Natural Selection 2 - Action Hybrid Game

**Crazed Rabbit** · 10-28-2012, 23:55

http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/

A combination FPS/RTS with aliens vs space marines.

A live tournament is being shown right now (4:00 PST) here: http://battlefy.com/tournament/116/#/watch

It's an independent game, a sequel to the famous half life mod, from a small team.

Great graphics and gameplay, though balance is a work in progress. Still, it provides some truly amazing moments of gaming.

Available on steam for preorder, it comes out on October 31st, ten years to the day after NS1 came out.

I've played this game more than every other video game combined this year.

If you're a fan of games requiring a lot of skill that go way beyond the standard COD-style soldiers shooting at soldiers, it has what you're looking for.

EDIT - I was originally going to make this post a while back, and call it "The promise and peril of Natural Selection 2" or something. Several months ago it was not well optimized and fps for many people were not good. That's mainly been fixed, but the main problem now is the asymmetric teams (marines have guns, aliens have different sorts of aliens that mainly bite or slash) have not been balanced by the developers. They built tweak on top of tweak but some of the basic mechanics (the health of aliens doesn't scale from the beginning to the endgame, while marines can research health and damage upgrades, for example) and it doesn't work that well.

CR

**Crazed Rabbit** · 10-31-2012, 00:57

I may have been to harsh in my edit.

To clarify; this game is really fun. The haphazard balance doesn't show up as much in public games. I loved the original mod, and I'm very glad I bought this game because I've had loads of fun.

It also has amazing graphics and atmosphere: http://imgur.com/a/ZP9QV

It's releasing in a couple minutes, too.

CR

**Crazed Rabbit** · 11-03-2012, 21:44

From Rock Paper Shotgun:
How Natural Selection 2 Was Saved (And Made) By Fans

Natural Selection 2 is out. You can buy it right now. Given that it’s actually possible both purchase and play (!) a great many games, that might not seem like such a huge deal to you. But make no mistake: Unknown Worlds’ RTS/FPS buildy-chompy-shooty hybrid could’ve easily died on the vine. And it nearly did – over and over and over, for pretty much the entirety of its development cycle. Fortunately, the NS2 team has always had a secret weapon on its side: a community that is – by most definitions of the word – completely and rather terrifyingly insane. This is their story.

CR

**Crazed Rabbit** · 12-02-2012, 19:56

I want to love this game, and it still has many great moments of gaming. It's still quite fun most of the time.

But there are some frustrations, mainly caused by the dev's inability to balance the teams and ignoring some frustrating aspects of gameplay (getting killed in one shot by a marine shotgun, the second most expensive alien lifeform being very weak, cascading uselessness when aliens lose a 'hive', aliens not being able to spawn because they need the hive to spawn eggs, but the spawn rate is way to slow for large games and if your team dies constantly they'll use up the available eggs very fast - unlike the marines who respawn quickly). But fixing these - or in some way making the gameplay experience less frustrating would involve buffing aliens, which the devs don't want to do because they seem to balance mainly on overall aliens vs marines win rates. Apparently aliens are winning more often, so they get nerfed - but this obviously ignores the many other factors (do alien win the majority of games that finish within 5 minutes?).

And when they do balance, it's like a roller coaster of nerfs and buffs because they often have knee jerk reactions to perceived imbalances.

But I kept searching for, and occasionally finding, those sweet moments of gameplay this game can create.

But they're to far in between, and come at too high a cost in time and frustration. So I deleted the game from my hard drive. I still check for updates - but not regularly. There's still hope, and I know a lot of people have a lot of fun playing this. But I have better things to do with my time.

CR

**Xiahou** · 12-02-2012, 20:00

There was a very similar game coming out that was mercenaries vs dinosaurs wasn't there? Wonder how that one turned out....

**Crazed Rabbit** · 12-02-2012, 20:28

This one: http://store.steampowered.com/app/70000/ ?

NS2 has the real time strategy aspect of building bases and researching upgrades as well as the commander role, and I don't see anything about that sort of thing for Dino D-day. Plus the dino one was significantly worse reviewed.

CR

**Xiahou** · 12-03-2012, 02:15

Originally Posted by Crazed Rabbit

This one: http://store.steampowered.com/app/70000/ ?

NS2 has the real time strategy aspect of building bases and researching upgrades as well as the commander role, and I don't see anything about that sort of thing for Dino D-day. Plus the dino one was significantly worse reviewed.

CR

Nah, that wasn't it- it's a different dinosaurs vs soldiers game (seriously? there's more than one?)
I found it though- Primal Carnage.

I was interested in it for pure cheese factor alone, but I held off because it has no bots or offline play yet...