Bellevue, Washington developer 5th Cell is known for making cute, creative games like Scribblenauts and Drawn to Life. Last year, fans of these games anxiously awaited the company's next title, thinking it'd be something along the lines of 5th Cell's previous titles and were understandably shocked to find out the new game was slated to be a third-person shooter. Dubbed Hybrid, 5th Cell has decided to swap family-friendly fare for post-apocalytic, gun-toting pandemonium.

At this month's Game Developers Conference, 5th Cell set up a 3v3 match for the attending journalists and let us have at each other. Before we started, they gave us a little bit of background on the game—very little. Although details are fuzzy at this writing regarding the plotline of Hybrid, what we do know is that it takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, blah blah blah. At first blush, the too-familiar story concept and forgettable name don't do much to garner interest for the game. Fortunately, if gamers give the game a chance and play it for five minutes, 5th Cell's unorthodox take on combat movement is likely to win them over.

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Before starting, we were urged to pick one of the game's two factions (Paladin or Variant; we don't yet know what either of these are) and then were let loose on one another. Immediately, we saw the main way Hybrid departs from the usual run-and-gun, cover-centric mechanics. The usual left-stick movement scheme is thrown out the window in favor of one that has you use the left stick to select a position on the battlefield. Positions are highlighted by a floating yellow triangle, and once you've chosen a position, hitting the A button will send your avatar scurrying over to it. Hitting A twice will fire up your jet pack and send you flying over to it, which comes in handy when you want to bomb down on an enemy position from above or want to take cover vertically on a wall.

Incidentally, that was one of the weirdest and most fun aspects of the game's cover system—that you could stick to the wall behind cover like a heavily-armed fly. The arena we played was a multi-leveled building with lots of handily knocked-down walls, which made for a highly chaotic skirmish. You never knew when an enemy would get the drop on you and suddenly be blasting you from behind. Luckily, you could quickly hop from one side of cover to the other just by hitting the Y button.

The secondary way Hybrid departs from the typical shooter is in its handling of AI allies. Skirmishes are limited to 3v3 but as you gain points during the fight, you gain the right to spawn AI allies like turret gunners and assassins. The former are big, beefy armored guys who latch onto walls and stay there, firing madly at the enemy. The latter are quick-as-a-flash, ninja-like soldiers who fearlessly leap over cover and kill whomever's behind it. Both were fun to use, and when all six players got their AI on, things were pretty ridiculous. The final change Hybrid's making to the shooter genre is the concept of "Persistent World War," although the developers were fairly cagey about that at the show and wouldn't give us any details. From what the game's teaser trailer shows, this aspect of the game appears to happen on a kind of Risk-like map and we can speculate that what happens on it will be directly related to the outcomes of the many skirmishes. Outside of these not insignificant innovations, from what we saw, Hybrid's weapon usage will be very familiar to shooter fans, using the "left trigger to aim and right trigger to fire" approach. We were also told (as opposed to shown) that the game will feature a Call of Duty type of leveling.

Hybrid is a big departure from 5th Cell's previous efforts but that could definitely be a good thing. Having done a certain genre well, it seems the team is stretching its creative wings and by making Hybrid, proving it isn't a one-trick pony. In any case, what we saw in this month's demo offers some interesting variants on the usual competitive shooter, and we look forward to seeing the game develop over the next few months as further details are revealed.

By Neilie Johnson
CCC Freelance Writer