5th Cell may be better known for making cutesy family friendly titles like Scribblenauts and Drawn to Life, but the developer’s next game is anything but cute, as Hybrid is emerging to be quite a dark, gritty third-person shooter indeed.

We’ll need to wait until the end of February/beginning of March for 5th Cell’s full reveal on Hybrid during Game Developers Conference 2011, but a handful of screenshots and new details have been released to whet our appetites for the developer’s first Xbox LIVE Arcade title.

While we already knew that Hybrid is set in a post-apocalyptic world torn apart by two warring factions, the Variants and the Paladins, both of whom are fighting for dominance by capturing and defending various territories, we now know that players online performing this capture/defend cycle will be doing so on a global basis.

Everyone playing Hybrid will choose to play as either a Variant or Paladin, and will be on a “single, unified world server,” so any territory that is captured contributes to a faction’s worldwide influence, but if a faction loses territory, its global influence in that area will be diminished. Complete global domination by one faction is the goal.

Another neat aspect planned for Hybrid is something called ‘Combat Focused Movement,’ which 5th Cell calls an “innovative new system unique to the shooter genre”… but no more information was revealed on this feature.

Check out the newly released screenshots and art for Hybrid below, and watch the game’s debut trailer over here.