Haze will call you a "pussy"

Future-war shooter Haze will team you up with some alarmingly outspoken AI comrades, promises David Doak, co-founder of developer Free Radical. Haze's mercenary-military action will put you in some very uncomfortable situations, but if you hesitate for a second your tooled-up soldier "buddies" are going to be hassling you mercilessly.

"I don't think you will see in any other game points in the narrative, in cut-scenes or cinematic gameplay moments, where people are calling you a pussy - telling you that you're not with the program, that you're a liability to the team," Doak informed us during a refreshingly open discussion at a recent Ubisoft event. "Haze puts in this warzone, where other people are perhaps doing things where a line has been crossed. You're going to think, 'These guys have gone too far'. And you'll have to ask yourself, 'Are you part of this now?'"

But how far is Free Radical willing to go to make Haze the challenging, mature videogame it is aiming for? "The thing is," Doak pointed out, "you come up against the law of censorship, which is incredibly hypocritical when it comes to games. Because the act of putting these uncomfortable, challenging experiences into a game is somehow glorifying it. Except that other media can do such things, and still be having some sensible discourse about it."

Ben Richardson is a former Staff Writer for Official PlayStation 2 magazine and a former Content Editor of GamesRadar+. In the years since Ben left GR, he has worked as a columnist, communications officer, charity coach, and podcast host – but we still look back to his news stories from time to time, they are a window into a different era of video games.