Nether Preview

Nether is not a typical survival game. Well, it is, but not in the ways you expect.

Whenever an idea is a runaway success, it’s inevitable that others will try to emulate it in some way, shape or form. Until a few years ago survival games were a pretty niche product, but with the mainstream success of Day-Z certain tropes began to be formed and copies of it became a suddenly marketable product.

And the copies came. Some took a combat/gun based approach to the modern multi-player survival/horror genre, running from nasties around a desolate world, whilst others preferred to add creative elements to the mix. Now Nether doesn’t completely wander from the tried and tested formula, but it has two big things going for it to separate it from it’s rivals.

As lonely and desperate as an open, desolate landscape can feel, it’s never really hard to know if an enemy or potential friend is approaching. The first thing Nether stands out for is it’s environment. Set in a destroyed city full of dis-used buildings, it’s claustrophobic, and painfully so. You could be less than five metres from a creature or another player on the other side of a wall…and you’d never know. The walls close in as you search through buildings for essential supplies and parts to build weapons with. Every turn could have a silent enemy around it, and every wall could conceal a potential friend or foe.

It’s scarier than it’s predecessors because of the sheer volume of buildings and the vertical component. You’re not just worried about potential snipers and hordes of zombies in the distance. They could be above you, below you, or suddenly behind you, and that’s terrifying.

The second thing which really excites me about Nether is the lack of Zombies. In their place; teleporting mutant creatures, which are genuinely scary. There are currently eight creatures in the game, each with their own distinct abilities, but the key component of the Nethers is that many of them can teleport around you. Well designed and interesting, they really blow traditional monsters out of the water whilst remaining scary.

Plonked down in the city, your only aim is to survive. But how? You need to avoid the monsters whilst hunting for nutrition amidst the wreckage, and luckily you aren’t alone.

Dedicated safe-zones provide a place to hide from the destruction, construct weapons and sell your collected wares. Whilst they can sometimes be invaded, it’s a good place to find companions to aid you in your collection quest, and it’s nice to have a central location to amass.

Another tool in your arsenal is the ability to level up and gain new abilities to enhance your combat skills and movement. It’s good to see such elements merged into the concept, giving a sense of real upward progression.

As much as I enjoyed my time with Nether, certain things were constant annoyances.

Firstly, enemy placement. Whilst searching an area (and accidentally going around in circles), I repeatedly found the same enemy in the same place. That’s either a static spawn point or a predictable randomly generated one, but it takes some of the tension out of the game when you expect it to always be there, so I would hope it would change before it leaves early-access.

Secondly I really couldn’t get on with the graphics. Whilst as a whole the game isn’t ugly, generally the city’s textures are pretty low resolution, even when on highest settings on a high-end graphics card. The same can be said in terms of the actual menus, which aren’t exactly polished, but again, hopefully these will improve at full release.

All in all Nether has a lot of promise. With the future implementation of Community tribes and other multi-player elements to look forward to, I think it could end up as a strong, distinctive side-evolution of the genre, putting horror over action.

A brilliant concept, just with a few execution issues. Here’s to hoping it ends up as the success it deserves to be.