Haze

Hazy sunshine, scattered showers

As you've probably gathered, the story mode of the game is a fairly heavy focus - although Littlewood thinks that the team might have made a bit too much of the story at the outset. "We focused a lot on the message that we're trying to communicate with it, and in a way, I think this may have distracted people's attention from the ideas that we had to make it a really interesting game to play. Since then we've always been backtracking a bit," he muses.

So, the "message" eh? Well, despite Littlewood's assertion that "the message was never meant to be this overt thing that comes in and whacks you around the head", we did see quite a bit of that going on in the few cut-scenes we got to witness. There's a fair bit of eulogising and a lot of naked anti-war sentiment in the game's script, which can leave the whole thing feeling like the strange offspring of Metal Gear Solid and a John Pilger article. On a tropical island. It's hard to say at this stage whether this is going to grate or not, really, but we can certainly see some gamers making faces at the chest-beating sincerity of it all.

On the plus side, the story seems to provide a fairly good reason for setting up a lot of varied levels - ranging from a running battle around a cargo ship that's running aground, through to an assault on a mountaintop observatory, with plenty of Far Cry-style jungle combat in between. Even better is the fact that the story mode experience isn't necessarily a single-player affair, either.

Co-op is one of the things Free Radical has focused on very heavily, with the end result being a "drop in, drop out" system that does pretty much what we've wanted a top-flight FPS game to do for years - allows a friend to join in (either online or in split-screen) at any point in the game, and then to leave whenever they like. You always have three AI companions in your squad, so when a player joins, they just replace one of those - and when he leaves, the AI takes over again.

Simple - well, sort of. "To be fair, three AI characters are not the same as three players," says Littlewood, "so the game also auto-balances against that. If you've got two human players, it will start ramping the difficulty up to compensate for that. On lower difficulties, it doesn't get much harder - but on the harder settings, it really ramps up the difficulty as you add extra players. That way we enable all ranges of gamers to get a good experience, from the most casual to the most hardcore."

In graphical terms, Haze looks pretty good, thanks to Free Radical's in-house developed engine - it lacks some of the slickness and graphical detail we've come to expect from modern shooters thanks to the ubiquity of the Unreal Engine, but Littlewood claims that developing its own engine gave the team much finer control over things like lighting, which lend hugely to the atmosphere of the game.

We're not sure how that one is going to be judged, in the final analysis - the game certainly looks good, and some of the environments, like the jungle areas, are incredibly lush and packed with foliage. The visuals aren't by any means a leap ahead of what we've seen before in FPS titles, though - if Haze is going to win over hearts and minds among gamers, it's going to be with great gameplay, not with flashy visuals.