After playing Scavengers for a couple of hours, I felt cold. Like, to the bone. I’d frozen to death a few times from an impromptu storm that had caught my teammates and I on our heels. My character, arms wrapped tightly around themselves as I ran as fast as my limited stamina would let me to what I hoped was shelter, simply couldn’t take the cold any more, and died. We were inches away from a fire. Such is the harsh world of this new game.
Scavengers, from Seattle-based studio Midwinter Entertainment, is a PvEvP third-person shooter survival game with elements of battle royale. You are thrust onto the frozen wasteland that is future Earth in a team of three and charged with capturing more datapoints than any other team. You must then exfil the planet on a dropship with those datapoints in tow to win.
Scavengers Early Access trailer Watch on YouTube
You begin with nothing. You then, as the name of the game suggests, scavenge for loot – weapons, items, resources, things you use to kill stuff and things you use to keep yourself alive. Your maximum stamina depletes over the course of a match as you perform actions such as sprinting, but you can regain it by eating food. Other items give you brief respite against the cold. You’ll need them.
Sprinkled on the map are objectives, each presenting an opportunity for more loot and resources, but each with its own associated risk. There may be a Scourge Growth (Scourge are horrible diseased monsters that have emerged on the Earth). There may be an Outlanders outpost (Outlanders are the cannibalistic remnants of human life on Earth). There may be a roaming boss for you to consider. Elsewhere, there are tactical stashes that contain important items, such as ammo, food, health and scrap. Discarded vehicles are salvageable. Strategic sites offer supply drops and the chance to “bank” your datapoints. There’s a lot to consider, a lot to think about before you even get to the point of shooting someone in the face.