Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The latest IndieRoyale bundle includes FPS/RTS hybrid Nuclear Dawn, side-scrolling platformer puzzler Max & The Magic Marker, beautiful puzzler Fractal, and also psychedelic shooter Super Crossfire, which is appearing on PC and Mac for the first time. Quite the selection! There’s also a chiptune bonus for paying more than the minimum. The bundle is available for the next four-and-a-bit days. As ever on IndieRoyale, it’s a PWYW, but there’s a minimum price which goes up as more people buy.

The delayed Nuclear Dawn free weekend will be upon us from tomorrow! Igor from InterWave sent us this message about the FPS-RTS hybrid’s exciting promotional event: “In preparation for the Free Weekend on Steam, running Thursday 15th through Monday 19th, InterWave has released their biggest update for Nuclear Dawn since its release in September. The patch brings the début of all-new features and a host of improvements, including new weapons and interactive single-player training.” He also says the game will be 40% off at $12.

Have a read of Dan’s take on the game from just after launch if you want to know a bit more about what you’d be getting yourself into.

Update: Boo. The trial has been delayed. Now the 15th to 19th of December.

Nuclear Dawn’s multiplayer combination of strategy and FPS harks back to Savage and Natural Selection, with one player on each team taking the role of a base-building commander while the rest run around collecting resources and shooting one another. As might be expected, it’s the sort of game that needs plenty of players willing to form functional teams. Perhaps to that end, a free trial, accessible through Steam, begins December 15th and runs through ’til the 19th. In the hope that people might stick around, Interwave are also dropping the price of the game to $20. Do we have a Nuclear Dawn community here? I’m tempted to jump into the trial and see how the radioactive twilight suits my complexion.

Nuclear Dawn, the FPS-RTS hybrid Source mod turned (maybe) commercial title, had all got a bit hazy of late. What was going on with it? We hadn’t even posted about it in two years. Two years! Anyway, we’ve just received word that post-apocalyptic project is getting a release in September (definitely!) The game is a multiplayer mix of FPS and RTS, with folks able to take on the roles of RTS-style commander, or one of four classes on the battlefield. As I understand it the two factions differ in how their bases work, with their team loadouts being roughly symmetrical. The new announcement also claims that the game will be packed with all the trappings of modern multiplayer, with unlocks, 60 ranks, squad-functionality, and Steamworks-based cloud configs and character stuff. It will kick off with six maps and 32-player servers. Not 32 player servers. Obviously.

Teaser below.
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So claims Nuclear Dawn (a name that immediately makes me think of Nuclear Winter’s theme from Freedom Force- skip to about 1m10 in), a bold, Source-engine powered RTS/FPS hybrid. It’s a document of a post-nanotechnology war in Earth’s near-future, and claims to be “the first game to offer a full FPS and RTS experience without crippling or diluting either side of the game.” If you succeed in annihilating the boundary in the post, you’ll find the first trailer for it below.
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