Title: Fear The Wolves

Genre: Battle Royale, FPS

Platform: PC

Developer: Vostok Games

Publisher: Focus Home Interactive

Release: Feb 6,2019

Riding the battle royale trend is a dangerous gambit. We’ve seen this first hand with the MOBA craze from a few years back. One game will make huge waves and others try to play catchup to chase that elusive dollar and eSports love.

If you are not at the front lines of the trend, you are going to be fighting a losing battle unless you ride off the back of an established franchise. Fear The Wolves does none of these things and so they are at a disadvantage before the even kick off. I actually think the game is sort of tied to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series but you’d never know it other than from the setting.

I played, or at least tried to play the game while it was in early access on Steam. Let’s just say that it was a bit of a mess of buggy code and a pretty unoptimized disaster. Still, it was early access and so I let it bake in the oven and came back to the game after launch.

While a lot of games, especially ones with single player, can spend the first few weeks making tweaks without much trouble, an online only game does not have that luxury. Those first few days are going to be make or break with regards to player base and retention. You don’t have the players, you don’t have a game.

Unfortunately, the player base a few weeks out in so low that the few games I just played before starting this review, I never saw another player and only battled wolves. These roving packs of mutated wolves killed me every single time, so I suppose I didn’t really need other people.

I’ll give you an example of how most matches played out. I spawn into a random area (heli-drops were abandoned from the beta) and gather some gear. The map is dead and shows only nine total players. I come across a pack of wolves and barricade myself in a home hoping that they pass.

They don’t and manage to break down the door, which was freaking terrifying the first time it happened. You clearly aren’t safe just running inside. I unload and kill four mutated wolves. Moving on I grab better weapons and radiation gear.

Another small village means another pack of wolves, but this time I was ready. I bolted to a house and closed the door. They followed and I managed to trap them inside with myself in another room. They break through and I pop them off one at a time.

The map is now shrinking fast, faster than any other battle royale game probably due to the limited players. I’ve now killed 7 wolves but have not encountered another living soul. I fight through weather changes like fog and rain to make my next location. This would be incredibly tense if I thought another player would be around.

The helicopter shows up for extraction and I bolt to it, knowing that this will probably be the time a battle with others will happen. I get to the LZ early and I am forced to wait in the open for 90 seconds before the ropes drop. Nothing happens and nobody approaches.

The flares pop signaling the rope is down and I attached myself and lift off into the sky to safety. Not a single soul challenged me or even showed up on the map near me. I won the match without seeing another player and if there weren’t wolves in play, would have just casually walked to the helicopter.

It was the most boring and lonely battle royale experience ever. If there were a large player base I could really see things getting tense and super exciting with what is thrown at you. I thought I was playing a singe player game, and I sort of wish I were. There is enough cool stuff here to set a number of objectives, throw in some bots in squads hunting you and then work to reach the helicopter.

What sucks about all of this is that Fear The Wolves actually throws some interesting elements at you in terms of the standard battle royale thing, some of which I mention above. I don’t know if these things are enough to justify the games existence, and by the player numbers it seems they aren’t

Fear The Wolves has the basics of shirking area and collecting gear in a sort of team setting. I say sort of because teams seem to only be made up of duos or solo play now. Not the end of the world but it sure feels disconnected from the idea of battle royale. Then again, without a large player base it does make some sense.

The cool stuff comes from the world the game is set in and what comes along because of it. Fear The Wolves is set in a radiation-ravaged Chernobyl because that’s apparently all the world knows about Russia and it needs a tangential tie to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. But this isn’t just some visual setting as radiation and weather play a role in the mechanics.

While the world itself is the same every drop (you actually just spawn randomly now), every game is made different because of off-limit radioactive zones inaccessible to less-equipped players. So, if you have a favorite area you like to stick to, know it might be a dead-zone during any given game.

These sections are all suffering from different levels of radiation that spread at random. You might be able to scavenge a home or two with minor issue, or you made need protective gear to do some exploring without dying. And this radiation adds the most interesting thing Fear The Wolves has going for it –mutated beasts.

Mutated wolves will roam in packs and hunt you down for sport. And those aren’t the only once animal dangers you will encounter. Imagine dropping in and seeing a huge mutated bear-thing barreling down at you. It’s not the first battle royale game to add creatures, but it sure feels like that idea has been dropped long ago.

Does it make the game a bit unfair at times? Sure, but that keeps things interesting when you are in a survival type game. It’s not like animals don’t exist in the world, and if my neighbors dog can chase my car down the road, surely forest animals can nip at my heels.

If Fear The Wolves had a strong player base then this might have worked to keep players on their toes. Having to worry about other humans is hard enough, so imagine also having to contended with a pack of mutated animals at the same time. The tension built could have really worked.

Could have worked. The problem is that there just isn’t anyone playing the game and every death suffered I was only ever killed by some animal and not another human player. The game kills you without any help from other players. I’d almost like it if this was an open-world FPS instead of battle royale.

The map is interesting enough with the varied forest and industrial setting to sustain something like that. Adding in some solo objectives or a mini story would have given the game some staying power. Think what Valve tried to do with Counterstrike back on home consoles. Still the online shooter but with some solo missions to run.

And players who are invested want to play more of the game. The forums on Steam are full of people with the game looking for a partner or asking for bots to be added to the game so they can play. There is clearly something here, it’s just not connecting in an already crowded battle royale market. With Apex Legends doing massive numbers I just don’t see Fear The Wolves taking off, which is a shame.

But the worst thing against the game is that it isn’t even free! I don’t know who thought it was a smart idea to release an unknown battle royale title as a $20 game when its competitors are all free, but they need to be fired. With literally dozens of free options out on the market I just don’t know why anyone would throw down $20 for an dead game.

Again, if there was some sort of single player feature in the mix you’d be able to justify a price tag. There is so much potential here but none of it is at the level which makes charging for the game worth it. Players are posting times when players are online and tossing ideas to better promote the game and I really feel for them.

Fear The Wolves brings so much to the table, but it’s all just wasted potential. I didn’t even get time to discuss the artifacts that you can find that can give you all manner of abilities, mostly because I never really found any. Look, it’s just not ready to be out of early access, and everything it does well will now probably be co-opted by another studio that already has a complete project.

I’d say give the game time, but Fear The Wolves isn’t in the sort of genre that allows that. It’s almost impossible to build a community up after a failed launch as can be evidenced by the dozens of dead MOBA games out there hanging on by a thread.

One Steam review sums it up best: “all it needs is more people to play it then this game would be perfect”. I can’t really argue with that as I’d probably love the game with a bunch of people playing, and I don’t even like battle royale games.

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Final Score

2/5

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