Vostok reveals Stalker battle royale game Fear the Wolves in video
Howl you play?
Vostok has released the first footage of Stalker battle royale game Fear the Wolves.
The trailer gives an overview of a typical game experience. You parachute in - as you do in those other quite popular battle royale games PUBG and Fortnite - hunt for supplies, shoot other players, run away from wolves and towards a helicopter extraction point.
Within these are some of the big differences in Wolves compared to PUBG and Fortnite. For starters, there are two ways to win: you can either be the first person extracted (there can be only one), or you can kill everyone else. Then there are the wolves, the first of the game's mutant roaming enemies. On their own they're not such a problem but they'll drain your ammo (and shooting will give your position away) and possibly leave you injured or worse. In packs, they'll be a formidable threat. But they will be indiscriminate in their targeting - running a chasing pack into a densely contested area, for example, may be a legitimate tactic for clearing it out.
Hunting for supplies means better weapons as in Fortnite and PUBG, but it also means crucial equipment for surviving an increasingly poisonous atmosphere. Hazmat suits will let you get at the best loot in the most poisonous areas, and could even, a press release suggests, give you more options for flanking - possibly from within the ever-encroaching radiation storm?
Tonally, Wolves is similar to Stalker, which it had to be and which is a relief. It's tense and focuses on realism, playing up the endlessly eerie deserted zone around the exploded Chernobyl nuclear power plant, with a dramatic things-have-mutated licence of course.
Edwin spoke to Vostok about Fear the Wolves earlier in the year. Battles, incidentally, are for 100 people.
Fear the Wolves will launch for PC on Steam Early Access this summer, and will follow on consoles next year.