SouthPeak Games today announced that it will distribute Raven Squad: Operation Hidden Dagger for the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft® and Windows PC this Autumn. Published by Evolved Games, Raven Squad is set in the near future. The game is a unique blending of real-time strategy and first-person shooter genres.

Developed by Atomic Motion, Raven Squad puts players in control of two groups of mercenary squads who crash land behind enemy lines in the Amazonian jungles. It will require tactical planning and a liberal amount of brute force to escape to safety. Each of the eight squad members possesses distinctive skills and weaponry that the player will have to use wisely to progress through the game's story driven objectives. Raven Squad sets itself apart by allowing players to switch freely between real-time strategy and first-person shooter gameplay. Only by mastering both of these modes of play, and becoming adept at switching between the two, will players make it out of the jungle alive.

"Raven Squad combines two extremely popular genres into a single robust experience where either gameplay mode could stand on its own merits," said Melanie Mroz, CEO of SouthPeak Games. "Atomic Motion is creating something that's visually compelling and building new boundaries in what a military title can accomplish. Fans of both RTS and FPS games are going to love it, as will anyone who enjoys intense, action titles."

Singleplayer / Campaign:

Warcraft III has a solid singleplayer component.  Including the expansion pack, there are a total of eight campaigns, each with an interconnected story.  The story is executed in a compelling and immersive way, and the map designs are beautiful with a profound attention to detail.  In-game cutscenes are used frequently to drive the story forward, and the power of these ... Continue Reading

The three playable races will be the same as the original game: Protoss, Zerg and Terran. The Zerg are a race of insectoid-like aliens which resemble the creatures from Starship Troopers, they operate with a swarm mentality, and they display similar traits to the scourge from Warcraft III. The Protoss are a pseudo-immortal race of humanoids with psionic abilities and the most developed technology in the StarCraft universe. And finally, the Terran are basically space-faring humans split into multiple warring factions/empires.

The newly ensconced editor-in-chief of Electronic Gaming Monthly isn't exactly a hardcore PC gamer, but he is a hardcore Blizzard fanatic, and anything StarCraft or Diablo-related falls under his personal jurisdiction. More specifically, he's a StarCraft freak, having spent the better part of four years after the release of StarCraft: Brood War playing the game and testing his custom maps until 6 a.m. every morning. That made him the perfect person to sic on 1UP.com's PC Games editor-in-chief...

Over the past year there have been countless screenshots and previews of StarCraft II, the long-awaited sequel to one of the most popular and enduring games ever made. In fact, there's so much information floating out there that it can be somewhat overwhelming, so we've put together this preview that condenses all the critical information that you need to know into one a single informative video. We'll spell out some of the key features, cool units, and changes thus far. Keep in mind, the game is still in development for release either later this year or sometime next, so changes can and probably will happen. But this is everything that we know to date. So sit back, relax, enjoy, and feel free to leave comments in the space below.

Blizzard ended months of Starcraft II silence at its headquarters today. We hadn't gotten the slightest morsel of new info on the famed developer's rabidly anticipated strategy sequel since BlizzCon in August of 2007, but now we've finally gotten our hands on the new and improved zerg, the third and last of Starcraft II's factions to be revealed to the press. After sliming our way through numerous multiplayer games with the zerg, we can say that our previous experience with the terran and protoss factions in Starcraft II still holds. Everything old here is new again, which is to say that the zerg feel startlingly similar to their counterparts in the first game. Of course, when you're building on arguably the best strategy game ever made, that's really not such a bad thing.

Give the folks at Blizzard credit for knowing how to build excitement. While the Terrans and the Protoss got to shine at the 2007 announcement of StarCraft II in South Korea and BlizzCon (respectively), the company kept the one truly iconic StarCraft race under wraps. We're speaking, of course, of the Zerg. This world-destroying plague of slavering monstrosities actually spawned its own semi-generic RTS terminology describing a simplistic strategy to overwhelm an opponent under a mountain of cheap disposable units. As we discovered when we went hands-on with the StarCraft II demo at Blizzard's big "Zerg reveal" event, though, the Zerg are still numerous and cheap, but they're anything but simplistic.

The game is Tom Clancy's EndWar, or "Apocalypse done Clancy style", according to Julian Gerighty, editorial content director at Ubisoft Shanghai, where the game's being made. He's taking me through the game at Ubidays in Paris using only the thumb sticks of an Xbox 360 pad and his voice. This is not a hands-on preview of what could well be one of 2008's most ambitious titles. This is a voice-on preview.

As with any good RTS title worth its salt, EndWar boasts full campaign, skirmish and multiplayer modes, each side blessed with unique strengths. The Russians are billed as tenacious, hard-wearing fighters, who are perhaps a little slower than their rivals. The Europeans meanwhile are mobile and adept urban combatants, skills honed acting as peace-keepers across the globe. The Americans meanwhile have some of the most advanced technology.

Over the years, various games and game genres have made the jump between the PC and the console. Often this results in ports that are near-identical to the original game. Other times, it results in tweaks to the underlying engine in order to try and optimize the game for its new home. Usually it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Of all the genres to make the move, real-time strategy, or RTS games have always suffered on consoles. Sure, Starcraft was an awesome game on the PC, but trying to shoehorn its control system onto a controller for Starcraft 64 wasn't exactly a shining moment in the Nintendo 64 library.

If you aren't familiar with EndWar, it will feature two main modes: Annihilation and Conquest. In our preview of EndWar, we played a Conquest match, but this time we got to pit our vocal chords against the computer in Annihilation. Whereas Conquest is a large-scale battle with lots of players, Annihilation is one-on-one, with each player controlling six units and vying for control of six victory locations.

Ubisoft Shanghai has a novel idea: Make a real-time strategy game from the ground up to work on a console. Sounds simple enough, but that hasn't stopped developers from trying to cram a game designed for a keyboard and mouse setup onto a controller. I have high hopes for this newest game set in the Tom Clancy world that takes the strategy down to ground level and makes use of voice commands to keep the gears of war turning. We'll find out whether it can live up to those hopes soon -- the game is now content complete and in the bug testing and balancing stages on pace for a fall release.

A lot of that's due to just how wacky and over the top the game was. Much as I love the epic space opera of StarCraft, I also enjoy Red Alert 2's goofy alternate-history motif that lent itself to units like boat-destroying, telepathically controlled squids, soldiers that erased you from time, and dogs that tore through enemy infantry. So the idea of these bizarre units and fast-paced RTS gameplay being updated for modern times via a new Red Alert (à la Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars last year) is one that immediately grabbed my attention.

The executive producer for Red Alert 3 is taking a quick break from back-to-back presentations at Electronic Arts' pre-E3 event. We're seated in a display area filled with somber red mood lighting and garish displays featuring Natasha, the busty Soviet commando who acts as the game's iconic character and is played in-game by EliteXC MMA champion and "American Gladiator" star Gina Carano. The ambience was the perfect counterpoint for our discussion of the team's decision-making when it came to designing the graphic look for the latest Red Alert.

The Command & Conquer series has always been as much about the experience and setting as the actual strategic gameplay. Half the fun of a C&C game is checking out which B-movie actors will be chewing up scenery in the game's cut-scenes and which piece of wacko technology the developers were able to cobble into a workable unit. After the series split back in 1996 between Red Alert and the Tiberium series, both sides of the franchise began to evolve in different directions. The Tiberium series, the "straighter" of the two (as epitomized by C&C3 and the recent Kane's Wrath x-pack), has always carried itself with a wink-and-a-nod pseudo-gravitas. Based on our recent visit to EA's Los Angeles studio, the latest iteration of Red Alert is going for out-and-out crazy.

There's a familiar quality with Red Alert 3, which isn't too surprising since it's coming to us from the real-time strategy team at EALA. This is the same team that delivered last year's Command & Conquer 3, The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth games and Command & Conquer: Generals. So the team has been working on RTSes for a while now, which means they've had time to develop a distinct approach.

It's been quite a while since we last checked on the Command & Conquer: Red Alert games, but maybe the time is right for a new chapter. The classic formula of real-time strategy games is built on harvesting resources, constructing a base, and churning out armies to crush your opponents before they can do the same, but this unusual strategy series was built around an alternate history. This is a world in which the so-called Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States never ended, and in which all the potential of experimental technology from that era, from the Manhattan Project to Tesla coils, was actually realized as devastating (and in some cases, fantastical) weapons on the battlefield. The series is set to return with Red Alert 3, a new game built on the modern Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars engine, but with all the over-the-top enthusiasm of a summer blockbuster popcorn movie. We recently had a chance to take a look at the game in motion.

With the announcement of one high-profile strategy title coming to home consoles, comes the revelation of another. Sierra first announced they'll be bringing World in Conflict over to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and EA is quick to follow with an announcement of an all new Command and Conquer: Red Alert game. This here would be the third title, and for a franchise that's 12 years old that's impressive. Typically, we'd be up to the fifth or even sixth iteration, but Westwood Studios (now EA Los Angeles), has always given us grueling wait periods in between. For example, the first Red Alert arrived back in 1996, the sequel in 2001, and the third in 2008 - a five, and seven year gap.

Firstly, thank you for taking the time to chat to us about Red Alert 3, secondly, for how long have your team wanted to create a third Red Alert game, and what was EA's stance on this?

No problem! A return to Red Alert has always been in the cards and something our team has wanted to explore. If you remember, there was an announcement made a few years ago about Red Alert 3 when EALA began work on a previous iteration of the game. We eventually suspended that effort to concentrate on our Lord of the Rings games, and Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars. Even today, some of the work done back then continues to inform the current team.

"A lack of long-term goals drives me f***in' bats***," Dawn of War II producer Mark Noseworthy says, shaking his head.

I was recently craving an RTS to play, but not a typical RTS.  If I was looking for a traditional RTS I would just fall back into my old ways and play the gold standard of Warcraft 3.  Something with smaller squad-based combat was my thought, and I was looking at Company of Heroes pretty hard.  It almost fit the bill, but still felt a little bit like business as usual and is starting to get dated at this point.  Imagine my surprise when the first details of Dawn of War 2 started breaking this week.

Char was formerly one of the thirteen core worlds of the Confederacy, but it is most notorious as the primary hive planet of the alien zerg. Upon its discovery, Char was found to be an inhospitable volcanic planet with thick ash covering most of its surface and tainting its acrid atmosphere.

the single-player campaign will shift its focus to covering the adventures of a small squad of individual characters...The campaign will give you greater freedom to customize these characters with dozens of different war gear items--weapons, armor, and other items. You'll do so while also learning their names, faces, and, ultimately, coming to care whether or not they live or die because surviving characters will improve over time--along with all those big guns or swords they'll recover from battle--with experience.

"This is the first game of its type and I don't think that games on console will be made the same after Endwar," he said in to CVG. "It's kind of boastful, but I really do think that this is a watershed type of game."

Of the two newcomers to the series the Dark Eldar are the more intriguing. Being the dark elves of the 40,000 universe, they're sturdier than their leaf-eared counterparts, can hit hard and dominate a map quickly given half a chance.
On the other side of the moral spectrum are the Sisters of Battle: a bunch of female fundamentalists that fall in between the original game's Space Marines and Winter Assault's Imperial Guard

“It’s like the movie 300, right?” Mark says, “But Space Marines are so bad *** that it would just be called 30.”