Would I Rather Command Marines or Bite Them In Half? Hmmm.

Wow, did Charlie Cleveland ever surprise me at PAX East. I don’t know the guy, and I didn’t pay much attention to the game his studio was showing off at the big show in Boston. Not at first.

Charlie’s game looked, at a glance, like just another team-based shooter. I walked by a row of PCs running the game on Friday and nothing caught my eye. Later on, I was walking past the other side of Charlie’s booth. That’s when I saw the teeth. That’s when I saw what looked like a first-person shooter, except the player wasn’t looking down the barrel of a gun but through the jaws of a monster.

This is Natural Selection 2, a shooter, a brawler and a real-time-strategy game. It’s awesome.

Charlie Cleveland’s small studio, Unknown Worlds, has been working on Natural Selection 2 for a couple of years and will be releasing it this summer on Steam. (Maybe console or Mac later.)

If you play as a Marine, you’re playing a first-person shooter.

If you play as a monster, you’re chomping through Marines or buzzing over them as some sort of flying critter that streams spores.

BUT! You can also play the game as a Marine or an alien commander, seeing the game overhead, doling out resources

Pre-order the game at NaturalSelection2.com