Haze (PS3)

One of the reasons Rare are such a controversial developer nowadays (apart from the whole Nintendo selling them to Microsoft thing) is the fact that a lot of people associated with GoldenEye and Perfect Dark left the company a long time ago. Many of them ended up at Free Radical Design, where they created the love-it-or-loathe-it TimeSpliters series and the underappreciated Second Sight. Haze ditches the stylised look of their older games though, with a game set in a future world dominated by mega global corporation Mantel - where you're cast as one of their soldiers fighting rebels in South America.

Like all fictional global corporations Mantel is up to no good and it turns out their drug NECTAR is doing more than just making you a super soldier with increased speed, strength and accuracy. Highlighting enemies under cover from you, as well as grenades and bobby traps is all very good but the downside is it also turns you (and your teammates) psychotic if you use it too much. Worse it seems to sanitise the world around you, making corpses invisible and even obscuring the true nature of the landscape around you…

Rebel soldiers are able to take advantage of the reality bending powers of NECTAR, such as playing dead to regain their health or using a special "weapons steal" move to make up for their lack of hardware (both of which moves work great in multiplayer). With arguably the most interesting storyline in any current first person shooter and a custom made graphics engine Haze's future looks crystal clear.