"This is quite an accolade for a new development company and its first game," says Terry Malham, CDV's UK president. "CDV spotted Breed's potential at an early stage, but it's always good to have your beliefs confirmed by a market giant such as NVIDIA."

"We believe in championing developers and giving them whatever support they need to create the very best PC games possible," says Darryl Still, head of developer relations for NVIDIA in Europe. "We have been liaising with Brat Designs on Breed for some months now and the game is shaping up to be one of this year's ground-breaking titles."

Breed is being designed to run with DirectX 9.0, and incorporates many of the features specific to this latest version of Microsoft's API. Developer Brat Designs has created its own game engine, the Mercury engine, to make full use of next generation hardware, including graphics cards, with multi-texturing, soft shadowing, reflection mapping and real-time adjusted 'time of day' lighting, all featuring in the game's environment.

The level of textural detail available in the game, both in characters and the scenery, add greatly to the atmosphere. Featuring scenes of intense combat between your soldiers and the robotic Breed which have colonised Earth, players will have unprecedented freedom to roam and explore the huge playing areas. With an interactive demo due shortly, gamers will soon be able to sample an extract from the title for themselves.

Breed will be published by CDV Software Entertainment UK in the second quarter of 2003, at a price to be confirmed.