Few settings have captured the imaginations of game developers and players like Chernobyl, the site of a reactor explosion in 1986 that created one of the world's few actual nuclear wastelands. The legendary Exclusion Zone - now, would you believe, something of a tourist attraction - has provided the stage for countless virtual conflicts and survival stories. There are the indirect recreations, such as Big Robot's bleached starship graveyard The Signal From Tölva, or the Erangel island map from PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds - an abandoned Soviet testing facilty in which the wanderer is forced towards rather than away from the centre by an ever-encroaching sea of blue energy. And there are truer-to-life portrayals like Call of Duty 4's "All Ghillied Up" mission or GSC World's STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, which gives you the run of an Exclusion Zone in which space-time is starting to fall apart like overcooked pasta.
Developed by former GSC World staff and building on the lessons of middling free-to-player shooter Survarium, Vostok's Fear the Wolves is an attempt to bring STALKER and PUBG together - a battle royale shooter that sounds like and probably is a rather opportunistic bit of genre-splicing, but which does entertain some rather exotic ideas. The project began life in September 2017, hence the current absence of screens or footage, and is slated for initial release this year on Xbox One, PS4 and PC. Developed using Unreal Engine 4, it sets you and 99 other players loose on a 25 square kilometre chunk of Chernobyl, surrounded by a radiation cloud that slowly contracts, shrinking the map. Each player starts with nothing and must scrounge weapons, protective gear, vehicles and mods such as scopes and grips in a bid to be the last person standing.
So far, so PUBG, but the devils are in the detail. Most obviously, Fear the Wolves is first-person rather than third-person, and studio co-founder Oleg Yavorski says it will aim for "more of a hardcore feel" than its primary influence, "with realistic gunfights and multiple smaller elements that players will need to master", including high-fidelity bullet physics. In itself, the relatively cramped viewpoint should oblige a more tentative approach to recon and a greater emphasis on stealth, though matches are still expected to last a fairly brisk 20-45 minutes, beginning at dawn and ending in darkness.
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