This week we check out Sleeping Dogs, Darksiders II, and The Last Story.

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McBargains and Caro fight off the Undead Syndrome and feel the groove with Sequence.

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Bulletin

The GameSpot Community has been bounding with a plethora of activities, live events, contests, community gaming events and more! First up some of our crew headed out to Hawaii to get ready for Sunday’s Pokemon World Championships 2012 live stream. Watch our live coverage on GameSpot or Twitch as we highlight the best players of both the video games and trading card game. Who knows maybe we;’ll have some schwag to give away from the event!

Next up, Chalk Talk, last weeks assignment users wrote editorials about what developers and publishers they were willing to forgive and for the first time in a long time members were featured on the front page of GameSpot! And if that wasn’t cool enough, a new GameSpot User Rewards Challenge will be starting this week. In addition to the automatic profile points you get by simply being a user on the site you’ll also have the chance to earn bonus points by completing activities. We’ve also been cleaning up some nasty bugs around the site so you’ll want to read the latest known bugs report for further details.

Making Mischief

Not everything on the internet needs to be serious about gaming, take some of these hilarious comics and videos for example. I mean who doesn’t want Bacon Wizard Time? We’re also sharing some amazing Dorkly comics, including Everything you ever wanted to know about “whoo-hoo” and The Great Deku Dad. But if silly cartoon humor isn’t quite your thing than this guy playing the Super Mario theme backwards might be impressive. Also, if you want to see the future by John Carmack, this video shows off his futurist VR Headset.

Free to Play

If you’ve been wanting to attend MLG for quite some time, pre-order Hitman: Absolution to gain free access to their Sniper Challenge game–now available on PC through Steam. Practice your sniping and win a chance to go to MLG’s Dallas Tournament courtesy of GameSpot / In addition to our current beta key giveaway for Free Play Friday we thought we would take a moment to give a shout out to a little indie game called Freedom Planet they currently have a browser demo available on their site. For those of you who are Sonic fans you will likely be giddy at the clear homage to the spiky blue fellow. Also for this week only you can get Skylanders: Cloud Patrol free on iOS devices, One of Swords has the full details.

Geeky Gimmies

As always the internet is a cornucopia of gaming swag delights, this week in addition to all of the nifty Team Fortress stuff seen in Synthia’s blog, there were also Sriracha Rooster Sauce Lollipops to enjoy thanks to the good people at thinkgeek. But if you’re looking for something a little classier to add to your video game swag collection you could try this 300$ limited edition 25th anniversary Street Fighter chess set.

Will Play for Food

For many GameSpotters the idea of getting to work in an industry surrounded by the great minds that create something as powerful as games is a dream come true. Well for those of you who are interested we are here to inform you that both “Perfect World” and “Riot” are currently hiring for various positions, go make your dream a reality!

Bonus Item

For those of you who have not yet seen this fantastic Legend of Zelda parody and are in any way a “fan” of the games. Stop whatever you’re doing and watch NOW!

Just when you thought you’d had your fill of third-person shooters with cover mechanics, along comes Hybrid to show you something new. It may not be immediately apparent, given the generic sci-fi setting and fairly standard arsenal, but the innovations here are significant. Hybrid fundamentally reimagines the way you move through the world, and the result is a battlefield that feels exciting and novel.

It’s all in the movement. In Hybrid, you are either in cover or flying between cover. There is no freedom to run around, no going off into a corner to find a perfect sniper perch–these maps are built around cover hotspots located on the floor, the walls, and the ceilings. The only places you and your enemies can physically be are in cover or in the air, traveling to cover. You’re essentially traveling on wires between fixed positions, and you rarely have more than two visible destinations at any time.

This may sound limiting, but like with any well-designed gameplay mechanic, there is room for flexibility. To travel, simply look at a cover position and tap the A button. You will automatically jetpack to your destination, but your flight path is not a fixed trajectory. Using the left stick, you can climb, dive, strafe, and swoop as you progress steadily forward. You can quicken your pace by boosting, or reverse direction and head back to your point of departure. You can even change course by selecting another cover point midair, which allows you to stay airborne longer and quickly traverse sizable sections of the stage. Just like that, your on-rails transit between points is not so on-rails, and you’ve got room for strategic maneuvering.

You also have the right analog stick and trigger free for gunplay. Whether you’re targeting entrenched enemies or flying foes, your arsenal provides a familiar framework for combat, offering shotguns, rifles, SMGs, machine guns, heavy pistols, and so on. They are effective in the usual ways, and are fun to pair with the novel movement mechanic. A close-quarters shotgun blast always packs a punch, but if you’ve zoomed in low to surprise your enemy, or lain in wait as an incoming foe peppers you with fire from above, that powerful shot is all the more satisfying.

Kill successfully, and you are rewarded with a robotic ally. One kill gets you a little hover drone that provides close fire support and can serve as a helpful decoy. Three kills earns you a bulky gunship that flies lazily around the map, firing on enemies and serving as an impromptu mobile shield. Tally five kills, and you can unleash a homing missile that takes the form of a flying, shrieking, holographic lady ninja.

These drones can all be helpful and deadly, or they can be easily destroyed and contribute to your enemies’ kill streaks. Figuring out when to best deploy them is an interesting tactical consideration. You can have one of each stored for deployment, and unleashing a host of drones as you approach an enemy position is a good way to tip the odds in your favor. Drones emit a burst of light when created, which means they can give away your position, but they also persist after your death, potentially earning you kills from beyond the grave. The fact that they are awarded at such low thresholds makes these kill streak rewards an integral part of regular gameplay, rather than occasional anomalies that disrupt the flow of combat.

Things get even more interesting when you factor in abilities. These powers operate on a cooldown timer, and you can equip only one at a time, but the sheer diversity makes for a lot of possibilities. Grenades come in many varieties, including deadly explosives, disorienting flares, and a sinister little number that instantly converts enemy drones to your side, making them fire on their owners. There are also ammo enhancements (like poison and health siphon), defensive aids (like an overshield and a grenade defuser), and team support powers (like a radar sweep and an ability recharge).

Certain abilities even let you self-destruct, destroying any nearby enemy, or instantly teleport to cover to get the drop on unsuspecting foes. Though the latter can be tough to defend against, most abilities have some kind of counter-ability to help balance things out. On top of all that, you can choose a specialization, which can offer a passive boost to experience gain, weapon damage, drone strength, and so on. You select only three elements for your loadout when entering battle, but the variety of weapons, abilities, and specializations creates an impressive array of ways to play. Hybrid’s battlefields feel lively, deadly, and full of opportunity for experimenting with new strategies.

Matches consist of three-on-three battles in a variety of game types, though team deathmatch is far and away the most prevalent. There are two versions of king of the hill, a mode in which you must capture and hold onto an artifact, a bomb-based mode with no respawning, and a mode that focuses on individual kill streaks. You earn experience points for dispatching enemies and meeting a particular mission goal, and these points increase your level and earn you unlocks in the armory. Guns, abilities, and cosmetic helmets await, and if you’re impatient you can purchase credits with Microsoft points to unlock items faster. Everything can be unlocked over time, and you earn unlocks for weapon categories, not specific weapons. This means that anyone can have any weapon fairly early on, so the pay scheme doesn’t appear to have an unbalancing effect on the game.

All of your skirmishes contribute to your faction’s progress on a persistent world map. You choose Variant (red) or Paladin (blue) before you get into the action, and you are pretty much stuck with that faction for the duration (though you can switch once per world cycle and not lose any personal progress). The only story tidbit you get is that there is dark matter and both teams want it, and your influence on the world map is hard to discern. You fight in various regions across the globe, though as the game points out, the region you choose in-game does not correspond to a server region. Though Hybrid suffered serious network issues on launch day, it runs smoothly as of this review, despite some occasionally sluggish matchmaking.

This is crucial because Hybrid is online multiplayer only. It does only one thing, but it does that thing really well. Hybrid subverts one of the core mechanics of this popular genre, while skillfully implementing many of the elements that have made its predecessors so addictive and successful. The result is an enjoyable blend of the new and the familiar that makes Hybrid something special on the shooter scene.

The crazed red and blue mercenaries of Team Fortress 2 may soon have more to worry about than the other team of crazed mercenaries. Various hints spanning from 2010 to 2012 (many compiled in one handy location by Reddit users) point to a new mode which will pit the two teams against waves of robots.

“Mann vs. Machine,” the rumored name for the update, was most recently indicated by a suspicious splatter mark appearing this week on the logo of Team Fortress’ website. The splatter mark links to an image: a birth certificate which indicates the feuding brothers who founded the opposing RED and BLU teams had a third sibling named Gray, who was “absconded with” soon after birth.

Previous hidden assets on the Team Fortress 2 website and within the game’s code have pointed to robotic variants of each of the game’s nine distinct classes, which would theoretically compose the rank and file of the Gray team. Reddit users have speculated that references to waves as well as new deployable items for the engineer indicate the mode will have elements of tower defense.

Valve, the game’s developer, recently debuted its final “Meet the Team” update for the Pyro class, and unveiled a new cross-promotional Team Fortress 2 map for the upcoming Sleeping Dogs today. Valve also has a history of promoting upcoming titles and features with elaborate alternate reality games.