"Innovative" is a word marketers and developers try to sell us often, but it's rare to find a game—particularly within the shooter genre—which deserves the label. Hybrid is an exception, but it takes more than a novel idea to craft an engaging, worthwhile experience.

Hybrid—the gravity-defying action title developed by Jeremiah Slaczka's 5th Cell's studio—is supposed to be launching today on Xbox Live. But the experimental shooter doesn't even appear to be available to download.

As part of a (kinda random!) cross-promotional stunt, 5th Cell's upcoming Hybrid will allow for unlockable helmets that let you dress your character up as a Minecraft creeper, among other things.

The Xbox Live Summer of Arcade promotion has become a bona fide hot weather event in gaming. For the fifth summer running, Microsoft will be releasing and promoting promising download-only titles via Xbox Live Arcade. This year, the Summer of Arcade starts on July 18 and runs until mid-August. What's on deck, when's…

The Xbox Live Summer of Arcade will be upon us soon, and one of the games coming with it is Hybrid, a multiplayer shooter from 5th Cell.

Owen Good asked, "What the heck are you all about, Hybrid?"
It's a futuristic third-person shooter being developed by 5th Cell, which you may know for its Scribblenauts games on the Nintendo DS. I'm not like that at all; I'll be their first offering for the Xbox 360 and will be available over Xbox Live Arcade. My…

"Why call it Hybrid?"

When game developer Jeremiah Slaczka isn't answering your questions right here on Kotaku, he's making a multiplayer shooter called Hybrid with his team at development studio 5TH Cell.

Hybrid, the third-person online shooter set to release on Xbox Live Arcade this year, will have a public beta with signups beginning shortly after the end of GDC, which is next week. "Gamers will finally get to experience our innovative 'combat focused movement' for themselves," Developer 5th Cell said in a statement.

After making a big splash during its first showing at the 2011 Game Developers Conference, 5th Cell's dizzying cover-centric 3D shooter Hybrid was dragged back behind closed doors in May in order to make sure it was the "highest quality title possible". Let's see what changed the past eight months have wrought.

The next great innovation in shooting video game bad guys is focused not on our virtual guns, but on our virtual feet.

The people who made the Scribblenauts and Drawn To Life are getting a little closer to explaining how their next game — a shooter, of all things — is unique.

If you know a little something about which people make which video games, the trailer for a game called Hybrid released late last month seemed strange.

5th Cell, the developer behind innovative titles like Drawn to Life and Scribblenauts, revealed its upcoming title. The game is called Hybrid, and it's a post-apocalyptic third-person shooter.

Nolan Bushnell, creator of Pong and founder of Atari, returns to game development with Battleswarm: Field of Honor, a real-time strategy / first-person shooter hybrid he describes as "a mash-up between StarCraft and Starship Troopers."

GameSetWatch has a nice essay up from Gregory Weir, who takes a look at why Puzzle Quest was so damn successful at creating a satisfying hybrid.