Don’t worry though – they’ve brought plenty of guns, drugs and mercenaries along for the ride as well. Fresh from celebrating its eighth birthday in April, Free Radical can boast one of the industry’s finest FPS pedigrees: founded by ex-Rare members who’d worked on GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, the developer has gone on to create the Timesplitters series as well as the critically acclaimed Second Sight (see Time Extend).

Haze made its debut at E3 2006 and was labeled, amongst other things, a ‘jungle shooter’ and compared to the likes of Far Cry – a full year on and it’s painfully obvious how unfair those comparisons were in every respect, from the range of environments on offer to the game’s innovative narrative line.

The locations alone in this latest build range from the previously-seen jungles and atmospheric swamps to claustrophobic factories, rebel villages and mountain passes. But despite all this loveliness it’s not a game that lends itself to the five-minute pitch, especially given the pretty big and complex claims being made for it. What was most unclear at E3 is exactly the thing that is most important about Haze: do Free Radical’s promises of a new way of doing things stack up?

In the context of the current and future FPS glut, the bare bones of Haze’s story might not initially seem very remarkable. You play as Shane Carpenter, a new recruit to the private Mantel army: set in 2048, the UN and its like have collapsed, and military operations are outsourced to eerily prophetic private military corporations. In the future, the private sector does a fine Lord Kitchener impression, and a trailer shows an excerpt from a Mantel recruitment video with CEO David Bloomfield asking if you want to “make a difference”, offering the chance to “be a hero” and “fight the good fight”.

As much of a character as Carpenter, Mantel is beautifully realised, a corporation with all the smooth taglines and euphemisms we might expect from a globe-spanning operation that dominates competitors and incorporates divisions from pharmaceutical to military. The brand infuses the design of all your weapons and combat gear (redesigned since last year and now significantly cleaner and crisper), and in a genre twist you’ll begin with all of this extremely effective equipment while your enemies have to be more resourceful: after all, a bunch of angry villagers hardly have the production capacity and purchasing power of a multinational.
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