Way, way, back when I used to play Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat frequently on Steam, I found out about a Half-Life mod that my friends were talking about. The mod was called Natural Selection. What is Natural Selection you ask? Well my friend, it’s like Alien vs. Predator, only it’s not a movie, and it doesn’t suck.

Natural Selection is a mix of strategy and first person shooter, as often you find that unless you plan how you attack, and you play how you play with your teammates, you’ll die almost every time. Going back to the AvP comment, it essentially is the same thing, you can play as a human or an alien. Your abilities develop as you level up from successful kills. As a human you use technology to better yourself, as an alien you use natual ablilties that grow as you play. Once you reach the commander possition for the human side, you command 5 soliders together, and this alone offers a real unique experience as far as first person shooters go. Aliens evolve to include ablilites like cloaking and additional tracking methods, and along with those ablilites come a change in shape. You start off as a kind of headcrab, then evolve to run on walls, fly, and become big enough to eat human soliders whole (1 HIT KILL!).

The graphics are a bit outdated, but as far as gameplay goes, Natural Selection is very original, and completely free. They’re also working on a Source version of the game which I hope turns out to be better than the original. This game really represents the whole theme of “learn to adapt and evolve, or die out”.