Brutal Nature

Games like Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft managed to inspire a large number of spin-offs and clones, all of which either wanted a piece of the glory or aimed to provide the players with a complete alternative. However, the two titles mentioned earlier are still immensely popular and very few people actually find something better.

Brutal Nature is a first-person survival game played in multiplayer which allows you to  shape your own world and try to survive its perils, while also interacting with people from all over the world. Hence, you are free to do almost anything you want, including build your own mine/fortress, craft a variety of weapons, hunt animals, or just keep moving and take the days as they come.

The biggest innovation of the game is not in the freedom it offers you, because plenty of other titles out there already do this. Instead, it’s the voxel-based engine that should be the main attraction, because it features some very impressive capabilities that can turn out to be everything that’s needed for the ultimate survival game on the market.

Since the game world is filled with a variety of resources that can be extracted and mined from the ground, it is only natural that you can use them for something else. Thus, there are hundreds of items that can be crafted using the gathered resources, although it might take some time to get used to the interface. Not only that, but there are many different gun models to choose from as well, which come in handy whenever you have to deal with the wildlife.

The graphic quality is quite decent, especially when it comes to texture resolution and the excellent voxel terrain deformation. However, the shadows are missing and there are many bugs that still need to be fixed, like the water that suddenly disappears once you submerge under the surface. Other than that, it’s clear that the game has potential, as long as the developers keep at it.

In the end, Brutal Nature is definitely a game to keep an eye on, because it can turn out to be revolutionary if it plays its cards right. However, a lot of things can go wrong as well, with the most obvious being the lack of players and the high system requirements of the DX11-powered engine, which already causes a lot of lag and frame drops.