State of Decay 3

Despite not starting life on the best foot forward, State of Decay 2 was able to turn the tides of fate around with a slew of meaningful content updates that have made the game better in more than just one way. State of Decay 3 will most likely build upon those foundations, and hopefully create a sequel that’s bigger and better with updated graphics, new enemy types, and a greater focus on survival. There’s no word on when it will be released, but we know that it will come out for Xbox Series X/S and P

Ark 2: Survival Ascended

The original Ark was a smash hit thanks to a surprisingly addictive gameplay loop and interesting creature design, and those merits seem primed to be taken to the next level with Ark 2: Survival Ascended. The sequel also looks to be placing a bigger focus on the narrative side of things with a star-studded cast that includes but is not limited to Vin Diesel, and all that sounds like a very interesting prospect for the game. It comes out for Xbox Series X/S and PC sometime in the near future.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornoby

GSC Game World is hard at work on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, which is being built using Unreal Engine 5. Set against the backdrop of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 thrusts you into a world teeming with all sorts of mutated creatures and soldiers ready to maul you at the smallest of wrong turns. The gameplay and visuals are looking to be of supreme quality, and we are stoked to check it out when it releases on 5 September 2024 for PC and Xbox consoles.

Pacific Drive

Pacific Drive offers a weird but interesting mix of genres. It’s a driving simulator at its core, but it incorporates well-known survival progression mechanics to craft an interesting gameplay loop. It essentially puts you in the driver seat of a station wagon, and you must collect resources and upgrade the vehicle to finally get out of a radioactive zone. Pacific Drive is out now for PS5 and PC.

Road to Vostok

Road to Vostok is all about embarking on a long trek through a war-torn region. It’s a brutal survival game that features realistic shooting mechanics, complex progression trees, and an open world brimming with all sorts of dangers. Add to that permadeath mechanics and the ability to trade items with other players, and Road to Vostok becomes a pretty compelling survival experience for genre fans.

Project Ferocious

OMYOG’s upcoming Project Ferocious feels like the perfect tribute to classic shooters like Turok and Dino Crisis with its focus on hunting dinosaurs and exploring lush jungle environments. The shooting mechanics look fantastic, and the developer promises a dynamic gameplay loop which sounds pretty enticing. It comes out for PC, PS4, and Xbox One sometime in the near future.

Sons of the Forest 1.0

Sons of the Forest serves as an excellent sequel to The Forest, and the bevy of gameplay improvements has made this game better than the original in almost every conceivable way. Sons of the Forest has had some great critical and commercial reception since its release in early access, and version 1.0 is now available on PC. Endlight Games has stated that this release will have plenty of new changes, and while the details of those improvements are shrouded in mystery – it’s definitely worth looking forward to nevertheless.

Frostpunk 2

The original Frostpunk managed to win over the hearts of many survival game fans with its brutal simulation mechanics and tough choices, and those strengths will most likely be taken to the next level with the sequel. In Frostpunk 2, players will have to make tough choices to ensure the city stays warm and safe. You will have to craft controversial laws, keep a check on the several factions that reside within the city, and keep tabs on a ton of other variables to ensure a smooth flow of operations. It all sounds pretty captivating, and we will be checking it out when it comes out sometime in 2024.

The Alters

The Alters tasks you to make your way out of a distant planet after crash landing on its surface, and while that might sound like a generic narrative setup for a survival game – developer 11-bit Studios has quite a bit of tricks up its sleeve that makes this game a lot more interesting than its contemporaries. For starters, you can make clones of yourself and delegate tasks to them which is a pretty interesting concept with a ton of potential. Furthermore, there are elements of decision-making and crafting that all come together to make The Alters a game that’s worth looking out for. It comes out for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S sometime this year.

Light No Fire

Hello Games is no stranger to survival elements, as evidenced by No Man’s Sky, but Light No Fire offers a much larger scale. Announced as the first “real” open world with an Earth-sized planet to explore, players can create buildings and form towns, explore various biomes, uncover resources, explore its origins and maybe tame some wild creatures like dragons to serve as mounts. While the fight for survival is “constant,” there are no restrictions on where you can go. Climb underwater, go deep sea diving or sailing, and much more.

While some may want to jokingly proclaim it as “No Man’s Earth” (somehow missing the slam dunk of “No Man’s Land”), Light No Fire is incredibly ambitious, offering all of these with role-playing elements, various fantasy races, and co-op. There’s no release date, but it’s in development for PC.

ALOFT

Aloft is an upcoming survival sandbox game that takes place on floating islands in the sky. Players can dive in solo or co-op with their friends, and explore the endless skies to take control of the many islands peppered throughout its massive world while fighting the enemies that lie in your way. In addition to exploration, you can majestically fly through the air, collect various resources, and discover ancient ruins in this cozy-looking survival game. Aloft is scheduled to be released in 2024 on PC.

Once Human

Developed by Starry Studio, Once Human puts you on the path to uncovering a massive secret behind a dark corrupting force known as the Stardust. Set in a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by fierce monsters and hordes of undead, Once Human’s gameplay revolves around exploring these desolate ruins and fighting gargantuan bosses while working on building out your character with strong weapons and high-level gear. Once Human also offers co-op options to join forces with friends, which should make it a pretty fun time for survival game enthusiasts. It comes out for PC in Q3 2024.

Rooted

Built using Unreal Engine 5, Rooted promises brutal survival mechanics in a post-apocalyptic world brimming with all manner of dangers like ferocious undead creatures and scarcity of important resources. It presents its post-apocalyptic world in great detail thanks to Unreal Engine 5’s impressive feature set, and that combined with the systemic game design makes it a compelling experience. It comes out for PC sometime in the near future.

Outbreak Island

Outbreak Island is all about a detective who has been stranded on an island and must now solve an overarching mystery surrounding the mystical land. The gameplay juggles between resource gathering, investigating clues scattered throughout the island, and shooting down enemies with a wide array of weapons – all of which sounds like a lot of fun. It will be released for PC sometime in the near future.

Derelicts

Developed by Romain, DERELICTS is set in a future where Earth has been covered by strange radiation – and you must embark on a grand adventure to get to the bottom of this mystery. It’s a simple narrative setup, but DERELICTS manages to impress with its intricate crafting systems that let you come up with all sorts of interesting ideas to delegate tasks like resource building and crafting to custom-built machines. It looks like a game that will be worth sinking your teeth into, and it releases for PC sometime in the near future.

But thanks to AA and indie studios that have recently got a platform to shine with the advent of Steam Early Access, such kinds of games have started to resurface again. We recently took a look at Compound Fracture, and now we are shifting our attention towards Project Ferocious which seems to be hitting all the right notes when it comes to action games featuring these fierce predators. So, it’s finally the time to ask the question – what the hell is actually Project Ferocious?

Project Ferocious is an action-adventure game that’s currently in development at a small studio named OMYOG, and this is the studio’s debut title. While the studio is certainly pretty small when compared to AAA standards, the game has definitely impressed us with its scope, mechanics, and the general level of polish in everything that it’s trying to do.

Project Ferocious is set against the backdrop of a secret island that’s filled with all kinds of horrors ranging from monsters to dinosaurs and others. You see, we assume the role of an unnamed mercenary who has been tasked to investigate a distress call from someone out in the wild. But the catch is that there’s supposed to be no landmass or civilization at the origin point of the signal, and naturally we find ourselves in this magical place.

Who sent that distress signal in the first place and what secrets these lands hold are the first questions that come to mind when thinking about this narrative premise, and it seems rather obvious that the story will lean towards answering these and building a coherent narrative around it all. Sure, it’s not something that we haven’t seen in games of this ilk, but OMYOG should definitely try to craft something that manages to retain the player’s interest for the vast majority of the story’s runtime.

But most players wouldn’t be jumping into this game for the story, right? So it’s great that OMYOG recognizes this as well. In the case of action games like Project Ferocious, gameplay is the king – and the developer seems to have brought its A-game to the field when it comes to the moment-to-moment stuff which looks excellent. You are a highly trained mercenary capable of overcoming all odds against a wide variety of opposition, and that’s what you will be doing most of your time during your stay at the tropical place of death and despair.

The combat system itself seems to be a mechanically sound one, and everything from proper bullet recoil to enemy feedback to punchy sound effects really make it feel lifelike and genuine. Enemies will fall to the ground with weight behind those movements, bullets and gunshots leave visible traces of impact on every terrain, and explosions constantly pepper the battlefield as you try to dance around your enemies and race for cover all while chipping away at the health bar. The player is meant to be aggressive in their tactics, and fast movement speed and recharging health bars ensure that you are always leaned towards that particular style of play.

Then there are the enemies, which as mentioned before – are nimble and demand quick thinking and changing tactics on the fly to overcome the toughest encounters. Project Ferocious features plenty of enemy types ranging from enemy foot soldiers to sharks to raptors and others, and they are obviously very different from each other in form and function. For instance, you might be better off with an automatic shotgun if you are dealing with a raptor who keeps chasing you around the battlefield, but you might want to switch weapons to a submachine gun and engage from a distance when up against hordes of enemies with ranged artillery.

Exploration also seems to be a core component of Project Ferocious’ design pillars, and the developer has already confirmed that you will have access to varied equipment to clamber up cliffs and dive underwater and explore every nook and cranny of this island and its surrounding. At best, we may be in for a sandbox styled experience where the freedom of exploration opens up new tactics for attacks and ambushes – and we are certainly hoping that it turns out like that. Of course, it could also be a platformer-styled implementation where you get new gear as you progress through the story – and that allows you to explore other areas and uncover new secrets and loot that make you stronger.

Either way, it all sounds really promising – and we can’t wait to scour these lands when we finally get the game in our hands. Furthermore, you will even have access to vehicles like motorboats that allow you to cover huge distances in a relatively short span of time. Much like the combat system that we discussed earlier, OMYOG has certainly paid the required attention to exploration – and hopefully, it would be able to shine through in the final release.

Coming over to the presentation side of things, Project Ferocious looks really great. The biggest surprise is definitely the intense atmosphere that the developer has managed to build with its choice of dark colors and a cloudy skybox. Of course, great art direction wouldn’t amount to much if the technology powering it all isn’t on an equal plane. But thankfully, Project Ferocious delivers the goods in that regard as well – and we get to see high resolution textures on terrain, volumetric fog, destructible environments and high-quality depth of field which combine to make the presentation pristine and realistic. It’s a visual feast for the eyes, and surprisingly – it’s all being achieved on the Unity Engine which is actually the best choice for developers with smaller budgets and manpower.

Finally, there’s the question of its release date – and unsurprisingly, Project Ferocious is still some ways from its release. Details around release dates are paper thin at the moment, but from the looks of it – development seems to be chugging along at a fine pace. OMYOG has been working on the game for a couple of years now, and the community is kept in the loop with regular updates over on the game’s social media handles. If we were to take a guess, Project Ferocious would be out before 2024 – but the game could definitely slip out of that range, so best keep those expectations in check.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Horizon Forbidden West

Guerilla Games’ upcoming Horizon Forbidden West will continue the tale of series protagonist Aloy as she ventures forth to the Forbidden West with the goal of clearing the corruption spread by H.A.D.E.S. Much like Zero Dawn, players will be fighting a bevy of dangerous machines, with some clearly being modeled after dinosaurs such as the likes of Thunderjaw, Stormbirds, Watchers, and many more. While it isn’t confirmed how many of those will be returning from the original, it’s likely that at least a few will make the cut, and a whole bunch of new creatures would be roaming the landscapes.

FAITH OF DANSCHANT: HEREAFTER

Chinese developer developer Beijing Joyfun recently unveiled its action RPG Faith of Danschant: Hereafter with a lengthy gameplay debut, and honestly, it looks really interesting. Inspired by Chinese mythology, it’s the sequel to 2017’s Faith of Danschant, and the gameplay trailer it debuted with was quite packed. Slick, action-packed combat, large-scale fights against mythical beasts, parkour-heavy traversal- it’s got all the elements in place to deliver a promising package.