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Uber Entertainment recently showed Shacknews one of the new Pros that will be thrown into the mix in its upcoming free-to-play shooter, Super Monday Night Combat: The dreaded Karl. He's a monocle-toting mechanical man who resembles the Assault archetype from the first game -- a jack-of-all-trades; especially when those trades require him to see really, really well out of one of his eyes.

He's also a decommissioned reconiassance cyborg created by oblivious upper-class engineers, as well as a downtrodden divorcee, having recently split from fictional supermodel Jazelle Pivovarova. We now know and care more about Karl than most of our immediate family members. Sorry, guys, maybe if you all had endearing back stories and even-more-endearing eyepieces.

Later this year or early next year, Uber Entertainment's going to try and thread a fairly dangerous needle. The studio, which saw success with its very first product, the XBLA and PC shooter Monday Night Combat, is trying to branch the franchise out into the increasingly populated free-to-play space. To do so successfully, it'll need to maintain its community's good will with some substantial -- but not too substantial -- changes.

"Super Monday Night Combat is going to be the same basic world," Uber Entertainment creative director John Comes explained to us at PAX last week. "We still have the same kind of lightheartedness, with the announcer and the mascot -- that same happy, fast, punchy game." The development team won't leave the formula entirely untouched, however. "Some of the balance has changed," Comes added. "Mainly, the lethality has been lowered a bit, which we've found makes for more frantic fights."

#mondaynightcombat Here's just a little bit more of Super Monday Night Combat, the recently announced, free-to-play sort-of-sequel to Uber Entertainment's Xbox 360 and PC game that (this time) draws a lot more influence from DotA-style gameplay. More »

Super Monday Night Combat, launching sometime on PC in the "next several months," is a freemium pseudo-sequel to Uber Entertainment's class-based shooter. Speaking with Kotaku, Uber says that the gameplay will essentially remain the same, with teams escorting their robotic minions to destroy the Moneyball for cash and glory.

Super MNC will wander off the established expectations of the first game with all-new levels that don't resemble futuristic arenas, and avoid the propensity for one-hit kills found in the original. "People tend to live a little bit longer [in the new game.] There's a lot more tactical battles, so the gameplay is a little bit more intense," said Creative Director John Comes. The company is also shifting the way turrets and bots operate to encourage more teamwork.

The original Monday Night Combat was a fantastic game that suffered from a severe case of launch hiccups on XBLA, but eventually found its footing as a PC title. A freemium version of MNC sounds like a great idea, especially if Uber supports it with the type of solid updates and robust systems we've seen it deliver to the original version.

Everybody's doing it. What was once a stigma most gamers wouldn't take seriously is now the most popular business model in gaming. It's called free-to-play and it seems like every day a new game is adopting it. Monday Night Combat, the third-person shooter released last summer on Xbox Live Arcade and Steam, is getting a free-to-play sequel called Super Monday Night Combat...