As part of a Facebook promotion, highly popular iOS developer and publisher Gameloft has pulled the lid off of its "secret project." The secret announcement turned out to be a brand new episode in the celebrated N.O.V.A. series [iTunes Link] of first person shooters. The announcement came today as Gameloft reached a previously set goal of 300,000 Facebook followers.

There are next to zero details currently available, and the best info comes from a single screenshot. The game is called N.O.V.A. (Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance) Elite. It's been rumored to be the first of Gameloft's upcoming Unreal Engine games, which would make sense given the high production values that have become associated with the series.

If you'll allow for a moment of nearly baseless speculation, the single shot of the game that has been released (above) gives us a small inkling of what the game might feature. The screen shows three soldiers standing side-by-side that appear to be of differing classes (one is holding a shotgun, another an assault-rifle-y thing, and another with thick armor is holding a minigun.) Given that N.O.V.A. has always been an unapologetic "homage" to the Halo series (a development strategy that Gameloft has been criticized for lately) it could be that this game will have a focus on cooperative play or at least class-based gameplay, which would be consistent with the most recent Halo games, Halo Reach and Halo 3: ODST.

This is a major release on the upcoming schedule of a major developer. The N.O.V.A. series is one of the most highly regarded in all of iOS gaming. So we'll definitely be keeping close tabs on this as it gets closer to release and as more information becomes available.