After an extensive session with Brothers in Arms 3 we stuck around some time at the Ubisoft booth, and lucky us got a chance to get a private demonstration of upcoming PS3-exclusive shooter Haze.

Set in 2048, the game takes place in a world where all military operations are outsourced to private military corporations, and lets you assume the role of Shane Carpenter. Like many other drafted youngster, Shane aims to make the world a better place and wants to fight for the good cause. The corporation of his choice, Mantel Global Industries, works with an arsenal of high-tech vehicles and weaponry, and the performance-enhancing drug Nectar. The game takes place as Shane is sent into a war-torn Southern American country to fight a rebel faction called the Promise Hand.

Today we saw interesting materials about how the different game elements work. During the campaign you will be switching from the Mantel side to the Rebel side as you come to understand all the forces at work. Both sides have highly specific and incredibly different weaponry, with the rebels focusing more on conventional weaponry than the Mantels. Some of the most interesting aspects of the game come from the Nectar, used by the Mantels as a sort of super-testosteron to allow you to take more damage and run faster, but Rebels employ Nectar grenades to overdose Mantel troopers, turning them into blinded killers shooting everyone including their own. While playing as Mantel you will also experience this being used on you, and it will result in you automatically firing when you accidentally aim at your own troopers, and forcing you out of looking up or down until it wears off to ensure you can’t chicken out of the effect. You can also OD the troopers by sneaking up from behind and injecting them by hand, which is facilitated by rebels being able to play dead and lie on the ground so that the drug-enhanced killers ignore you, as shown in the video below. Sounds promising and interesting.

The game as a whole looks good, but not really spectacular. The footage we saw from Far Cry 2 is more or less comparable, as you fight in good-but-not-spectacular looking jungles and plains. Haze was also displaying the occasional frame rate issue, but that might be ironed out before the as yet unplanned release. They do have some impressive smoke billowing around as fog and dirt fly around.

Most elements of the game will be directly translated to multiplayer, but it will need a good bit of testing for balance still according to the devs, considering the highly different tactics on both sides. They might even decide not to let possibly overpowering weapons like the Nectar grenade into MP to go easy on that. What they will do for sure however is introduce a fairly unique 4 player coop mode, that will sure have a lot of friends spending online time together again.

A demo is going to be released on PSN for sure, but again no date is given - they do hope to have it online before the game’s final launch though.