5TH Cell took a step away from its typical adorable style (see Scribblenauts) to craft a unique and innovative third person shooter. Well, mostly innovative. Hybrid is a bi-polar mix of the very generic and the very original. Now these generic elements don’t detract from the game overall, they are the needed and expected pieces of a shooter. A wide variety of weapons are available throughout the armory, all but a couple are exactly what you’d expect. And all the standard game types are present and accounted for. The look of Hybrid is also straight out of the recycle bin, with forgettable environments and the fairly typical space dudes that are so armored up they might as well be robots (Secton 8, Tribes, Halo, etc).
Each and every month, various games and DLC are permanently discounted on the Xbox Live Marketplace.
- AT
This year was a year dominated by the rise of the Arcade. Half of the games in my top 10 were 15 dollars or less and that’s a huge testament to how big the Xbox Live Arcade has gotten in the past year. Apart from the ones on my list, other games like Fez, Journey (PS3 download but you get the message), and Trials Evolution are getting major consideration for awards on multiple other websites. That doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a fair share of retail releases that impressed on multiple levels. Tell that to Sleeping Dogs, Mass Effect 3, Far Cry 3, Assassins Creed 3, and Dishonored and they will prove you wrong. It wasn’t the best year, that’s for sure, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t impress in many ways.
Ben Rowland wrote: Hybrid’s lineage is perhaps one of its most interesting aspects. This unlikely project has 5th Cell, the developer of Nintendo DS-exclusive games such as Scribblenauts and Drawn to Life, making the leap into the realm of online shooters. Hybrid is a third person multiplayer-focused shooter that attempts to bring some new ideas to a genre that’s well beyond the point of saturation. While Hybrid makes a valiant attempt and succeeds in a few areas, it unfortunately isn’t the genre-bender that we had hoped for.