been used to create a coherent tropical setting. Scattered amongst the standard shooting are chances to drive or ride shotgun on a range of slightly twitchy but always exhilarating vehicles, such as an armoured Mantel buggy and rebel pick-up trucks and quad bikes. There are also a couple of heart pumping, on-rails, objectives that require you to defend a rebel village using a helicopter's chain gun and get aboard the giant Mantel Land Carrier by taking out its defences as you speed alongside it.

While Nectar isn't as central to Haze's gameplay as, say, the time control in TimeShift, it's certainly not a gimmick either. When working for Mantel it becomes an amber ambrosia, warning you of danger, increasing your resilience and enhancing your perception so that enemies stand out with a Ready-Brek style glow, allowing you to pick them off at distance with your pinpoint focus or in close by unleashing your ultra-powerful melee attack. It's shocking how quickly you fail to notice that your finger has become a permanent fixture on the L2 button and a shame that, because your switch of sides happens so soon, you never have the length of time necessary to develop the same addiction as your character is experiencing. After you become a rebel, the various different ways you can use it to make the Mantel soldiers overdose - shooting the Nectar administrators on their backs or collecting them to use as grenades and mines - are efficient and inventive, and, whichever side you're on, the shooting mechanics are always reliable. Although you can only carry one weapon at any given time, there's a fair range available beyond the standard rifle, including a rocket launcher, sniper rifle and a rangy flamethrower that you really want to keep pointed away from your face. Its jets of fire are accompanied by a distinct, unpleasantly breathy noise, which is one of a range of solid sound effects and a standard action score.

Multiplayer was another previously vaunted aspect of Haze and the two player offline and four player online drop in/drop out co-op definitely gives the campaign another lease of life; although the way you have to wait until the next checkpoint to join back in if you die may frustrate some. Besides this, the usual individual and team deathmatch options are present, but the real interest is the team assault mode, where each of the six maps has its own mini story and provides unique objectives. Promised Hand fighters attempting to steal Nectar from caves below the copper mines, Merino trying to reach a helicopter to escape a shanty town and both sides trying to be the first to a missile launcher are amongst the choices that will probably get much less attention than they deserve. If all else fails, it's worth just watching other players make their characters jump. It looks like they're on invisible, miniature ponies at a gymkhana.

In the end, it seems that Haze is all about perspective, and a little slice of life imitating gaming. Some of those who'd been shooting up on pre-release Nectar had distorted Haze's world into a perfect one. The withdrawal symptoms they suffered when the saw the reality made them punish the game twice, once for not being brilliant and a second time for not living up to their lofty expectations. The reality is that, while Haze may be dumb, it's also fun, and if you like your first person shooters - and especially if you can find it for under £30 - it's worth picking up Haze so that you can shake off the blurred vision for yourself and make up your own mind.

Reviewed by James Hamblin for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).