It’s due in time for Christmas (the game, not the wonder-drug),

With his ever-longer and stragglier grey beard lending him an increasingly Gandalf-like appearance, Free Radical Design’s head honcho David Doak seems to have emerged from his awkward, subversive days and to have become an elder statesman of the games industry. An impression which Haze, Free Radical’s barnstorming new IP of a first-person shooter, is reinforcing.

Gone are the days when monkeys and a steady stream of jokes would take the place of any sort of coherent plot in the TimeSplitters games – Haze is a serious, grown-up fps which is rammed full of interesting ideas and appears to be just what the PlayStation 3 will be desperately in need of this Christmas.

At Ubidays’ big press conference, Doak and Derek Littlewood kept their powder somewhat dry– although clearly having acquired previously unseen levels of polish, they did not reveal any startling new aspects of the game. But the next day, in smaller presentations, Littlewood and scriptwriter Rob Yescombe (a man you could envisage on a market stall) opened up a lot more. This is what we now know.

Haze is set in the nearish future, in a world dominated by the Mantel corporation, which has its fingers in many pies, but mostly pharmaceuticals and the military (both as manufacturer of military equipment and supplier of a massive army). Basically, it’s the sort of organisation that would come about if Rupert Murdoch decided to mount a coup and install himself as leader of the world. You play Shane Carpenter, a soldier in Mantel’s private army, fighting in a war in South America – of which the game spans a three-day period.

As an employee of Mantel, you get the finest military kit (there are extensive vehicle-based sections in the game) and, best of all, Nectar, a performance-enhancing drug that turns you into a super-efficient killing machine and (ecstasy-like) makes everything look shiny and nice. Although, as the game progresses, you may discover that it’s not perhaps such a wonder-drug as it appears.

It’s due in time for Christmas (the game, not the wonder-drug), on PlayStation 3 – although there is an Xbox 360 version in the offing, that won’t surface this year.