Unknown Worlds have recently put up a brand new website for the forthcoming Natural Selection 2. The previously Kotaku-exclusive teaser trailer is also viewable on the site as of today. I’ve included the trailer in YouTube format after the jump, but you can find the teaser in glorious 1280×720 on the website.
For an indie game developed by as few as four people, obviously NS2 is nothing short of a miracle of economy. While we probably won’t be covering the game as much (due to its move from Source onto a proprietary engine), an interesting facet of their current presale methodology hit me.
You can pre-purchase Zeno Clash for 50% off at this link – for one day only. The discount lasts until Friday, March 20th 20:00 GMT.
Project leader Andres Bordieu further explains the game’s price point – including the ACE Team’s relationship with dollars and euros – on their official blog. That is all! You can check out our previous reportage on the upcoming HTH-FPS by following the tags.
This was to be the space for a review of Paleo Entertainment’s new game, Merchants of Brooklyn. In MOB, you play as Matteo, a cybernetically enhanced Neanderthal clone. Suffice to say, Matteo suffers a life-threatening dismemberment in combat but ends up being saved by a scientist who grafts him a new robotic arm to replace the lost one.
The problem? The game’s launch on Steam was unfortunately a miserable one, and Paleo Entertainment have now confirmed an alpha version of the game was uploaded to Steam at first: This meant the load game mechanism tended to break scripting and a degree of graphics settings were unavailable. Most importantly, however, the sound levels of the audio were such that players were completely unable to hear the game’s narration and thus follow the plot!
Go Matteo Go!
Luckily, Paleo Entertainment has jumped to the save instantaneously and a massive first-day patch, one that amounts to more than half the original size of the game (of 690mb), has already been released. So far, we’ve head reports that the menus have been improved (AA is now selectable), a difficulty setting has been added and the sound is now indeed correctly balanced.
When will Matteo be truly unshackled? While we wait for our patches to download and bugs to be fixed, you can read more about the game in our introductory post for the game.
While Zeno Clash might have been on the receiving end of some hefty accolades already, we shan’t forget there are others in line for a title shot at the crown of the new Dark Messiah! A trailer recently reared its head for a new challenger in the seldom-seen HTH-FPS genre, Merchants of Brooklyn (MOB for short).
This CryEngine 2-based, Steam-distributed PC-only game from Paleo Entertainment pretends to the throne from vastly different origins than the two aforementioned fantasy games, for it presents to us a Babelian Manhattan in the year 3100. The city has been rebuilt – entirely skywards, this time – after a devastating flood caused by global warming.
Casting Call
As its inhabitants ascend, not enough work force remains; meanwhile, human cloning has advanced immensely and has primarily refocused on the Neanderthal DNA for its physical resiliency. However, due to a contractual miscalculation in producing workers for the city, too many Neo-Neanderthal clones end up being produced and are outright outcast to be the bottom feeders of the new society.
To the save the local mob – the Merchants of Brooklyn – who discover a lucrative opportunity in the plight of the clones and begin to arrange lucrative Neonean fights to the death. The player, a Neo-Neanderthal himself, has his arm unwillingly replaced with a chainsaw and realizes he’s had enough of the fun and games, and then begins his journey at the very bottom of this violent, bottoms-up society to work his way up – via gratuitous violence – and ultimately exact revenge upon his former masters and take over the Brooklyn empire together with his fellow clones.
The first teaser trailer for the project presents to us an ultraviolent, comic book –influenced dystopia with an off-the-wall setting equally influenced by the new resurgence of martial arts and the combat sports as it is by the environmental panic and the economic downturn. Perhaps. After all, sci-fi has always been a magnificent vehicle for social critique, and although several other games tackle similar ideas as presented in the backstory to MOB, it will be very intriguing to see if there’s more to the game than the bone-crunching melee.
Check out the teaser trailer and pictures after the jump and stay tuned for an in-depth Side to Side on both Zeno Clash and Merchants of Brooklyn!
In a puerile attempt to whip up a hot cool antagonistic parallel, Slowdown observes the release of Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason draws near: The game, to be released on February 13 in the EU and North America, has been hyped as probably having “…more PhysX effects than any other project coming … before it” 1)http://www.cryostasis-game.com/html/news.php
Hydrophobia-Cryostasis
According to Alec Tractenberg of 1C Publishing, the game’s protagonist – meteorologist Alex Nestarov – will go face to face with “zombie monsters”, “dynamic fractally generated frost” and “hydrodynamics”. 2)http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_cryostasis_videos.html
Hydrophobia, on the other hand, remains elusive: Although the game is still slated for an undefined March ‘09 release, it remains to be seen whether Blade Interactive can actually bring the game out in time; there has been no new footage or news since a short E3 2008 teaser trailer. Now, the question remains – which of the two aqua-tastic titles titillates your taste buds more?
