Feeling helpless in a virtual world is an experience that’s surprisingly difficult to convey without making your game feel clunky, sluggish, or outright broken. Even successful examples like the popular Arma 2 mod, DayZ, can feel alienating to players used to bounding across beautiful battlefields as their super-soldier of choice. But survival-action games don’t need to look and feel so stiff, and from the brief time I spent with it, Phosphor Games’ upcoming shooter Nether is looking to prove that.
The elevator pitch for Nether is a familiar one. You join a server with a bunch of other players and explore a once-populated city that’s been left in ruins after a disaster event (ominously named The Call here). Your character is fragile, your supplies scarce, and your enemies are best avoided, or engaged with no worse than even odds. Players can either pool resources and help one another, or kill fellow survivors on sight. Player-driven anarchy in a large-scale open world is certainly a compelling concept, but one you’ve doubtlessly seen before.
But you’ve probably never played one that looks or controls quite like Nether. Running on the Unreal Engine 3, it sports a lot more gloss than you’d expect if you’ve played other games in the genre. Light shafts flicker through cracked window-boards, and the dilapidated, Chicago-inspired streets are rich with natural overgrowth. Crysis it’s not, but Nether stacks up quite favorably against its survival-action contemporaries.
When it happens, combat feels fast and fluid. Guns have a more traditional FPS kick, and melee strikes connect predictably, and with weight. Anyone who’s spent any amount of time with a Battlefield game will recognize the sensation of pulling the trigger here. Weapons are your traditional military fare (would any self-respecting post-apocalypse be complete without a good shotgun?), but this is still a survival game first, so don’t expect to take on hordes of the titular baddies and come out in one piece. The nether are relentlessly aggressive, and you simply won’t have a bullet for all of them.
The rest of Nether’s structure shares a lot of parity with DayZ’s, but its setting and mythology serve to further distinguish it. Humanity’s darkest hour began with an apocalyptic event known only as “The Call,” during which the DNA of mankind was rapidly mutated, turning some into the monsters known as nether, while leaving others seemingly unaffected. Nether take a variety of forms and sizes, each with different methods of attack. The demo I played was dominated by a strain called Hunters, who can teleport about freely to ambush you or to evade your attacks. You’ll instinctively want to take advantage of the city’s verticality, but even that won’t always put you out of their reach. Though none of these design choices are groundbreaking by any means, they definitely give Nether its own identity rather than borrowing one from its competition wholesale.
They may implement features as big as drivable vehicles or PvP-only servers.
Phosphor Games is embracing the growing trend of the long, playable beta with open arms, and they’re looking for community feedback to inform more than just balance particulars. While certain things are set in stone, they may implement features as big as drivable vehicles or PvP-only servers if the player base indicates the desire. But regardless of how the fans eventually sculpt the experience, Nether is already looking like a viable alternative to DayZ and its ilk. If you’ve always wanted to have a survival-style experience in an open, player-driven world without all the artifice that usually comes with it, keep an eye out for Nether’s open beta sometime towards the end of October.
Vincent Ingenito is IGN's newest recruit. He's pretty good at fighting games. Beware, and follow him on Twitter.
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