Haze Hands On

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Obviously, with sides this different from one another, the question of balance is of supreme importance. Indeed, according to creative director Derek Littlewood, much of the extra time afforded to the team at Free Radical by Haze's delay late last year has been spent on tweaking and polishing that balance, to the point where the team is satisfied that it's created a level playing field between the two very different styles.

Some of the fruits of that balancing can be seen in the quirks of the various abilities - for instance, there's the few moments of disorientation after getting up from a feigned death. But on the flip side of the coin, the team has also balanced out the Nectar ability to make enemies glow brightly by giving Mantel forces neon yellow patches on their armour, which means the rebels can pick them out relatively easily. It's very much a skirmish-heavy, balls-out shooter as a result - there's not much sneaking and hiding to be done here.

One rather unusual - and potentially annoying, although obviously essential - piece of balancing is that Mantel troopers can't hurt anyone they can't see - so you can't just shoot at the spot where you saw someone fall down just in case they weren't really dead. Without this, of course, the Rebel feign death ability would be near-useless - but it's still frustrating, as a Mantel soldier, to know that someone just feigned death (it's fairly obvious, since if they were really dead their weapon would have dropped) but be unable to do anything other than wait for them to get back up.

All in all, however, Littlewood is satisfied that his team has built a game that balances nicely - and one which has plenty to offer for fans of two entirely different play styles. "Different players always like slightly different things," he says, "and the thing we tried to cater to with the two different sides was two major archetypes of FPS players."

"With the Mantel troopers, you've got the very straight-up, action-based kind of player who likes to go for the headshots, get in close, do some melee and get out. Mantel troopers are very direct-action oriented. The Rebels are more about flanking, about using indirect tactics to get one over on your opponent - and, again, there's a set of FPS players who definitely prefer playing like that."

One group of players who may find Haze a little harder to get into are those who have become enamoured with the extremely quick, realistic kills of games like Call of Duty 4 and Counter-Strike. Despite its near-future setting and vaguely realistic weapons, the game is more of a traditional FPS where enemies must be worn down with multiple shots to kill them - but with CoD4 already dominating the one-shot-kill market, this may well be to Haze's advantage, of course.

Whether Free Radical likes it or not, Haze will definitely also end up being a flag-bearer for the PS3's online gaming capabilities. It will help if the rumours of an early summer launch for the in-game XMB menu system turn out to be true, and who knows, if Haze lives up to its potential, it might even help to drive people to actually pick up Bluetooth headsets for the console.

All of that's an "if", however, and much depends on Free Radical's balancing. Then again, few development studios have its depth of experience with multiplayer FPS titles. We'll let you know how it turns out as the launch date approaches.