Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

100 or More Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Worth playing"

Natural Selection 2 is a "strange" hybrid between an old-school RTS, and an in-your-face action FPS.

Most of the players will likely play in the FPS style gameplay, while one will try to help co-ordinate the team with a top-down view of the action.

Players can be human (Marines), or Alien (Kharaa), and they have completely different styles of gameplay.

The Marines have what might be a typical sort of kit for an FPS game - rifles, shotguns, pistols, flamethrowers, grenade launchers, jetpacks, phase gates (teleport technology), giant mechwarrior style robots called Exo's (Exosuit), and mobile cannons to attack alien strongholds.

The Aliens have a variety of lifeforms they can evolve into, a Skulk (which can walk up walls and across ceilings), a Gorge (which is a cute lovable little fat thing, which is a support class for healing and stuff), a Lerk (which can fly / glide around the map), a Fade (which can do it's own sort of teleport and has a nasty swipe), and an Onos (which is a large creature like a rhinocerous).

To get access to all the tech upgrades / alien traits, the commanders have to try to gain and control ground by directing their "troops on the ground" to allow them to place resource collectors. The more resources your team has (it's split between the commanders and the players), the more chance you have of getting skilled-up, and better able to attack.

Unlike a straight forward RTS game with simple units that follow dumb orders, your team are all real players - and as a commander, if you ask them to do something stupid, there's a good chance they'll ignore you. It's a team game remember, and they might know something you don't !

For marines, the tech tree is fairly "simple" to understand, to get jetpacks, you need to build a certain type of structure etc., and you only get access to the "big" stuff when you manage to capture a couple of "tech points" but for aliens, it's a bit more complicated.

Aliens use the same tech points, and have to fight for control of them, and this allows the commander to place a "hive" there. A hive will allow a choice of upgrade paths, some of which can be used by every alien, some are lifeform specific.

These include a range of abilities from cloaking so you remain hidden until you attack, spikes for a Lerk, blink (teleport) for a Fade, bile bomb for a Gorge (a corrosive attack that does damage over time).

This game is not CoD or Halo, you're not in it just for personal glory and point scoring - you need to work as a team to win, and a headset is almost vital to play this well, as you need to communicate with your team.

As a result, you'll find the community is very helpful to new players - because if they're not, their side is going to lose anyway.

Because of the wide variation in play styles between Marines and Aliens, you'll find a lot of bad players trying to stack on the Marine team - it's just a bit easier to point and shoot than to use stealth and skill as an Alien.

That said, it's very rewarding to play as an Alien, because of the skills and tactics you need to put in place as a team - you just need to take your time to learn "how-to", and don't be afraid to ask questions.

The graphics in NS2 are very, very good - but they need a system with a bit of grunt to switch on all the eye-candy. It's also quite CPU intensive, so it can help if you switch off most of the eye-candy and perhaps even use a lower resolution to get the best out of it (if you're not on a decent rig).

The development team are very small, but also very close to the community, and many of the game features were ideas from the players themselves who were in the alpha / beta tests.

There are the occasional snags that can crop up with the game, but patches are due to be issued on a weekly basis for some time to help clear these up - but in no way does that mean the game is unplayable now. It's probably less "buggy" than many AAA titles at first release.

The initial map pack that comes with the game are "themed", so they have a lot of similarities in decor style, but more texture packs are coming soon which will open up a whole new type of playing environment (which is nice).

The community are also very active in creating maps and add-ons for the game (there were 99 already as of last night, less than a week after release), and some of these are shaping up to be very nice indeed.

If you have more than two brain-cells to rub together, and are past the stage of calling your victims "n00bs" or making racist remarks, this is a fantastic game to get into.

There are few games that make you think "oh hell" when the Aliens take down a power supply and it goes pitch black - sure, as a marine, you have a flashlight, but that only shows you so much - and the Aliens can see in the dark :-)