2014’s been the year of the survival game. The success of the DayZ mod spurred a long line of developers into making their own survivalist’s nightmare. They all have a few things in common – finding sustenance, shelter, and shooting strangers. Nowhere near enough of them have dinosaurs.
Thank goodness then that theHunter: Primal has stomped onto Steam. And from the makers of Just Cause, too.
The Hunter: Primal drops you on a 24km² island with 15 other players and limited supplies. You’re going to need to find guns, protective clothing, and the supplies you’ll need to survive this deadly land. It’s not just dinosaurs you need to look out for but poisonous plants, starvation, dehydration, and other players.
Death in Primal sees you drop all your items and, unless you can get back to your body quickly, they’ll be lost to wild animals.
You may have heard of TheHunter. It’s a free-to-play game from Expansive Worlds, a subsidiary of Just Cause-developer Avalanche Studios. TheHunter: Primal is the premium edition that strips out the microtransactions and beefs up your control of servers.
The Early Access build already has three dinosaur species to hunt and be hunted by – the triceratops, utahraptor, and the T-rex. They all offer up a challenge to take down. The triceratops is a massive creature with a huge amount of health and it can become very aggressive when threatened. The raptors will actively hunt you, communicating to one another as part of a pack. The T-rex? Well, it’s a T-rex.
You’re not going after these creatures with sticks and stones. Primal’s launched with a slew of weapons for fans of Jurassic Park – 12 GA Crowd Control Shotgun, .700 Double Rifle, and a .308 Marksman Rifle.
There’s also tools to track and call dinosaurs, letting you lead them into traps.
Over the course of Early Access, Expansive Worlds hope to release two more dinosaur species, more weapons, in-game currency to be used in a store, and “elaborated PvP mechanics and support for team based gameplay.”