Snowblind renamed, trailer released

Crystal Dynamics' forthcoming first-person shooter has undergone another name change, Eidos announced this week, but the results are already impressive - as you can see from the first trailer for the game mirrored on Eurofiles (11MB) today.

Having previously been known as Deus Ex: Clan Wars and subsequently Snowblind, the newly titled Project: Snowblind is actually shaping up rather excitingly. The premise is nothing too exciting, but you can see where the Deus Ex thinking came in early on in the project - gamers tackle an elite super soldier called Nathan Frost, fighting on the frontlines of a near-future war for the Liberty Coalition, with high-tech gadgets and guns stuffed in his pockets and implanted under his skin.

Players will be able to upgrade their abilities throughout the game via a system of Deus Ex-esque bio-enhancements, and Eidos is also promising an array of weapons never before seen in a game. Unfortunately the trailer doesn't give us too much evidence of those - although there appears to be a gun shooting blue blobs at one point, which probably counts - but it does demonstrate that Crystal Dynamics is putting a lot of effort into the aesthetic, with finely crafted environments overflown by choppers, plenty of dynamic explosions and all the rest. If that's running on a console, then you can understand why some hacks are racing to chuck the "Halo-beater" label at it (damn them).

We're reserving judgement, mind, but it definitely looks promising, and Eidos is planning a 16-player online option for both PS2 Online and Xbox Live, featuring voice over IP headset comms, deathmatch and capture the flag mode, and more (or "etc." as the publisher put it so convincingly). There's a PC version too, and all three should be out - perhaps appropriately - in time for this winter. Brrr.