The first videos for Darwin Project were super exciting. The game looked to be a solution to the problem battle royales have of camping and hiding. With a cold weather survival system and a tracking system, Darwin Project aimed to make it easier to find and kill each other. Now that we’ve had a chance to play the closed Alpha, we can see that Darwin Project achieved most of those goals, but at the cost of many other things.

From the start, things weren’t what they seemed. Before a match, players have a chance to customize what items they want to be able to build in matches. These items range from boots to increase speed to coats to protect against the cold and traps to ensnare enemies. This was a bit of a surprise since many of the videos emphasized the competitive tracking aspects of the game and on hunting other players down, but not on the building aspect of the game. By using collectable resources, the items can be built and used, but players very quickly discover that all these items – including special abilities, like teleport – are single uses, meaning to get any of the more fun abilities means farming materials.

In a way, this makes Darwin Project a bit like Fortnite: Battle Royale. Players are dropped into a zone and pitted against one another with resources to build. However, the resources fit certain categories – boots, armor, axe upgrades, etc. – and fighting an opponent with better items, in theory, puts you at a severe disadvantage.

But this is where the game begins to come a bit apart. The developers focused far too heavily onto the crafting side of Darwin Project. As a Battle Royale, the difference between life and death is often seconds long. This is entirely counter-intuitive to a builder game like Minecraft where the fun is in collecting and building. However, Darwin Project’s building is not fun or logical, and the benefit isn’t nearly as obvious as in games like Fornite. A tree produces a single wood, and a single wood can make a single arrow, or a single trap, and once they are used, they are gone, leaving you with nothing.

Even the cooler abilities – like teleportation or leaping huge distances – are all single use expenditures, and trying to plan around having them is largely impossible. This is probably why the vast majority of players simply try to farm wood and build arrows. In fact, across a huge number of matches watched, not a single one involved getting kills with anything other than the axe and arrows, and almost all of the final fights came down to who handled a bow better, since it is really the only weapon of choice, unless you run out of arrows and have to resort to the axe.

Darwin Project’s biggest problem is that it was designed around survival, but the game was marketed as a battle royale where players win by fighting, and fighting isn’t exactly fun in the game. With only melee or bow, it isn’t the most exciting of battles taking place. Additionally, the third-person view coupled with fast paced combat makes firing a bow a bit of a chore, especially when the camera zooms in on a player’s head and hand, essentially obscuring most of the screen and thus the enemy you are trying to snipe.

All in all, Darwin Project still has potential, but it feels a long way off. Scavengers Studio needs to dramatically change their crafting system, not only implementing ratios but making it less onerous. Additionally, it’s hard to imagine the game having mass appeal with a whopping two weapons available. Without additional weapons and without making crafting easier and more fun, Darwin Project doesn’t seem poised to take on any of the Battle Royales champs, but then again, that is what a closed Alpha is all about. We will just have to check in later to find out what has changed.