Wow... that video totally has me questioning the game now. I hope it's a very old build, for FR's sake. An enemy gets caught on the environment and starts clipping in the opening firefight, one of your merc buddies actually quotes Vanilla effing ICE shortly after (listen for it: "if you got a problem, I'll solve it" -- I cannot make this shit up), and that cutscene about 6-7 minutes in was godawful. "Just an animal!" "Then... we'll get some chow!"
The game does seem to be smooth in terms of motion, interface, and control, but the graphics really are a bit jarring. It's like when an Unreal Engine game first loads up and not all the fancy textures and filters have filled... only the fancy textures and filters never do show up here. In the past, that's been fine for FR games, since 'splitters is understandably cartoony and Second Sight had a cool bit of story and gameplay working for it and by that point we got that the look was just FR's schtick. Here, though, it's like they couldn't decide to go all the way with the realism or just keep some of that whimsical style their PS2 games had. And when it's 2008 and we've seen Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, and promises of Resistance 2 and Killzone 2, that doesn't quite cut the mustard.
On the other hand, the character models are very good looking... but they just cycle through canned animations. Watch the cutscene about 9 minutes in, when you address your squadmates. They move and act robotic, which is only compounded by the silly dialog. The pilot's monologue had me itching to shut off the video--I can't imagine how that would be if I had been playing.
Which is a shame, really. Haze has some cool ideas but from the looks of it they won't be implementing them in a unique way. The game seems to follow the conceit of you being the X factor, pushing whatever side you're on to victory in what would otherwise be an AI standoff. Obviously being a game it should make sense that you killing the enemy = progression, but the deus ex machina of it all feels more exposed than in, say, CoD4; that game's intensely scripted events had you focusing more on surviving the mission than Haze appears to, where the combat seems more like a joyride through a shooting gallery. Again, though, I'm basing this off a 14 minute video and not first-hand impressions. It could very well be a visceral game... I just don't see it coming across that way. It's still a game I'll be keeping an eye on, but right now it's looking like a rental at best. Prove us wrong, FR.