When talking about Ubisoft and Free Radical’s upcoming FPS title Haze, it’s essentially impossible to speak for very long without talking about how amazing this game looks. It’s quite simply stunning, and that’s why I’ve already dived into the graphical portion of this preview before I can even get a full sentence out. The texture detail is great, but the design and style of the environment is what really sells the photorealistic nature of this game. It takes place in South America, and you’ll really feel like you’re fighting through the lush southern-hemisphere vegetation, and it’s quite simply great.

 

In Haze, you play as paramilitary sergeant Shane Carpenter. In the theoretical future of Haze, it’s the year 2048 and governments have outsourced their military operations to private corporations (Blackwater USA, anyone?). You play as a member of Mantel Global Industries, the company essentially responsible for global peacekeeping. You’ll start the game fighting against an organization called The Promise Hand, a group of rebels lead by a man known as Skin Coat. (The name comes from rumors that he skins POWs and fashions their hides into crude leather. Awesome.) Mantel is not just a military organization, and as such has the R&D capabilities to develop things like their proprietary armor suits and this special injectable goo known as Nectar. Nectar basically turns humans into hardcore killing machines – it enhances speed, strength, resilience, aim, intelligence and gives special powers to boot. You’ll see your enemies glow among the foliage, but if you overdose on Nectar (Nectar delivery is user-controlled and up to five reserves are stored in a back-mounted unit) you’ll go berserk.

 

It’s good to learn a lot about Mantel and Nectar early on in the game because...

 

**MAJOR SPOILER ALERT**

 

...halfway through the Haze experience (which all takes place over the course of three days of this conflict), you’ll learn some new information and essentially switch sides. You’ll begin fighting for The Promise Hand and become the rebels you’ve been hunting. This means that your Nectar supply is cut off, and so are all the benefits it provided. No more special vision or extra power, but you can use these things to your advantage.

 

Nectar can definitely cause overdoses, so shooting a Nectar delivery system will cause the Mantel soldiers to go into a rage and kill everyone around them. You can also create Nectar grenades by combining the substance with a standard grenade, causing a fragmenting rage-inducing explosion. Also, in an effort to “sanitize” the battlefield, Nectar won’t allow Mantel soldiers to see dead bodies on the battlefield. This means that you’ll be able to play dead in order to get a jump on unsuspecting opponents, to whom you’ll quite literally be invisible. If this isn’t cool enough for you yet, there’s a shotgun called the Donkey-Puncher that should probably seal the deal for you.

 

Haze is coming from a good number of the minds behind a handful of classic FPS franchises – N64’s Perfect Dark and Goldeneye, as well as Timesplitters and Second Sight. If this game shapes up to be half as good as it’s potential, it should be one of the best FPS games we see this year. Be sure to stay tuned to Game Almighty for more details as they become available.