Here comes Fear the Wolves, another downloadable battle royale title. In what is becoming the dominant new genre of the past year, battle royale games show no sign of slowing down in their campaign to conquer all of the first-person shooter genre. What’s the deal this time?
Fear the Wolves from developers Vostok Games is part of the tidal wave sweeping gaming as its unique take on battle royal first-person shooter gaming features not only a 100-player battle arena but also uses the real-world ruin of Chernobyl as its backdrop.
As you can imagine, choosing Chernobyl, a city famously evacuated in the 1980s due to the nuclear meltdown that occurred at the local Pripyat power plant, will inevitably involve some kind of environmental hazard in the game.
And that intuition would be dead on.
Not only is the environment massive but also its filled with secrets and hazards that players will discover over the course of their survival and exploration of the area.
How to Download Fear the Wolves
Fear the Wolves was released as an alpha early access title on August 28, 2018, and can be downloaded from Steam for a moderate price. To start your download click on the button at the end of the review. The game is also available on the consoles PS4 and Xbox One.
The Game Review
As in other games in the genre such as Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Fear the Wolves parachutes players into the arena with each person landing in a random location with one task only – survive.
The second task, eliminate other players, can best be achieved through weapons found in game but also by letting others take care of the field of competitors for you.
Nothing says strategy like camping out and letting others do the hard work is a bad one but…
… here comes the best part…
…in Fear the Wolves, even the environment is a potential foe, giving campers something to worry about in their quest for survival above all others.
Brought to life by the team at Vostok Games, many of whom also worked on the cult-classic title S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Fear the Wolves sports a decidedly realistic graphics style and art direction with an ambiance that shifts between moody and eerie.
How can you beat that?
And as if that’s not enough…
…Recreating the wasteland that is the Chernobyl radioactive area is perhaps one of the coolest ideas to come to a battle royale game and the environment’s adherence to the actual real-world locale gives the whole thing a level of immersion that only something like that could achieve.
Along those lines, Fear the Wolves more closely resembles PUBG than Fortnite and the mishmash of natural settings and decayed urban buildings more closely aligns with the former’s eastern European aesthetic.
As the name implies, Fear the Wolves also has mutated creatures that attack players as they make their way through Chernobyl.
And this is, in fact, as crazy as it can possibly get.
The mutated creatures add an element of chaos and randomness to Fear the Wolves and can easily turn a dire situation or an obvious victory into a run for everyone’s life. This element is refreshing as so often newer players can find themselves overwhelmed in battle royale games as veterans pick them off with aplomb.
The bottom line?
Adding in the chaos of powerful NPC enemies such as mutated wolves makes everyone approach the match with a level of caution that would more accurately mirror the general tension of a game of hunt or be hunted.
Overtly dark but fiercely competitive, Fear the Wolves’ unique take on battle royale games stands out for its blend of that genre with survival horror elements for a unique and compelling atmosphere in the game and fun, engaging gameplay to boot.
