Hybrid – It’s Quite the Hyrbid

In a world of dull gray shooters and bland yearly releases, we see a lot of the same. Most shooters have you running around a map trying to kill as many enemies as you can, with very little strategy. Some games mix this up with a dedicated cover system – like Gears of War – that doesn’t effect to much of how you play.

Hybrid, is, at its core a hybrid of todays current third persons shooters, with a hint of the classic strategy game Risk. Hybrid takes what Gears of War does best, a cover system, and puts all of it’s weight on it – but before we explain any further, lets set the scene.

A Variant Soldier.

In an apocalyptic future where an alien force attacks, the world is at arms. Only two factions remain; the Paladins and the Variants. The factions are fighting to harvest a rare mineral called dark matter from multiple zones of the world. Your goal as a soldier is to fight against the opposing faction in 3 vs. 3 matches to advance towards the center of the zone. Whichever group earns the required XP first will earn two pieces of Dark Matter, with the second group only earning one.

Hybrids top layer meta game has you looking over different sections of the world and choosing where you want to fight, this adds a fun amount of strategy into your gameplay, as different sections will your help at different times, and I often found myself going to twitter and telling all Paladins to hit section 7 and make the final push, or to abandon the US and move on to Europe. This is a fun element of the game that really builds a bigger sense of community as well as making you really rely on your team.

The presentation of Hybrid is definitely the games weak spot, as the soldiers look taken straight out of Halo, and the graphics look bland at the most. There is great potential for the landscape among the few courses Hybrid has to offer, but they’re all pixilated and lacking detail upon inspection.

One other problem I found with Hybrid is the lack of instructions on the game modes. Of course things like Team Deathmatch need no explanation, but some game modes that have you capturing dark matter spheres and planting bombs ala Search and Destroy made absolutely no sense to me and I found myself sticking to the Team Deathmatch hopper instead of wasting my time letting the other team win in a tactical game mode.

Hybrid also excels at what it does because of the amount of team work truly necessary to win – in such tight spaces with only 6 players, knowing where your team is and what weapons and powers they have is truly necessary to make the final push and win above your opponents.

While Hybrid is certainly an innovative game in terms of playstyle, it lacks the polish to be as long standing of a game as shooters like Monday Night Combat, but the overworld meta game with risk style play certainly makes the game an experience you do not want to miss.