Dead Hunting – Hands-on Preview

I want to start by saying that everything within this preview pertains to an unfinished build of the game, and are not my final opinions on the project.

Dead Hunting features a very familiar premise: A lone survivor caught in a struggle for survival during a zombie outbreak. It is a premise that we are all familiar with and somehow can not seem to get enough of. This time around, our protagonist is a uniformed physician in the middle of a Vietnamese jungle that must scrounge around for ammunition, food, and water, all while surviving the threat of now-zombified locals that wish to munch on tasty flesh.

And that is all we really have to go by – for now at least. And that quick little backstory pretty much sums up what will be occurring within this first-person survivor, but with a bit more emphasis on the whole searching for food and water part. That is what I have spent the majority of my time doing, and I have spent a solid fifteen-hours plus with this build. Not once have I died by zombie; all of my deaths have been due to thirst or hunger. This made my biggest threat a lack of food or liquid. I never concerned myself with the zombies as they were, sadly, sparse and only around in areas with buildings. Not once when running through stretches of trees and narrow bridges did I ever get ambushed.

Knowing where to expect your enemies pulls out some of the tension and surprise, and always made me feel as though I had the upper hand; and I usually always did. Even with melee weapons employed, I rarely took damage from the zombies, and the only downfall from the melee was not an increase in threat, but the mere fact that it took longer to kill my foes.

You’re thrown right into the middle of a gigantic area that just begs to be explored, with various buildings and small villages scattered about, even housing a giant portal that looks as if it were pulled straight from a fantasy game. It is a world teeming with intriguing possibilities, and nearly every structure that is come across incites the urge to plunder; but sadly, as of this build, there just isn’t much to see.

The game does run well and controls well, especially for an Alpha. Not once did the controls ever feel cumbersome, and blasting zombies in the head was always a fluidly controlled act. Any bugs that popped up were Alpha norms, such as a wall or two that could be walked through, and minor collision problems here and there – mainly when traversing from one floor to the next within a building.

I do have faith that all of these things will be remedied by the time of the game’s final build, which is currently set to be comleted sometime in September. I do feel that the Alpha build of this game is not a good representative of the developer’s overall idea and passion, and his passion towards this game is what gives me hope for later builds that come along. With the right tweaks, this could be an intense game of survival, not just against hunger and thirst, but against the enemies that want to devour you as well.

There is potential here, and Dead Hunting is definitely a game I will continue to keep my eye on. I have voted for it on Greenlight – and you can too – and I eagerly await the next major update to this title, hoping it will wow me with the true vision the developer has for this game.