Natural Selection 2 available for Pre-Order on Steam

The Half-Life mod turned Source engine mod turned standalone Sci-Fi FPS/RTS by Unknown Worlds Entertainment is now available for Pre-Order on Steam. If you’re a fan of complex strategy, first person shooters, crazy genre-bending and most importantly; aliens (in general, not the sequel to Alien), the I highly recommend picking it up.

I got it about a year back when they had opened it up for Alpha/Beta testing, and it’s everything I could have hoped for. If you’re unfamiliar with the game, it’s kind of like what would happen if you took Team Fortress, StarCraft, WarCraft 3, and some other nameless military FPS and made them into one game. There’s resource management, structure building, equipment management, and all the micromanagement of the great RTS games with the speed and adrenaline of FPS thrown into one shiny, slimey, delicious ball of death.

At $24.99 for the pre-order of the game, you get a free upgrade to the digital deluxe edition, and if you pre-ordered the game before the Steam release(like me!), you also get the digital deluxe upgrade, as well as a free copy of the game to gift to a friend. What this means is that basically, UWE is giving away 45,000 copies of their game.

The UWE blog post says that the release date will be sometime in October, so hopefully we can bank on that (they do, however subscribe to Valve-esque mindset of “release it when it’s ready”, so I won’t be upset if they have to delay it).