Let's play Nether: surviving the alien invasion

This post is the third in our Early Access Experiments series, which will look at a bunch of Steam early access games before pitting them head-to-head and asking whether these games are good for consumers, and whether this is a monetization model that should be adopted by more Asian developers.

Nether is a tough game to pin down. It’s an open-world multiplayer FPS/survival game with perma-death much like DayZ. But it has a per-game RPG style skill tree that lets you level up and resets each time you die, something like the per-game skill tree in MOBA games. And it has MMORPG-style global events, and at least the inklings of a single player story. Confused yet? The best way to understand Nether is just to see it in action. Behold!

Like all of these survival games, Nether entails a lot of running around looking for loot, although the decaying urban setting is denser and has more surprises in store than the maps in similar games like Rust and DayZ do right now. And, like all of them, whether you find this entertaining or boring is probably dependent on how easily you can get immersed in games and create your own story, or and how much you’re interested in seeing how other players react in this sort of a no-rules environment.

What Nether has going for it at the moment is that although its map is relatively small, it’s packed full of little details that make it feel real, and even give you some clues as to what the hell happened in its alien — or maybe demon? — infested world. There are also some actual side missions and in-game events like nether surges (swarms of enemies appearing to attack a location) that make it all feel a bit more like a game than its closest competitors. It also seems to have more natural-feeling controls and to be more free of bugs at the moment.

The basic version of the game will run you $19.99, and although the game also appears to have an in-game purchase system, it’s still probably worth you’re money if you’re into this kind of game. You’ll have more fun and put up with fewer bugs in Nether than in other similar games — at least for the time being.

Up next: Spacebase DF-9.

Previous early access games:

Tmall on 11-11 sales day
Let's play Rust: surviving the zombie apocalypse in a dead world
Let's play Starforge Alpha: building your future on an alien planet