8 Video Games So Bad They KILLED The Studio
6. Haze
2008's PS3-exclusive shooter Haze faced quite the uphill struggle from the get-go, because despite being a new FPS from much-loved TimeSplitters developer Free Radical Design, the games media unrealistically hyped it up as a "Halo killer."
Haze was saddled with woefully unfair expectations out of the gate, then, but beyond that it just a bit... boring.
Far from the personality of Free Radical's prior titles, Haze was a dull, generic shooter with poor controls, unimaginative level design, terrible AI, a forgettable story, and lackluster multiplayer. Not quite a Halo killer.
As a result Haze was a commercial flop and this, combined with the cancellation of Star Wars: Battlefront III which Free Radical had been working on for several years at the time, caused the studio to enter bankruptcy.
By December 2008, barely six months after Haze's release, Free Radical was shut down.
A few months later the shell of Free Radical was purchased by Crytek and transformed into Crytek UK, which worked primarily on the Crysis franchise before itself being shuttered in 2014.
Though Embracer Group did resurrect Free Radical in 2021 to work on a new TimeSplitters game, the company was shut down once again at the end of 2023 without releasing anything new.