PROJECT WINTER

If you want an unprotected multiplayer-based survival game, there is the Project Winter title that currently offers a pre-release version. And it's not a blank, where a lot of things aren't working or missing. Already at this stage, you can expect a comprehensive survival battle experience where you have to cope with harsh conditions, but also treacherous players.

Project Winter, as it is quite clear from the title, takes place in the winter, a really bang, which weakens you and if you do not do everything necessary, eventually kills. You won't be alone in it, each game can have eight players, but it can be started with less. Naoko is one party that should work together to get everyone out of the inhospitable wilderness. In fact, there are also a few traitors among the survivors whose job is to harm others and defeat the escape plan. Who are the marauders will decide the game at the beginning. The saboteurs know each other, but the other players have no idea who the black sheep are between them. Until they reveal themselves.

Ordinary survivors are busy trying to prepare for rescue and eventually escape to safety. Although developers emphasize that cooperation is important, it is not so obvious in practice, and you can do it even if you do not respect others. However, coordinating teammates' activities significantly increases the chances of survival and early evacuation. They all start in a wooden log that is the main refuge and a place where everything can be made. Here you will find a kitchen where you can cook meat (ultimately human), process fruits, make a first aid kit or burn vodka. There is a workshop table next to it, where various tools, components, fuel and weapons can be made. And near the fireplace chest where the survivors accumulate common property and raw materials. Those, of course, have to look outside.

Your character has a given level of life, which is also reduced by the effects of cold and hunger. So you have to keep warming up in the rump or other building or at the outbreak that you set up or find out there and put the wood there. You get food by collecting and optimally cooking berries from bushes and also by hunting. Reindeer run around, but wolves and a bear that is quite dangerous can persecute and kill you. It is best to hunt them after making or finding a shotgun or submachine gun.

In the snowy land you collect wood and ore. You can find isolated pieces on the ground or shade trees and mine when you find a bearing. It can also be done with bare hands, but it is faster with an ax and a pick. But you also need raw materials to produce such tools, so you must also consult without aids at first. However, if you work with other survivors, you will quickly get to the crates with equipment in the stores and nearby buildings. However, you only open these by pressing two or more activating switches at the same time. This is how the game wants you to lead to teamwork.

But the game requires even more from you. You have given the main challenges that the survivors have to fulfill in order to have a rescue chance. Usually it is to find and repair a communication station, radio tower or other important objects that will allow you to call for help and, in the final phase, to prepare for evacuation. This means providing a landing area or other pickup point, a central radio transmitter announcement, and finally arriving at a designated location. There you will find a crawler, a helicopter or other means of getting to safety. You can leave yourself, but if you get more at once, you'll get a bonus score.

With other survivors, you can communicate with text messages and chat emotions, but if you find or make the transmitters of the same color, you can comfortably understand it with your voice. This is how you can agree on who to do, coordinate your activities, and also alert you to a traitor who reveals or even wants to kill you.

Usually, the wizards are two and initially they should be inconspicuous because they don't have great chances against others. They start just as they do with their bare hands. Although not really, because they are immediately equipped with radios to coordinate their crimes without problems. These saboteurs have several advantages. They have attributes at a higher level and can at any time and individually open special boxes scattered around and thrown away from the plane and also use shifters to move to another location.

The aim of the marauders is to sabotage and thus slow down the work of other survivors so that they do not evacuate to the arrival of the deadly snowstorm. But they can do it more vigorously and innocent survivors simply kill them. They do not need to collect parts for repair, but from the raw materials they most often produce weapons and non-bats in several steps to shoot or, for example, injure them with refined bear traps. However, the survivors are naturally defending, so it is good to do as little as possible and kill them when there are no more people. Otherwise, the other party succeeds and everyone can turn into a spirit-observer after death.

In addition to the main goal, however, each player also has his or her personal, smaller mission, which may or may not be fulfilled for extra points. He learns to study a blackboard with a map of the area before the log. It may be the revival of four survivors or, conversely, the successful expulsion of one of them from the log. This can be achieved by a secret ballot box, but at least two other voices are needed. The game ends when all players are evacuated or dead, either by their own efforts or after the final element of the elements.

Before the next game you can adjust the look of your character - it can be a woman or a man, fat, poor, with a hat, scarf, coat, backpack and accessories of different colors. You can also unlock the accessories by buying chests for the game menu, but it is worthwhile investing in character development. For points earned by successful play in previous games, you can unlock bonuses for the traitor or survivor by the focus you are inclined to (explorer, prospector, survivalist, helper). You can then get cosmetic but also useful accessories, such as a filter mask, a hammer, a larger backpack, and a sniper rifle in the case of a traitor.

So far it is fine and already complex enough at this stage. Above all, playing for a traitor is fun because you sabotage and massacre the surrounding survivors and don't have to deal with anything else. Those who are trying to save have something more complicated. While activities are not complex, finding key points where something needs to be corrected or done is quite annoying. In fact, the terrain is badly orientated and you don't even have a map, just a scheme that is little useful. Finding a station in a randomly generated neighborhood will sometimes take you a while, sometimes even tens of minutes. But at least to the log you are guided by orientation tables.

Project Winter is an interesting multiplayer survival, but it is questionable whether it eventually succeeds. When testing the game, where the selection of the game is still fast, the entire Eight was sometimes picked up without a long wait, at other times we stood in the lobby and waited in vain for other participants. There is no solo mode or bots who will be surprised and will probably not change, so it will be very important how big the community will be. And let's face it, this is not a game for everyone, although it is imaginative and it is not a dozen title. Anyway, Project Winter is still at the beginning of its journey and we hope it will unload some trumps and not freeze.