GC'07: HAZE Preview

Haze really is shaping up into something very special. Following on from their successful spoof-styled Timesplitters series, Haze will be the first game with a more serious narrative from FPS specialists Free Radical Design, since Second Sight a few years back. As if we ever doubted Free Radical, Haze not only seems to be nicely garnished with top of the line FPS gameplay, but also has some particularly enterprising new ideas.

One of Free Radical's hallmarks over the years has been the particularly well written games they have released. The comic styling of the Timesplitters series has never failed to make us guffaw at length, and you better believe that Haze is exhibiting the same brilliant writing abilities.

An example of this is the subtle symbolism at the heart of the game's plot. Playing as the character Shane Carpenter, you firstly take on the role of a Mantel soldier. Haze is set in the future where peace keeping forces are no longer formed by governments, but private companies instead. Mantel is one of these companies (whose reputation Shane Carpenter comes to question in later parts of the game, before defecting to the rebels about a third of the way through). Mantel soldiers have yellow and black coloured suits, are given a drug called Nectar (to increase their fighting abilities) and wear helmets that make them look like insects. This symbolism portrays the Mantel soldiers well as drones (worker bees, you see?) who fight without questioning their actions.

Rob Yescombe is a writer on the Haze team and, I must say, hats off to the guy. It's this sort of an eye for detail in computer game stories that is all too scarce, although it does seem to be getting more important for games to have an engaging plot these days.

Anyway, what you all really want to know about is the gameplay. TVG readers may have gleamed a look at the two Haze previews already on the site (that's right, we like the game enough to preview it three times). In these previews we took you through factors such as the asymmetry between Mantel soldiers and rebel fighters, as well as how the Nectar drug works on Mantel soldiers. Now, after having been at the Leipzig Games Convention where there was a chance for some hands-on play with the multiplayer co-op, as well as a presentation from the one and only (Dr.) David Doak, there are a few more details to send your way.

First things first: there's a four player - yes, that's right, four player - co-op multiplayer mode. Gamers will be able to play with up to three other comrades online (or one other locally via split-screen). By our reckoning, that makes Halo 3 and Haze the only FPS games that will be increasing co-op gaming to a four player experience in the near future. Well done Bungie and Free Radical, well done indeed.

All four player spots were filled up in the hands-on multiplayer co-op we experienced. Essentially, in the single player game you play in a squad of six. Three of these squad members then double as co-op hot-seats that gamers can jump in and out of online. Anyway, we started off playing through a jungle area as Mantel troopers, where we got to experience the effect of Nectar first hand. It helps you pick out targets, steady your breathing, increase your speed, warn you of danger and bolster your health. On the other hand, it makes dead bodies mysteriously disappear (a nice play on the FPS gameplay convention), sanitises your surrounding environment and if you overdose on Nectar then you go into a kind of overkill mode where you've no idea who you're shooting at as both Mantel and rebel soldiers appear as black figures. It's a nicely balanced system that promises to bring a breath of fresh air to a genre which sees far too many unimaginative releases with stale ideas these days.

Following on from this we experienced some of the vehicular co-op play which was, once again, a joy. There was a chance to jump onboard what seemed to be the main Mantel vehicle. It was a kind of all terrain buggy not too dissimilar to a Warthog in Halo. In fact, that comparison is quite fitting because ragging the Mantel buggy around was quite like driving a Warthog in Halo, as far as the feel of the physics and the buggy's handling were concerned, which is no bad thing. It featured one driving seat, one gunner position atop the buggy and two passenger seats where players could hop on and provide extra fire power. The attacking rebel vehicles looked more like a road going four by four in contrast.

Then came the opportunity to play as the rebels. Originally cast as the bad guy guerrilla warmongers, the game progresses in latter stages to tell their side of the story minus the Mantel hegemony. We saw the 'play dead' feature first hand: when you take a big hit to your health you can lie down and fake death. Of course, with the effect of the Nectar, you then become invisible to the Mantel soldiers. This makes for some voyeuristic surprise stealth skills that are a brilliant experience.

But that's not all! The rebels have a number of tricks up their sleeve to counter the effects of Mantel's Nectar drug. Rebels are a bit more agile on their feet, and you can also steal Mantel weapons by stunning a soldier with a melee attack and then grabbing their weapon before pumping them full of their own lead. Nectar can be used against Mantel soldiers by shooting their administrator (located on their backs), or taking the administrator from dead Mantel soldiers and attaching it to a grenade which results in an explosive yellow cloud. Both actions have the effect of an overdose of Nectar to affected Mantel soldiers, sending them into overkill where they shoot both themselves and other Mantel troopers - it's quite comical to watch, almost in a Splitters kind of way.

We were also told that rebels will have the ability set booby traps by rigging a Nectar grenade as a mine, for example. Whether this would be in the story as well as multiplayer battle modes is unclear, although it will be particularly interesting in multiplayer deathmatches - bringing back memories of proximity and remote mines in Goldeneye. Speaking of the multiplayer modes, it appears that the asymmetrical abilities of Mantel and rebel soldiers will be preserved in the multiplayer game, which will add scope to team based games in particular. Unfortunately, Haze won't have a four player split-screen multiplayer feature a la Timesplitters. Perhaps that feature will go the way of the Dodo with next gen machines. It'll be a sad thing indeed.

From the limited hands-on play we experienced, the core elements of an FPS game (e.g. AI, gunplay and combat style) seemed to be in good working order, as you'd expect from a Free Radical game. Speaking of combat style, with gamers playing as two different soldier types (Mantel and rebel) throughout the game's story, could this mean two different combat styles? Perhaps we'll see a more direct and aggressive form of combat under the Mantel guise, with a stealthier guerrilla warfare style of attack as a rebel. This certainly would put the icing atop a very tasty looking cake.