News published on May 20th 2008
Online Haze reviews hit with embargo
Videogaming247 report that Ubisoft have placed an embargo on all online Haze reviews in the UK. The embargo states that no site can publish their review of the game until May 23 – the day of the game’s official release.
Usually such embargo’s are to stop plots of games getting out ahead of time, or to keep other elements secret. The recent GTA IV review embargo was a good example of this. However, Ubi seem to have given no reason for their decision.
In other completely unrelated news the game recently got a 4.5 score from IGN.
8 comments ↓
Monkey Rimmer
May 20th, 2008
I’ve read some pretty bad reviews of Haze already…. IGN gave it 4.5/10 I think, stating that it seemed unfinished, lacklustre AI, shoddy textures and bad voice acting….. they were pretty damning to be honest. Based on the demo I’m going to buy it on release day, but judging from some of the reader comments, a few were thinking of cancelling their pre-orders. Maybe this is why Ubisoft are placing an embargo on reviews… in case sales are affected!?
Sean
May 20th, 2008
Yeah, another reason for embargoes is the publisher not having any faith in the product. It looks like this is the case with Haze.
Poor Free Radical. Just hurry up and make Timesplitters 4, eh?
Nogert
May 20th, 2008
I always thought it looked terrible from the start, and this was apparently supposed to be the PS3’s answer for Halo.
Monkey Rimmer
May 21st, 2008
After giving this some thought, I think I’ll still pick it up. After all, reviews are there to mainly act as a guide….. quite a few times I’ve ignored a review and have gone on to find the game really good! Reviews are always subjective I suppose aren’t they?
Major
May 21st, 2008
Don’t waste your money supporting shoddy products. It must be pretty terrible to only get a 4.5 on IGN. Besides, Ninja Gaiden’s out in a couple of weeks
Monkey Rimmer
May 27th, 2008
Well.. I decided to ignore the reviews and to find out for myself. How wrong I was. After around 8 hours of single player gameplay, I could have cried! Script was shoddy. Voice overs appalling! Gameplay non-descript. Vehicles were laughable! I might be wrong, but after what I’ve seen with HAZE, I’d say no-one tested it at all! I can’t believe that after an extension to development time, this was the result! I’d be ashamed of it and myself if I worked for Free Radical. Utter shite……
Ben
May 27th, 2008
How’s the multiplayer?
From the single player demo Haze seemed quite average, but if GoldenEye was released today it could be easily overlooked if it wasn’t for the splitscreen.
Monkey Rimmer
June 2nd, 2008
To be honest Ben, I only tried a handful of multiplayer games and I got bored. It played much the same as every other FPS. To be fair, there wasn’t any lag, however, according to the server list, there were normally 4 US and 3 UK servers empty, each with capacity for 16 players. I really should have listened to Major et. al.!