Even though both Fortnite and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds are the most popular battle royale games, plenty of smaller indie developers are making their own creative spins on the genre. One of the new battle royale games that's caught our eye is Vostok Games' Fear the Wolves.
In the video above, David Ahmadi plays through a round of Fear the Wolves, which just entered Early Access on Steam. Like Fortnite and PUBG, Fear the Wolves drops you into a battleground with 99 other players, and you must scavenge and fight until you're the last one standing. The firefights grow faster and more frequent as time passes and a shrinking barrier surrounding the battle drives the survivors closer together.
What sets Fear the Wolves apart from its competition is the addition of a PvE feature. While scavenging for supplies and fighting other players, you'll have to fend off wild animals. Wolves pose one of the more dangerous threats--they'll hunt small pockets of players and try to separate out stragglers before going in for the kill--but other predators roam the battleground too. This increases the worth of melee weapons, like axes, as they provide a means of dealing with the wildlife without expending your valuable ammunition.
Similarly to PUBG, Fear the Wolves takes place on a battlefield after nuclear fallout. However, in Fear the Wolves, the radiation levels are still high. Waves of deadly fumes act as Fear the Wolves' version of the barrier and force players closer together. Pockets can pop up in safe areas too, and these hot spots sometimes hide the best weapons and armor. To explore them, you'll have to find a protective suit and mask, or steal one off another player's corpse. Even with protection, the radiation will eventually begin to cloud your senses and make it harder to see where you're going or who might be sneaking up on you. You need to keep sprinting to keep your adrenaline up, or you'll die from infection.
There are two different ways you can win a match in Fear the Wolves. As the number of survivors begins to dwindle, an escape helicopter will fly in and land at a random point in the safe zone. The winner is whoever reaches the helicopter first. You can kill everyone else and--by default--get first place, or just outrun every other player in a mad sprint to the chopper.
So far, there are over 20 guns, 25 attachments, and 15 armors in the game, but future updates aim to increase those numbers, while also adding additional threats that you'll have to deal with, new maps, and more game modes.
Fear the Wolves is only available on PC for now, but expected to come to consoles in 2019.