Everything about Haze went silent after last year’s big show, but now Free Radical has ditched the squad-based nature in favor of intelligent A.I. characters, or even better, four-player cooperative play. Set in the year 2048, governments are now outsourcing military to private military corporations (PMCs). An uber-creepy company named Mantel Global Industries has taken over and acts as a sort of United Nations. However, they’re also a listed company, which has products including solar energy, bio-medical, engineering, high-tech weaponry and a private military organization of super-soldiers.

As one of Mantel’s soldiers, you’ll be dropped into a South American jungle, where a rebel faction going by the name “The Promised Hand” has taken control, and Mantel has been sent in to sort out the disturbance. The squads are having a great time, but suddenly things start to go wrong, and you realize that war isn’t the fun party that it’s supposed to be. While war is actually a horrific and dismal event, there’s something you discover that’s making light of everything that is going on around you. You’re constantly getting juiced up on a new military support supplement developed by Mantel called Nectar.

Nectar is some pretty potent stuff, and strapped onto your back is an administration tank of this drug that turns you into a super soldier, and more or less makes you blind at what you’re actually doing. As you’re high on Nectar, you’ll be able to take more damage, and you’ll be faster and heal quicker. Your character has a Samus-like curved visor that delivers statistics, including how much Nectar you have left and how much of the stuff is actually in your bloodstream.

Haze is built on all-new technology, and Free Radical took few years to build this new engine after they finished with Second Sight. This game is currently slated for a holiday release on the PlayStation 3, but we’re assuming the game will land on the Xbox 360 sometime in early 2008.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 12:55 pm and is filed under XBox 360, PS3, PS2, All. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.