I somehow got in the beta, right before it went on sale on steam (long story), and I actually have 270 hours played already and play it almost every day ;-P .
So... if you have any questions, let me know. I'll answer them
.
A quick low-down of the game that you don't see on the videos: It takes quite a beefy PC to run the game, and the most popular servers right now are actually overclocked I5/I7's to 4.0-4.2ghz. The game is sadly not very well multithreaded right now, and that's the reason for OCd servers. The client also slows down a lot, especially late game when there's a lot of structures and shit going on. If you want to keep all the eye-candy on, prepare to use at least a GTX 480(~GTX 570)-level performance for 1920x1080. Ideally you should also have a beefy and well-overclocked CPU (subject to improve before release even more hopefully, but still recommended). Non-OCd servers also are supposed to not be horrible, according to devs but pretty much all the popular servers right now (mostly 6-7) run OCd, so I don't know how a normal CPU would run it.
The reason for the lack of multithreading and generally not so great optimization is that the actual game logic runs on LUA. Yes, LUA. LOL. For those who aren't technically-minded, LUA is kind of a scripting language and it kind of runs on a virtual machine kind of like Java... so it's difficult to multithread well for some reason from what I understand. BUT, they've increased performance a LOT in the last two months (the CPU part anyway) so I have faith that good things will still come. There's a huge patch coming out tomorrow too, and one more beta patch before the final 1.0 patch. Graphical heaviness isn't likely to decrease anytime soon though, but you can just turn settings off for that.
As far as the game itself - it's fun. The marines are very traditional FPS-type game, whereas the aliens take a lot of getting used to, even if you've played things like Left 4 Dead. The alien melee initially feels like a clusterfuck, and it still feels like a clusterfuck sometimes, even after playing 270 hours, even though I have a lot more control than I did when I first started playing.
Hitreg is pretty nice, sometimes even feels like client-side detection, but I'm not entirely sure. It's nice though, no complaints for sure there. With the patch tomorrow, they're hyping it up to be even better.
In general, if you want a quick look at the game I'm not gonna waste time typing, just watch the totalbiscuit videos:
Natural Selection 2 Coverage - Marines - YouTube
Natural Selection 2 Coverage - Aliens - YouTube
Natural Selection 2 Coverage - The Commander - YouTube
Some of the stuff is a little outdated because this was 3 months ago, but not by much. They're constantly tweaking and balancing the RTS part of the game, and things like gun damage output, health on things, armor on things, etc. etc.
P.S. If you want to see an actual match from the RTS perspective (trust me, the FPS perspective feels a LOT different
), see the recordings of the Logitech beta tournament which just happened this weekend (as well as older beta tournaments):
NaturalSelection2
P.P.S. Some of the things that are in the game you just don't see in competitive matches due to them not being overly viable in the "comp scene," but there's some pretty nice long games involving all kinds of stuff on "pub" servers even now, so the comp. matches aren't necessarily representative of how the game is played outside of tournaments.
. Also I prefer Aliens, even though it's definitely more difficult in some ways... I just find the gameplay both as player and as commander more interesting than Marines.
but other than that HOLY CRAP they made the game even better, and it looks so pretty!
