A perplexing videogame press release showed up in my inbox this morning, full of proclamations so absurd and subtitles so nonsensical that I simply had to post about it, if only to reward Interwave Studios' chutzpah in some small way. 

The game is called Nuclear Dawn: Modern Combat Rising (once you've experienced a nuclear dawn, isn't it fair to say that modern combat has officially risen?). It's an FPS-RTS hybrid with a focus on squad gameplay in a post-apocalyptic environment. It's shameful how many of my buttons that pushes. Here's the trailer:

That contains what has to be my favourite game-trailer intertitle this year: "Boundaries between genres have been ANNIHILATED."

Not broken. Not challenged. Fucking ANNIHILATED. 

The boundary in question (the one whose corpse Interwave studios is now presumably browsacking) is the boundary between the FPS and RTS genres, apparently. Games have tried this before--there's at least one Fantasy-themed one whose title escapes me, and even this year's Section 8 had some hints of it--with varying degrees of success, though I daresay none have tackled the problem with the same, shall we say, manic enthusiasm. 

The game is being developed with Valve's Source engine, which means it'll eventually show up on Steam, but there doesn't seem to be a solid release date as of yet. This one is filed under "wait and see" for now, with a bright red "cautious optimism" flag attached. More on this later, I suspect.