I bought Haze for $20, and that was after all the baaad reviews, so my expectations were fairly low, but to be honest its not a bad game. Key things that prevented this game from being good

1) Story was very run of the mill. Massive shame as it had undertones of having a great 'what is the cost/benefit of war' theme that just wasn't really utilised.
2) Extremely linear, which isn't always bad if done well (HL2, Uncharted) but this was full of imaginary walls which is frustrating
3) graphics were quite average compared to its competition at the time (CoD4 mainly)
4) Bugs, lots of them. I remember driving along in a buggy and suddenly the ground disappeared and I fell through the map.

Good points
1) Multiplayer was quite fun for a while
2) The Nectar idea was neat, but under developed
3) Vehicles were pretty sweet.

Haze's development problems were very similar to another well known flop, Daikatana. The development time was very long due to numerous technical problems and feature creep (which ends up with lots of underdone features). I remember reading an article about Haze in 06 I believe and from the interview with the developers it was meant to be much grander in scale and features than ended up happening. As a game it had all the hallmarks of a game that was in danger of dragging on and so was somewhat abruptly rapped up and released.

Bad controls and bad dialog turned me away from buying this game. I was very excited for this game until I tryed the demo. They messed up what could have been a great game

This.

Also, it wasn't a horrible game. It just felt.... unfinished.... 

i heard it was a lil bit of ubisofts fault for
1)no marketing,
2)pushing its own agenda on the game,
3)rushing it

Just because a game sells decently, doesn't mean it's anywhere near a good game.

And here's an easy quick summary on the game and why it's a stinker.  The beginning of the video also quickly tells on why so much was expected of it:

Terrible voice acting, no polish on character models or enviornments, bad sounds, unpolished gameplay.

I got this for $15 just to see what all the fuss was about, and I don't think it was worth it. The concepts with nectar, and having the rebels be able to perform special skills was cool, but the rest of the game brought it too far down to be enjoyable.