Haze is a first-person shooter video game developed by Free Radical Design and published by Ubisoft worldwide and Spike in Japan for the PlayStation 3.

The game takes place in a dystopian future, where the Mantel Corporation rules the world with a drug called Nova-Keto-Thyrazine - also called Nectar,[5] a "nutritional supplement" that enables soldiers to fight harder and smarter, but also induces a hallucinogenic effect, where soldiers are no longer cognizant of the real battlefield around them, instead viewing an idyllic, painless environment.

After Carpenter witnesses the effect Nectar is having on his fellow soldiers, he turns rogue and teams up with The Promise Hand to take on Mantel.

Teare is quickly berated and dismissed by Duvall for not taking his requisite dose of Mantel's performance-enhancing drug Nectar.

Over a series of missions fighting for Mantel, Shane's Nectar administrator fails to drug him on several occasions, causing him to witness a number of disturbing events: he hears screams (implied to be Duvall torturing someone) which Duvall dismisses as "just an animal," he has a conversation with a pilot that had received no wounds from a crash and yet dies mysteriously.

Eventually, Shane and his squad are sent to capture Gabriel "Skincoat" Merino, the leader of the Promise Hand who supposedly eats his enemies and wears a long coat made of their skins.

When Duvall starts trying to cut off both of Merino's hands, Shane pulls a gun on the rest of his squad, leading to a shootout which causes the helicopter they're in to crash.

After crashing into a swamp, Shane tries to contact Mantel about the incident and his inability to administer his dose of Nectar but fails and starts going into severe withdrawal and experiences hallucinations from it.

Answering a distress call from a wrecked Mantel cargo ship off a heavily fortified beach, Shane meets up with Teare.

Teare, completely battered and wounded, reveals that when they first met, he sabotaged Shane's Nectar administrator to let him have "a taste of reality".

After a shootout in the control room, in which the two argue about right and wrong and the nature of war, Shane kills Duvall and escapes from the exploding Landcarrier.

The story ends with Merino describing Shane as a "hero" and revealing his plans to use Nectar, in combination with free will, to give his people some "confidence".

Though purchasing an engine would reduce the development time, the team chose to create their own in order to have more freedom in the features and game design.

However, the release date was pushed back to Winter, and it was announced at Sony's E3 2007 press conference that Haze would be exclusive to the PlayStation 3.

[11] On October 22, 2007, Ubisoft announced that nu metal band Korn had written and recorded an original song inspired by Haze.

Tons of visual issues abound within the game from texture tears and non-descript environments to pop-in and odd animation problems.

"[28] Greg Damiano of Game Revolution cited examples of bland gameplay and graphics and blistering sound, and commented that the main character, "Shane Carpenter, whines and pouts all through the campaign.

"[21] In one of its more positive reviews, PSM3 said the game "fails to better Unreal Tournament 3, Resistance and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare" and it "feels like a novel idea that missed its window of opportunity," but said "there is a certain charm to it."

Club gave it a C+ and said, "More narratively cohesive than the Halo trilogy, but less inventive and compelling than Resistance: Fall of Man, Haze does finally give us a self-aware portrait of videogame soldiers, and a foil for all the head-butting, 'boo-yah' behavior that's been the norm for far too long in the medium.

[36] In 2015, The Guardian nominated Haze as one of the 30 worst video games of all time, noting that despite having an interesting concept it was "a hollow disappointment.