I ran into Techland while wandering the business hall here at the Games Convention today. Techland are the developer's behind Call of Juarez, the Chrome Engine and the guys making both Warhound and Dead Island.

After sweet talking one of the devs on hand I was walked into a backroom where Pawel Kopinski walked me through some gameplay for the recently unveiled Dead Island.

In Dead Island you play as a man who has been separated from his wife when the plane the two are on crashes on a tropical island. The island, it turns out, is home to a resort and a growing population of zombies. While the game certainly has some very strong first-person shooter elements, Kopinski insists it's more of a role-playing or action game then straight-up shooter.

The game will have side quests, which you get from various factions of uninfected survivors you find on the island, as well as branching story lines, he said. Dead Island will consist of 15 levels that you'll need to negotiate to save your wife.

The game play still looks a bit wobbly in places, but it's certainly shaping up. Most noticeable was the over-the-top damage modeling. The game uses three layers for all people: bone, muscle and skin. When you attack a person you can cut or shoot through each of those levels and the damage you cause is illustrated very graphically, and uniquely depending on what type of weapon you use and where you hit.

For instance, Kopinski took on a group of ambling zombies with a machete, decapitating a grey-skinned woman in a bikini and then chopping off a man's leg and chopping into the side of another woman. The man Kopinski attacked fell to the ground, his leg, not so cleanly severed, laid to the side of his body, muscle and bone exposed. The woman who suffered the chop to the side still moved toward him, her body sort of leaning to the side, and an exposed gash of flesh marking his last attack.

The graphics looked quite good in places, though I still noticed areas where his attacks looked more like stickers than true deformation.

Kopinski says the team hopes to eventually make all the objects you run across on the island usable as a weapon, but currently that isn't the case. The game, which will feature guns, will more often than not have you relying on melee attacks.

The game is still publisher free, but I suspect that will change in the near future. I'd like to see the game given a bit more meat and some work on the plot, but the ideas has some major potential I think.

For instance, you can build very obedience-heavy structures, like assimilation centers, security cameras and corrupt police departments and it starts to change the way your entire city looks, turning it into something it of 1984.

The idea is that gamers should instead of focusing on where and how a city is built, focus on how the inhabitants live and will be effected by your decisions. The demo showed us a bustling Metropolis, a gritty urban setting, a utopian green city, a secular town and even a religious commune.

I like that Maxis has decided to break Sim City a bit out of the mold and is trying to get gamers to think more creatively about how they would fashion their civilization or culture.

It looks like this game has some great potential for both hardcore fans of the franchise and those, like me, who have over the years grown a bit bored with its formulaic feel.

Instead of making the game strictly linear, Airborne starts each level with your in the air and allows you to decide where you want to drop into the game. This does two things: First it seems to give the game's missions a more open-ended, user-controlled feel, but more importantly it makes all of the levels incredibly vertical.

In all of the levels we glimpsed you could land anywhere, be it near the middle or end of a map, or even on a roof top. This really changes the way you play through a game because you can, for instance, try to drop behind the current enemy lines.

The levels we saw showed a nice variety from towns and ruins to a traditional D-Day scenario or an industrial complex. The one that looks most fun, and most difficult, though is a level called Der Flakturm, which has you taking out a giant tower that is a city unto itself. The level looks viciously hard and seems to go straight up. In the one play-through of the level we say, the developer was killed within seconds of landing on the ground.

The expansion pack for the best RTS on the computer seems to add quite a bit of neat little extra to the game. This next chapter in the franchise adds two new armies, new tech trees, two new campaigns, and a bunch of graphical and gameplay enhancements.

This time around you can play from both the German and British perspectives. The game adds a full dynamic weather system that actually impacts the way you play the game. Rain can mud up an area, making it impassable for some vehicles. There's another level, I was told, where you can only see enemy troop movements by lightning flashes. What a cool idea. You can also set the time of death and type of weather for all multiplayer games.

The British army of the game plays as a very defensive based army. They have a very unique feel and look to them. They react faster than any other infantry in the game. The can build trenches, allowing them to create cover where there wasn't cover before. They can set up mortars, have sniper squads, light machine gun squads, rifle grenade squads and Tommy gun squads, which the developers called the Swiss Army knife of destruction for the British.

On the German side of things you have the Panzer Elite, hard hitting small units. The German units can garrison a squad inside a vehicle (and when they do you can actually see the units getting into the vehicle) and turn all of their armor into mobile weapon platforms.

To balance out the German's heavy use of armored vehicles, the British have self-propelled artillery units. They also get these really neat looking glider units (commandos and tanks) that are dropped in with giant gliders. They showed off a few of those drops and it's pretty spectacular, the engine-less planes just drift into the area you call them too, totally leveling any buildings in their path and dumping out the units.

From what I saw of the game it looks like an expansion that will fully live up to the expectations set by the original title.

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.

With Guitar Hero 3, the first thing Neversoft did was update the graphics, giving it a crisper, edgier look. They also added online coop and competitive modes and made the controllers wireless, but the biggest change for the game is the inclusion of Battle Mode a head-to-head form of Guitar Hero that features power-ups and attacks.

The way it seemed to work in the demo was that you could earn attacks by filling your meter and then unleash them on your opponent by going into star-power mode.

Attacks included things like cutting a string on your opponents guitar, forcing them to tap a specific fret button repeatedly until the string was "repaired", making their notes display jitter and shake, forcing them to play double notes for a brief period of time or reversing the notes temporarily.

The Battle Mode looked impressive while watching the developers play it, but I can't help but wonder how much fun it will be when someone like me (who screws up if someone says his name in mid song) plays it.

The demo, which mixed cut-scenes with some actual gameplay, left me feeling more than a little shaken and jonesing to get my hands on the game. The most important thing you need to keep in mind about this game is that Infinity Ward is developing it. So, it's gonna kick ass.

The game seems to do several things very right. It updates the graphics and the look of the game, doing an excellent job of capturing what I suspect the feel of modern combat is. It also keeps that addictive pacing that made the first two Call of Duty games so very much fun to play and hard to put down.

The game will feature to main story lines both of which center around a Russian warlord of some sort. More importantly, the game seems to mix up the action quite a bit. Instead of forcing you to stay on the ground, grunting it through the levels, you get to do things like take to a Cobra Gunship as a gunner, take on covert missions, even board planes to remotely take down targets from quite a distance.

The development teams say they've been working on multiplayer for the game since day one because they realize just how important it is to the game's longevity. One of the cool features built into the multiplayer mode is that you can unlock aspects of the game (like weapons or character classes) by playing online. The online mode will also feature create-a-class so you can create the exact type of character you want to play online and save it.

The game also brings back the killcam, letting you watch the 15 seconds that led up to your death, after you get taken out.

I can't wait to get my hands on this game. I can tell it's going to be the sort of title I'll have to set time limits for myself before I play.