Natural Selection 2 Closed Beta Released

If I’ve ever used hyperbole to describe how excited I am for something, it was a severe, complete oversight on my part. The amount of excitement that I have for Natural Selection 2 blows any amount of over-exaggeration, black humor killing-baby jokes, or sarcastic offers of sexual favors I have had for anything else out of the water.

If you pre-order Natural Selection 2 now, you’ll get access to the closed beta. If I wasn’t broke, I would’ve already been downloading the client and wouldn’t be writing this news post.

If you’ve never heard of Natural Selection, and don’t get why this is such a big deal to me, well, crank up that Goldsrc engine licence and get ready to get destroyed by a ton of people that have been playing the game for about 10 years (more like 9, it was originally released Halloween of 2002).

It’s actually a fairly complex game. It’s a FPS with a heavy focus on team-based resource management and combat, with the Space Marines on one side and the Kharaa (aliens) on the other. The main gametype (that I remember) was a sort of king-of the hill/capture point/base building style game, where you would fight for the resources across the map, and as you upgraded your weapons you’d destroy the other team’s base.

I’ve been following the development blog for a while and am happy to say that I’m really excited for this game. They’ve added a slew of new features, including an alien commander (the aliens were much less organized in the original when I played) and functioning abilities for some of the alien species (the blink never quite worked right for one of them). It also seems like they’ve gotten the map editor out and a lot of the old mappers are making new maps.

So yeah. If you’re interested in getting completely destroyed, check out the original (I might be convinced to host a server or something over winter break if enough people are interested), and if you remember the old one fondly I would tell you to get it, but I want a beta invite, so wait until I pick up my paycheck next week, ok?