Natural Selection 2.0 Review

Natural Selection 2.0

Running down a high tech corridor with lights of strong contrast flashing by me. I can hear the sniffling sounds of the alien creatures gaining on me from behind. I take a quick left and find myself in a dead end. I turn around and brace myself for what is coming. My whole squad whipped out – ambushed by small four legged aliens sitting in the ceiling that made fast attacks, killing one of us at a time and then retreating to the shadows. Everybody is gone… but me. I check my ammo meter, making sure I’m locked and loaded. I look up and I see 1…2…3 alien creatures of varied sizes. They make a hissing sound as I squeeze the trigger to unload round after round in to the pack. They scatter; the smaller ones climb up the walls and try to get behind me while the big one goes for a frontal attack. I unload my whole mag’ into the one coming at my front but it just keeps coming. Switching to my alternative weapon, a fiercely fast Automag like pistol, I pull the trigger repeatedly. I shoot another 10 rounds in the beast before it falls down, dead.

I hear another hissing sound coming from behind me. I dodge to the left while reloading my pistol and see the little alien creature with its razor like blades just misses me. I start firing at it but it comes at me once more and slices my torso. Down to 5 health and my commander decides to spawn a medpack next to me and in all the excitement I unload my whole magazine in to the four-legged creature as I run for the medpack. As I gain health the little creature falls down to the ground, and stays down. I take a deep breath and I turn around. I see a squad of four marines, all with heavy armour. I press the Voice Communication button, aligned to my middle mouse button. “Sure glad to see you guys…” I take my machine gun in hand and start to reload it but something is not right. I hear a hissing sound from above and I look up and I see the other four-legged alien leaping at me and before I know it, I fall dead to the ground.

Fighting aliens is a life style

Sometimes you, as a marine, have to use the Welder to gain access to new areas.

I experienced the scenario above while player Natural selection 2.0. One thing that is simply so amazing with Natural Selection 2.0 (from hereon NS2.0) is the way you “live” into the game. This is, of course, because of the setting you are put in as a player and the fantastic atmosphere. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be a marine, fighting aliens in abandoned space stations and colonies on distant worlds or an alien, fighting marines in the same environment.

The real strength of NS2.0 (and NS1.0, too, for that matter) is that you are not only confined to playing as one of the two. I could easily have seen the scenario typed out above from the perspective of one of the aliens that ambushed the marine squad. It’s the diversity that makes NS2.0 so damn good.

So what is Natural Selection?

These guys now allign to the surface they are running on - in this case me.

Natural Selection is a mod for Half Life that pits two races against each other in a deadly conflict over the resources of the universe. This reflects in the game as resources points that are placed throughout the map at key locations and it is the objective of both sides to seize, hold and control these resource points. By doing this new abilities or equipment (depending on which race you play) will become available for you to tamper with. This, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the things that make NS2.0 really stand out.

What we are looking at here is a new subgenre – RTS/FPS – in all its glory. A hybrid of two really interesting game genres that, given the time, really can evolve into something truly amazing. But for now we’ll stick with NS2.0, which in its own right is a damn good mod.

TSA 'Frontiersmen' Marines

I died - but atleast I took one of them with me!

There is something really gravitational about playing as a human marine, fighting along side his kind for their lives against a horde of aliens. Be it the nostalgia by the reference to the Alien-movies (and there are quite a lot of that in NS2.0) or be it… whatever else, but it really is compelling. As humans we are forced to relay on our technical knowledge and thereby gain an advantage against our adversary. In NS2.0 we have quite a few goodies at our disposal, including light and heavy machine guns, shotguns, mines and turrets. However, at the start of each game all you have is a puny light machine gun that is quite okay to take out the lower life forms of the alien breed, and a pistol. Before you set out to take control over the resource points it is a good idea to have a member of the team take on the role as the Commander.

The Commander is given a top-down view of the battlefield and he can give the other marines’ movement and engagement orders, place buildings that the other marines can then construct and most importantly, co-ordinate the team. Make no mistake; in NS2.0 team play is everything. If you want to win, you must talk to your Commander and obey his orders (unless you and the rest of the team think the orders are totally unfit, in which case you can eject the Commander and another player can take his place).

Obey the boss

Incomming!

The Commander also decides which player is to receive better armor, weapons and, of course, the jetpack. Ahh yes, the Jet Pack. It is wonderful. It makes you as agile as a cat – a cat with a jetpack. The whole gameplay speed changes the second you get your hands on one of these babies. Now, instead of charging right on into a cluster of Alien defence buildings, you can fly up to an air duct and crawl your way trough it and then emerge behind the towers and take them out with a well-placed grenade.

Before you get the jetpack, the marines are very slow moving. I am guessing this is a balancing issue but something about the Marines that I really don’t like is their inability to run backwards quickly. Whenever you try to back-pedal it feels extremely sluggish. It does, in a way, make you stand your ground with your fellow marines rather than turn your back to the aliens and run for it and that is a good thing at least.

The Aliens

In NS1.0 I did not play as an alien too often, don’t ask me why, but from the little I played back then it feels that the life an alien got simpler in NS2.0. When NS1.0 was released I felt it was not very newbie friendly and so I instantly read the manual and that helped a lot later in the game. It is easy to adapt to the way the game should be played when you play as a marine. With the aliens there were a few new tricks to learn and so I suggest to all you newcomers, do read the manual before you head into the game.

The Alien GUI system.

However, now the life of an alien is fantastic. I found myself playing as the little four legged alien most of my extra terrestrial time. It has the ability to climb on walls and ceilings and this reminds me of the Alien Versus Predator-series, only this time your prey is real people which makes it all more fun. As the poor sadistic creature I am (and yes, do feel free to add cowardly after reading the following sentence) I like to ambush my enemy. I sit and wait in a dark corner, high above the battleground, just waiting… Waiting for the right moment to occur to then leap my way down and slice my adversary into little tiny bits. What is more, before his teammates understand what’s happening I’m back in the safety of the dark high above them. Enough Adrenaline pumps trough my veins when I realize that I got away with it to knock over a small building.

If you get tired of stalking your enemy you can evolve into a more battle ready creature that can take a lot more damage and, of course, give it out as well. The biggest creature is called Onos and it has an amazing ability to eat the marines! It looks quite amazing when you walk around a corner and you meet up with this massive creature and it sends out its white “disables you to move”-goo and then just runs up and makes you his dinner.

The Graphics and sound

This is near suicidal. A bunch of marines and a bunch of turrets. Soon after this picture I found myself respawning...

As NS2.0 is based on the good old Half Life engine the graphics are not top notch, but I think no one expects that either. But for those of you who expect it to be ugly, you will be disappointed. The dev team behind NS2.0 has managed to squeeze in some really nice textures and it, along with the at times fantastic level design, is not in any way off putting. The models are all well made (even if some of the animations aren’t too hot). All in all, compared to NS1.0, NS2.0 has improvements in almost every single area in the graphics department and it is one of the best looking mods for Half Life.

On the sound side of things, I have nothing to complain about but rather the other way around.
Much like when you play a marine in the Alien Versus Predator series, you will constantly be on your toes and your ears pierced in order to locate the nasty aliens crawling all over the place. The hulking, hissing and “krrrrr”-sounds will really freak you out when you are running around as a marine, while you as an alien distinctively will learn to recognise the tip-tap of human feet running around on the metal floor. The weapon sounds of the marine’s hardware are most often very fitting for the looks of the weapon and feels satisfying pumping round after round into the nasty alien creatures (you really need professional help ;-), ed.).

In space everybody can hear you scream

An attack gone bad. My fellow alien has gone to the after life, but luckily as have the nasty marine.

I have been playing NS2.0 for three days now and it’s been a very long time since I’ve used my microphone as much as I have since the mod’s release. There is an ingame GUI system, accessible by the right mouse button that lets mic-less people shout out pre-recorded commands as well. I found myself to relay more on my own vocal cords and so do a lot of other people. The feeling of that you’re actually playing with real people around the world gets really amplified when you tell one of your team mates to cover you and they respond “Okay, mate!” in the coolest Australian way possible. And then to be able to communicate with your team fast enough for it to be of actual use for others, rather than the “see enemy, press Y for team talk, start typing – enemy kills you” scenario. The words “Incoming!”, “Cover me!” and “AAAARGH AMBUSH!!” now tops my “most common words”-list.

Almost everyone in the NS community (or at least the ones I’ve been playing with) is extremely nice people and this really makes you want to make sure they survive. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve tried to get to a teammate screaming “BACKUP! BACKUP!” only to get him or her out of harms way. It really is a special feeling. On a side note, one of the coolest events I experienced with NS2.0 was when an Onos ate me for the first time. When you are eaten, a big meaty view appears and the words “digesting” appears and this came as a complete surprise for me. I screamed on the top of my lounges “Get me the hell out of here!” and only a few seconds later my team mates managed to get the beefy beast to the ground and I could merge from its inners, with every one in my team laughing at the event that just took place.

The GUI system is very useful, but it’s not in any way fast. I imagine its hard to make a sufficient GUI system that works fast enough for it to be useful in a hectic battle but it does work well, non the less, when you aren’t fighting for your life.

To boldly go...

NS1.0 was a bold new project when it first was released with an innovative gamestyle and a tiptop atmosphere. NS2.0 takes this project further and improves it in almost every area with a few new levels, abilities and features and a load of tweaking. As with the release of a new version number of every mod, not everyone is happy.

I’ve heard a few unhappy voices out on the server complaining about one thing or another, but it’s a big world and you can’t please everyone. I, for one, say that NS2.0 is one of the best mods available for Half Life to date and that you would be making a big mistake to let this one slide on by. I strongly suggest you download it right away and join the fun. As for me, I’m going to play some more…

Naturally you can download Natural Selection 2.0 from Boomtown's fast download server and try for yourself.