Along with Overgrowth and Cortex Command, Unknown Worlds’ FPS/RTS hybrid Natural Selection 2 is one of those indie mega-projects that seems to be in a perpetual state of development. Today marks a rather special day in the development of NS2, as the latest development build – codenamed ‘Gorilla’ – has been released to preordering players, and is accompanied by a genuinely impressive gameplay-footage trailer. Hit the break for some hot marine-on-alien action.

Update: The developer of the game has divulged the promo code ‘STARBEAR’ which drops the price of the game down to $13.

The tagline for Rocket Bear Games’ Infested Planet paints an interesting picture: 5 men against a horde of 100,000 alien bugs. It’s an enticing concept, with strategy games usually presenting more-or-less symmetrical battlefields, with even the Starcraft’s Zerg only outnumbering humans by 2 or 3 to one. I jumped down into the gore-splattered trenches to have a look at the current work-in-progress beta build of this interesting ‘popcorn strategy’ title.

Good ol’ hybrid games. Often times it can be difficult to stand out from the pack when creating a new game. I mean, on some level you can only innovate so much in story or even basic mechanics. That’s why we’re now seeing so many “hybrid” games consisting of two or more genres. Today, I’m going to show you a game that’s taken the tower defense and twin stick shooter genres and smooshed them together.

The space 4X genre has been on fairly thin ice these past few years. While there’s been a steady stream of releases, very few have been really worthy of praise at launch – some (such as the original Sword of The Stars and Star Ruler) recieved enough post-release support to become fine games in their own right, but very weak launches hampered their sales badly. It’s a rough scene, with an unforgiving audience. StarDrive by Zer0Sum Games might just be just what people have been hoping for, though.

Not too long ago, we reviewed the Creeper World games and found them to be more than a little nifty. Unfortunately, the series has been relatively unknown up til’ this point, despite bringing a lot of very clever and unique elements to the Tower Defense concept and salvaging a lot of the core concepts from obscure Russian RTS Perimeter. That changed last week, with the release of Creeper World: Evermore.

Update: Delays and problems, it seems. The free 5-day weekend thing has been delayed until the 15th. Guess it’ll be a couple more weeks until we can hit the battlefields of tomorrow.

When you advertise a ‘free weekend’ for your game, it usually leads people to assume that it’ll happen over the weekend. Netherlands-based indies Interwave Studios dare to think different, though. Starting this December 1st and continuing until the 5th, everyone will be able to download and play their interesting FPS/RTS hybrid Nuclear Dawn for free via Steam. Accompanying this will be a permanent price-drop to a more palatable $20, and a range of temporary perks on top of a recently-released mod toolkit.

There’s no such thing as too many dead Orcs. Don’t believe us? See our review! The folks behind the game agree, as yesterday, Robot Entertainment released the second DLC pack for their defensive action game Orcs Must Die offering another five levels (including Nightmare Mode variants), two new enemy types, a new defensive structure and extended leaderboard support. Hit the jump for the trailer, and news of something potentially even cooler for owners of the PC version.

Last night, Carbon Games were kind enough to let me get my grubby mitts on the work-in-progress alpha build of their upcoming action/RTS hybrid AirMech. Having sunk a few hours into it, I’m almost ready to tell you why you should be very excited about this game. But before I can really explain why AirMech is such a big deal, we need to take a stroll down memory lane. After the jump, a gameplay video and the reason why AirMech is your daddy’s RTS. Read on.

A growing, laudable trend in games development recently has been for older studios to release the source-code and (sometimes) the actual media resources of their older games to their respective communities, effectively giving the fans the opportunity to adopt the game, and expand, improve and refine on the original commercial release under a freeware banner. Warzone 2100 is one such game.

When you think of ‘Creeps’ in a tower defense game, most tend to think of expendable yet loathesome blobs of stats, just waiting to be chipped away at by your mathematically positioned defenses. In the Creeper World games, you’re up against something much more elemental. Something more organic, and much bigger. You’re fighting an ocean. An ocean that hates you.