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Haze Impressions

I just sat through a very impressive demo of Haze gameplay. While the game itself looks amazing, what most blew me away was the revelation that what we had seen and heard about up till today was really only a small portion of the game.

To catch you up, in Haze you play as a sort of super trooper, a soldier working for a corporation. As a soldier you're supplied with nectar through an automated administrator attached to your back. The nectar gives you some distinct advantages in combat: it can slow time down, give you a bit of auto-aim, help you heal faster, and let you pinpoint enemies easier.

Early on this seems great, but the developers told me today that that benefit comes with quite a price.

About 30 percent through the game you start to realize that the Nectar that gives you these powers also warps your perception. When you shoot people they don't bleed. When those people die their bodies disappear. Sound familiar? It should, the devs said the game is as much a indictment of video game violence as it is real world violence.

There is a scene, when your nectar flow is cut off that you suddenly see the world for what it really easy. Where once there was a sunny environment free of death and carnage, you now face a rainy world with dead bodies. Soon after your character switches sides and becomes a rebel.

Although you no longer have the benefit of nectar, you do have a bunch of new attacks. My favorite is the ability to use nectar against your former buddies in arms.

You can do this several ways. You can embed nectar into a grenade, coat your knife with it or destroy a soldier's nectar administrator. Now matter what you do, the effect is the same: the soldier loses it. In the case of the grenade, all of the soldiers in the yellow cloud of nectar lose it. They turn on each other, shooting all over the place, throwing grenades, committing suicide. During this sort of nectar OD the normally yellow masked soldiers glow red.

You can also play dead. This works because as a soldier you are used to dead bodies disappearing. What happens in the game is that when you are close to death you can press the L2 button and go into a feigned death, disappearing from the soldier's view. A few seconds later you pop back to life and you can take them out. There's a little mechanic in coming back from your feigned death that effects how quickly you get up from the ground. Essentially it's a timed button press.

The only other thing I saw that was different was that rebels can melee a soldier and steal his weapon. This is done by first tapping the left trigger and then quickly the square button. Once you have their weapon you can dispatch them pretty quickly.

The neatest thing is that all of these interesting play elements will hold true for multiplayer as well. When you feign death in multiplayer you will disappear from view. When you hit someone with a nectar grenade it will disorient them and force them to fire all over the place, yes the real player will start firing all over the place. If they have grenades they'll start tossing them. The devs told me that the best way to deal with this if you're on their team is to melee them, knocking them to the ground, and out of their nectar-induced trip but not killing them.

The game interesting, very details, but not over the top like Killzone 2 or Gears of War. More along the lines of something like Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter, but with a distinctly run-down world feel. The AI seemed pretty sharp. I saw at one point. A friendly NPC run up to a soldier and take him out with a throat slice. And the background chatter. Holy crap, it was fantastic. Some of it very funny, some of it very angry all of it obnoxious.

Haze looks like it's going to separate itself from the pack not only with an interesting plot but with a play mechanic that backs up some of the social commentary that the game seems to be trying to make. I can't wait to see the finished product.

9:47 PM on Wed Jul 11 2007
By Brian Crecente
9,878 views
54 comments

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