PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds may have popularised the genre inspired by the Japanese movie, but it’s not the only battle royale game pitting players against each other in desperate fights to the death. Below are 11 games, modes and mods that you should check out if you can’t get enough of hunting your fellow man.

GAMES

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds

Let’s get the current top dog out of the way first, shall we? PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG, is still in Early Access, but it’s already swallowed up the lives of millions of players. In each match, 100 survivors are air dropped into a bucolic Russian island, seemingly abandoned during or just after the Soviet era. It’s a huge place, but the play area is always shrinking, forcing players to race towards safety on foot or using cars, bikes and boats, all while trying to murder each other with a wide range of guns and melee weapons. It’s a game filled with long moments of quiet tension, punctuated by chaotic, nerve-racking battles.

H1Z1: King of the Kill

Another Early Access game, H1Z1: King of the Kill was spun out of Daybreak’s zombie survival game. The survival aspect became its own separate game, Just Survive, while the more competitive, PvP side of things became King of the Kill. Frenetic and fast-paced, it’s more of an arena shooter than a game like PUBG, so you won’t have to wait long to get into a gunfight. Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene was also a consultant on H1Z1 before making Battlegrounds.

Ark: Survival of the Fittest

Like H1Z1, Ark: Survival of the Fittest is another arena-style battle royale game, and is similarly a spin-off. Its hook, not surprisingly given its progenitor, is that there are dinosaurs and monsters to watch out for, as well as 71 human adversaries potentially hunting you down. Other elements from Survival Evolved have made it in, too, including riding and taming creatures, tribes and traps. Unfortunately, it’s struggled to retain its playerbase in the face of PUBG.

The Culling

If you prefer battle royales of the more intimate variety, there’s The Culling and its 8-player and 16-player blood-soaked arenas. Though it’s fast-paced, there’s still time to craft equipment and set traps. The central conceit is a big draw, too, set as the game is in a crazed game show for sadists. It’s been in Early Access since March 2016, and while it was popular initially, it looks like player numbers might be on the wane.

Last Man Standing

Budget PUBG is probably the clearest way to describe Last Man Standing. It’s set on an island with 100 players trying to kill each other, the play area is a big circle that shrinks over time, mods can be scavenged and attached to guns, it’s got loot crates—there’s a long list of similarities, but Last Man Standing is free. It’s not quite as polished as its premium counterpart, however.

GAME MODES

GTA Online, Motor Wars

GTA Online recently got a competitive mode called Motor Wars, which has some similarities to popular battle royale games: a shrinking kill box, arriving from the sky, then finding the best weapons possible on the ground. The key difference is that it's more focused around vehicle combat, and all the cars are marked on the map, as well as the players driving them. The shrinking kill space provides a similar amount of tension, though, and there's tons more potential in building on the idea, given the size of the map they've got to play with. Sam had fun with it, even though it has some flaws.

Fortnite

Epic has announced a new battle royale mode for their base-building romp, Fortnite. It’s due out this month and will see up to 100 players duking it out until there’s only one left. The mode was put together by Epic’s Unreal Tournament team, who were busy experimenting while Fortnite was in development. The scavenging and building from the game’s regular mode will also feature in this new one, so you’ll be able to create bases and fortifications to hole up in while you wait for everyone else to die. They’ll probably be doing the same, mind you.

Unturned

Unturned is a blocky, free-to-play zombie survival game, but it’s also got a battle royale arena mode. Players are spawned at random points on the map and must hunt each other down while a barrier closes in, damaging those outside it. It’s as straightforward as a battle royale can be, but there’s one odd wrinkle: you can’t damage people with your fists, so you’d better get a weapon as quickly as you can.

MODS

PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale in Arma 2, Arma 3

Before PUBG, Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene created DayZ: Battle Royale, an offshoot of the original DayZ mod for Arma 2, inspired by the Japanese film. When players started leaving DayZ for the standalone Early Access version, Greene switched to developing Battle Royale in Arma 3. Later, it was licensed to Daybreak for H1Z1 and became the foundation for King of the Kill. A lot of Battlegrounds’ features started in PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale, and Arma 3’s realistic aesthetic isn’t far of PUBG’s.

Rust: Battle Royale

Rust: Battle Royale is an unofficial mode for Facepunch Studio’s survival game, made by Intoxicated Gaming. Inspired by the Arma 3 Battle Royale mod, it combines the brutality of Rust—you even begin naked—with the race to be the final person left alive. All the survival and crafting elements have been torn out, with the focus being entirely on gearing up and murdering your fellow players in a map that becomes smaller and smaller as bombs start to fall.

Garry's Mod Battle Royale

Created last year, this Garry’s Mod game mode, like so many in this list, owes its creation to the Arma 3 mod, being a lightweight recreation of it designed by IC4RO so they could play it with their friends. Since then, however, it’s become popular, no doubt helped by the fact that Garry’s Mod is considerably cheaper than Arma 3 or Battlegrounds. 

Unturned, a free-to-play zombie survival game, is more popular than Rust and DayZ combined. Currently sitting as the 16th most-played game on Steam with 28,000 players, it's more popular than a lot of things. When I bring this up to Nelson Sexton, Unturned's sole creator who began working on the game at just 16-years-old, he pauses a moment and then awkwardly says "thanks" like I just paid him a compliment. I think even he is having a hard time comprehending Unturned's success.

"It was just a hobby that I originally posted on my website, but when I did a revamp for version 2 I thought, maybe I can get this on Steam through Greenlight?" Nelson says. "I used to come home from school and take a look at Steam to see if it did. The first patch didn’t get through, but the next patch did and there was a big celebration. I think we had pizza that night as a celebration dinner. It’s crazy. I feel so lucky."

Born in Cowtown 

Nelson and I are sitting in a coffee shop on the outskirts of Calgary, Alberta, the city we both share. Calgary is a city with a lot of things—hot-to-trot oil and gas executives, people who own a pair of cowboy boots they only wear once a year, and the highest amount of 4x4 trucks in Canada per capita. It's like Texas, if Texans apologized more and wouldn't lose their shit over a few measly feet of snow. But Calgary isn't a place for game developers, so the idea that one of the most popular games of the last few years originated from a city best known for an outdoor show so ubiquitous with alcohol poisoning that Jugo Juice sells hangover smoothies is very amusing to me.

Last month, on its third anniversary since entering Early Access, Unturned finally released. It seemed like a good time to meet Nelson and ask him how he felt about telling a stranger his life story.

"Everything is still pretty normal for me," Nelson tells me over coffee. He says the success of Unturned hasn't really bled into his life in any dramatic way. He drives a Honda, has a girlfriend, and lives at home with his dad. Most times, his success is felt indirectly. "My girlfriend’s mom is a teacher and she tells her students that she knows the creator of Unturned and her students get excited," he laughs. "I love hearing those kinds of stories."

Unturned is undoubtedly popular with a younger generation of players. Conceived off the back of Nelson's experience building games using Roblox, its simple, blocky aesthetic feels more like Minecraft than DayZ. But it's still a zombie survival game at its core.

Nelson began making games when he was only nine. After attending a summer camp at our local university where he got to mess around with GameMaker, he convinced his dad to shell out the cash for it. "He had to sign up for a Paypal account and was really unsure about it because it was so new," Nelson laughs.

Eventually he upgraded to making games in Roblox before some members of that community got him programming in Java and then, finally, C#—the language used by the Unity engine. Unturned was never meant to be a commercial game, Nelson tells me. It just seemed natural that if he made something, he should share it with people. Growing up in tightly knit communities like Roblox, getting Unturned on Greenlight seemed like an obvious thing to do.

And then Unturned took off.

I feel really lucky to have gotten on Steam when I did ... there s so many more games coming out and it's impossible to get noticed.

Three years ago, Unturned hit its all-time peak at 62,000 players just months after launching on Greenlight. Nelson says he owes it all to a few YouTubers who started playing it on their channels. Beyond word of mouth, Nelson has barely invested anything into traditional marketing. He won the indie game lottery, and he knows it. "I feel really lucky to have gotten on Steam when I did, as opposed to now when there’s so many more games coming out and it's impossible to get noticed," he says.

Once Unturned had a thriving community of players, Nelson became trapped in the precarious circumstance of having to juggle school, being a teenager, and managing a community larger than every small town scattered around Calgary's city borders combined. "During school, I’d try and do my homework in other classes," Nelson says. "I’d finish math class really fast so I could do my English homework. I was always trying to cram as much work into school time when I had to be there so at home I could work on Unturned. I’d get home and work until dinner and then work until I had to go to bed."

I point out what an astonishing amount of discipline that takes for someone who is only a teenager and ask how he made time for being a kid. "I’m not the most social person," he responds. "I was able to do things like talking with friends online while working on the game."

I was always trying to cram as much work into school time when I had to be there so at home I could work on Unturned.

That dedication paid off. During its time in Early Access, he developed around 260 updates, far exceeding the number of features Nelson had originally promised. New maps, vehicles, tons of new weapons, weather effects—the list dwarfs the features of other survival games and that's without counting the thriving Workshop community that creates their own maps and mods.

But for Nelson, his unending thirst to continue developing Unturned isn't motivated by much more than a desire to bring to life whatever he thinks is cool. "One of the nice things about Unturned is I can find it a whole bunch of different things from other games I like," he tells me. "There is kind of the core of survival games, but then I can bring in things from other games. Like, I played World of Warcraft for a number of months so I brought in NPCs to Unturned."

Dodging the Early Access hate 

I ask Nelson how he managed to skirt the negative reception that seems to haunt other Early Access survival games and he shrugs. Unturned currently has 91 percent positive reviews on Steam, where other popular games like Ark can barely keep above 50. "With Early Access, there’s a lot less trust in it. At first it seemed more curated and the games were seen as trustworthy, but I think there’s some really unfair hate lumped on Early Access."

I suspect a lot of it has to do with Nelson himself. Since he's the only person working on Unturned, he interacts with his community directly. He tells me that he gets some hate mail here and there, but by and large everyone is very understanding and appreciative of the work he's doing. Unturned has also avoided the drama that seems to constantly haunt its peers. No sudden price hikes, no paid DLC expansions, no splitting the game in half and selling off its two parts. 

Looking into his patch notes, many are appended with intimate details that offer a window into his life. "Next week on the 3rd I'm off to Toronto to look at apartments for rent, and then several days later leaving to Italy for a holiday," he writes in his most recent update. "I'll be getting back home on the 22nd. I'm excited—this is my first vacation since I started work on Unturned 2.0!"

It's obvious that his candor pays off: "Have fun on your vacation, Nelson! It's good to take a break and relax, don't feel obligated to put out updates if you feel you need to chill for a bit," reads one of the more recent comments, with many more echoing the same sentiment.

I originally added the [paid] gold upgrade because new games were coming out and I wanted the money to buy them.

I ask Nelson about it and he shrugs again, saying that there's no particular PR or marketing strategy. He just talks to his players the only way that feels natural to him. He treats them like humans and they respond in kind. "I originally added the [paid] gold upgrade because new games were coming out and I wanted the money to buy them," he says a little sheepishly. "As soon as I could afford videogames, I wasn't worried about money." 

Turning forward 

Even though Nelson isn't exposed the drama that can sometimes come with being a big developer, Unturned has made him enough money to live on his own terms. Later this month, he plans to move with his girlfriend to Toronto so she can attend university. It's a big move and the first time either will have lived on their own—let alone together. But at least he won't have to fret about finding a job. "It’s definitely going to be a big step, but it's nice not to be too worried about money," he says. "Finding a place, sorting out all the new things of living together and on our own will be a lot. I’m very excited."

The change in scenery won't impact Nelson's approach to updating Unturned however. He tells me that he has a great deal of ideas left and an infinite checklist of things he wants to improve. "One decision I'm trying to make around now is trying to figure out when and how the right way to do version 4 is. Unturned has been in version 3 for the last three years, so it's lasted quite a while. But some of the earlier decisions are coming back to haunt me."

He tells me that, following some talks with developers at GDC, he's considering rebuilding Unturned from scratch using Unreal 4. "It's crazy to think I might spend another four years rebuilding Unturned again, way better than it is right now," he says and pauses to consider the monumental effort. "But there's not really another game I want to make. There's just a bunch of improvements I want to make to Unturned."

And part of that is because Unturned is still the hobby that Nelson started when he was 16. Unturned is as much a living chronology of Nelson's growth as a developer as it is a game. It's a canvas covered in eraser marks where he drew a line, decided he hated it, and started over.

"I'm very confident that I can always do better and improve," he says. "I think it is unlikely that whatever game I make next will be as successful or get as much traction on Steam. Unturned is probably the most popular game I'll ever make, and if I make a sequel or version 4, the core audience will transition and enjoy it. And as long as they're still there, I'll be happy. It doesn't matter to me too much whether it's 30 million players or a few thousand."

Unturned is a sandbox zombie survival sim. Looking at it scrolling through Steam, it seems like any other Minecraft clone. What makes Unturned interesting is its popularity. With over 219,000 reviews on Steam, 92% of which are positive, and a huge player base it s become an odd sensation.

What you can t help but notice first is the way it looks. A bit like Minecraft drawn on Microsoft Paint; it s not going to win any awards for graphical prowess. Every now and again I saw a moment and got a glimpse of an odd kind of beauty in its chunky primary colours. For the most part however, you have to ignore the strange cuboid potatoes and basic houses.

The controls are equally clumsy. I found myself pressing buttons multiple times to get the desired result, and fiddling with sliders and switches on the menus that seemed to do nothing. The UI and inventory system are not intuitive. You ll need great eyesight to make out the tiny writing informing you about equipment you collect. It felt unnecessarily cluttered which led to confusion as to where things were meant to go and how stuff was equipped. It s like the game is trying to make up for the simple graphics with a complex menu, which does not work.

The survival elements of the game are the same as a dozen of its predecessors. There s nothing truly original here, it has borrowed big parts from games like DayZ. However, although not original, it is all still serviceable. There are a number of things you need to keep an eye on health, stamina, hunger, thirst etc. You eat what you can salvage or grow, you drink what water you can find (preferably not dirty) and you try not to be mauled too severely by zombies. The maps are littered with settlements that hide the best loot, however, zombies tend to congregate there.

There are four main maps in single player with varying sizes and difficulties based on the environment. PEI, best for beginners; zombie-heavy Washington; the freezing Yukon best for experienced players; and the recently-added huge and varied Russia. Although the differences in environment are mainly found in the colouring, little touches such as a zombie in a restaurant dressed as a chef or a lumberjack zombie in Yukon made me smile. The ability to craft items and build shelter enable you to create a stable home-base, but you have to be prepared to defend your lowly homestead.

While many people unfamiliar with survival games may be put off with the pressure and hours of sneaking about before you get a weapon or dog food to eat, Unturned is far more accessible than the likes of DayZ. After an hour in single player you ll probably have a decent weapon, a backpack full of supplies and maybe even a vehicle to zoom about in. Unturned isn t as stressful as other survival games with loot being more readily available and zombies easy to sneak past. It is refreshing to head off into an unknown map safe in the knowledge that you have a rucksack filled to the brim with canned food and an axe. This isn t to say that Unturned is boringly easy. In large quantities the zombies quickly become a formidable force. The weather also plays a part in your survival as maps like the Yukon with their snowy terrain require you to shelter or build a fire so you don t freeze to death. None of this is revolutionary. The real popularity of the game doesn t lie in the survival mechanics, or the aesthetic. Unturned has amassed a following for two main reasons- the multiplayer and the price.

While single player is a decent way to while away a few hours most people seem to sink the most time into playing online. Unturned features both PvP and cooperative play. To new players PvP is baffling. I started in a house with a bunch of strangers, some of them were naked and I was also naked it was like a house party everyone wants to forget. After a bit you re warped to a small map and you will probably be mowed down pretty quickly. Although a large engaged community is a great boon, it also means to a newcomer entering this world on your own it s impenetrable. After being destroyed in PvP I decided to see if I would fare better in a more supportive environment. If you had a bunch of friends all playing together, this is where Unturned really shines.

The availability of Unturned is the crux of its popularity. It will run on most PCs and it s free to play, making it a great one that all your friends can pop in for a bit of co-op. The freedom that Unturned allows the online players means that a complex world has been created. Gangs are formed, intricate structures built and planned attacks take place. When I turned up none of this was available to me as a lone player wandering the map. I didn t even see another player let alone build a castle. However, this is hardly surprising, and more the fault of my lack of friends than the game itself.

Unturned is free to play, with an option to pay 3.99 for a permanent gold upgrade that gives you more customisation options, access to gold servers and an array of skins. I can imagine playing without ever spending a penny, which is impressive. But if you re hooked, the paid version of the game would be very tempting.

There is nothing original about the mechanics of Unturned and the low production values can be off-putting. However, it is impossible to deny its appeal. At first the overwhelmingly positive responses can seem inexplicable, but the combination of a passable game with an open multiplayer that costs nothing was bound to equal a hit.

The first thing you ll notice about Nelson Sexton is his work ethic. Since the release of his free-to-play, sandbox zombie survival game Unturned in 2014, he s developed, playtested, and implemented over 150 updates. Each one contains a small parcel of miscellaneous new content that s airdropped weekly sometimes daily into a hungry community. A one-man operation can come with a lot of tedious pressure, but it also means you can deliver what you want without the hassles of a Q/A team or publisher approval. On February 5, in patch 3.14.1.3, he added a police helicopter, a thief costume, building decay, and back buttons to the main menu. On February 12, in patch 3.13.1.4, he added pancakes, waffles, pizza, and, of course, a nailgun.

Every day Sexton wakes up and scratches a few more things off a vast itinerary, all small steps towards the everlasting goal of creating the perfectly limitless Walking Dead experience. The audience has waited decades for a developer willing to take that challenge, but instead of a billionaire conglomerate, they found an industrious 19-year old kid.

Unturned has been downloaded 24 million times, making it the third-most-owned game on Steam.

On a day-to-day basis I pick something that looks interesting to work on, work on a bit, finish it, and move on to the next thing, says Sexton. I ll go through these cycles where there s a whole bunch of stuff on my to-do list and I m like I m going to busy for a long time, there s all these cool things to work on, and it ll get closer and closer to being empty and I ll think maybe the game will release soon! But then there s always a ton of new suggestions I want to add and the list gets huge again.

Sexton released Unturned on Steam when he was 16 years old. Since then it's been downloaded 24 million times it currently has roughly as many owners as Counter-Strike Global Offensive, making it, best as we can tell, the third-most-owned game on Steam.

Like many games of similar amateur origins, Unturned carries the same blocky, easy-to-program aesthetic of Minecraft or Terraria. Your goal is to sustain yourself on a zombie-infested Prince Edward Island, balancing four simple vitality meters representing health, starvation, thirst, and disease. There s a crafting system, a skill system, a fort system, and a number of different servers promising unique spins on the difficulty and scalability of survival. In the two years since release Unturned has added a bounty of new weapons, animals, food items, buildings (anything from a research station to a mine tunnel,) new zombie types, a multiplayer-only arena game mode, and VR support. It s clear that Sexton was influenced by the prototypical DayZ mod, and the promise of a truly visceral, modular, unforgiving, constantly expanding apocalypse that these dreams are all built off of programming skills he honed at 15 is hugely impressive.

Communal bonds

I remember one day I came home from school and I was thinking about adding an attachment system, where you could add a grip to a gun or a silencer or stuff like that, says Sexton. Just in that evening I went through every single gun, added attachment points and the attachments, and by the end of the evening that version was in the game.

In Hearthstone the community pleaded for two years before Blizzard finally acquiesced and gave them access to additional deck slots. EA held SimCity hostage to an always-online disaster until they alienated even the most ardent of Maxis fans. Capcom launched a feature-bereft Street Fighter V to make an aggressive release date, and, to the surprise of no one, has spent the following six months mollifying the player-base. The video game industry is built by giant companies, and giant companies tend to be stubborn, slow, and scatterbrained. Unturned s patch notes are downright giddy by comparison. The game has consistently been in the upper 10 percent of Steam s top 100 played games, and much of that can be chalked up to Sexton s discipline.

For ages everyone had been asking for helicopters and boats and other transportation and I had always said yeah maybe, we ll see. says Sexton. But then there was this two week period [earlier this year] where I was just like you know what? It would just be so cool if there were all these vehicles in the game, so everyone was super surprised because out of nowhere there was this awesome update that added helicopters and airplanes, and the next week I added the boats.

In the past Sexton has given access to his Trello (a project mapping website) to the community so people could always keep track of what new items, features, and fixes were in the pipeline. That s no longer transparent due to the rumors it generated, but he still keeps a clear, open line of communication. The Steam Forums are particularly adorable; a sea of kids throwing out hyper-specific suggestions like better door animations and, um, a zombie-alerting airhorn.

At this point the community and I are always talking, says Sexton. Some of the people I talk to a lot on the Steam forums I end up just adding to my Steam friends list and they ll do bug reports and make feature suggestions. A lot of my best friends are people I met from Unturned.

Christian, a 16-year old who s been playing Unturned since day one, says Sexton s warmth is what makes Unturned special.

It's great to have a developer that is so close to his community, and I feel as though many big corporations that seem like they should know what they are doing, could learn a lot from Nelson about how to manage a community as well as he does, he says. I am surprised Nelson puts up with such a loud audience and manages to continuously implement new features the community wants. [He s] a huge inspiration to me as he talks to the community, and isn't afraid to experiment with something that strays a bit from a straightforward path that Unturned could take.

Sexton agrees that the constant patches are what keeps people engaged. You get the sense that he shares the same vision as his community. Every update makes the game more free, more expansive, more laissez-faire. The long-term goal is to have an experience where a player can do anything, but for now it s nice to know that there s somebody listening on the other end.

A lot of people feel like their suggestions are getting into the game, he says. Every time I put out an update with a comment section I look through them and I see all these people saying hey he added my idea! I think it s unlikely that it s their specific post I saw, but even if it takes a couple weeks before it gets in the game people like knowing that the game is moving in the right direction.

Christopher had one of those moments. In 2014, around the time Unturned hit 3.0, there were some complaints about the inconvenience of managing your wardrobe if your character was wearing a lot of clothing. Sexton made a post on the subreddit looking for suggestions, and Christopher responded with a mockup he uploaded to imgur.

[Nelson] said he liked some of the ideas, specifically the clothing items next to the name bar, and in the next update the icons of clothing were put next to the name plates, said Christopher. I think the reason why the community stays so tight-knit is because they know that Nelson is probably reading what they're saying. The community is constantly discussing new changes to gameplay, rumors, suggestions, and bugs, and Nelson always listens.

Unturned is still free-to-play. You can hop in and enjoy the same experience as everyone else. There are no microtransactions or thresholds, and the only monetization is a one-time $5 upgrade which gives you access to special servers, unique clothes, and gold-plated weapons. This is enough for Sexton to sustain himself, and it s not going to change anytime soon.

I like how people can try out the game and ask their friends to play with them, and they can have fun with their friends, he says. For me the main thing I enjoy about Unturned is seeing the feedback, and I think the reason for that is how it s easy to get into.

Keep on turning

Currently Sexton not in college, but says he ll consider enrolling if he starts encountering problems in game development he can t figure out on his own. He also mentions that there have been offers to take Unturned off his hands permanently.

I think it s just too much of what I do and what I enjoy to sell it, I think I d rather continue on having it being my hobby than have it become some corporate money-making thing, he says.

That makes sense. Technically speaking, Unturned hasn t been officially released. It s caught in that endless development cycle that defines a lot of Steam success stories. Unturned is Nelson Sexton s whole life. His friends, his work, his portfolio, his livelihood, all wrapped up in a single project he started in high school. Will he eventually cash in? Maybe. Notch eventually sold Minecraft to Microsoft for $2.5 billion, and while Unturned hasn t reached that level of cultural ubiquity, it s still been downloaded almost 24 million times on Steam with plenty of branding and monetization options left unexplored. There may come a day when Sexton is a little burnt out and the buyout number is just high enough.

But for now, he s here. Game companies spend billions of dollars trying to reach their market. They invite Wiz Khalifa to play Battlefield One and hire Drake to say nice things about FIFA. Sexton just talks to them on forums. Millions of teenagers have pooled their resources to lift up one teenager to make his game for them. They re all invested in the same fantasy. There s nothing lost in translation.

I love looking at the community-made maps and seeing them doing things I never even thought of. I remember seeing someone who put the kitchen cabinets I intended for the floor on the ceiling. I love seeing how people look at things I made and come up with their own ways of using them. There are maps with giant dams even though there isn t a dam object in the game, says Sexton. It s a special feeling. From the modding side of things, it s crazy to think there are people using my code and they re extending on it, and building on it.

Early Access reviews offer our preliminary verdicts on in-development games. We may follow up this unscored review with a final, scored review in the future.

Unturned is a DayZ-style survival sim with a Minecraft-inspired art style. I don t blame you if you ve already tuned out. PC is awash with DayZ and Minecraft clones. But Unturned is notable in that it s currently the fourth most-played game on Steam, beating Football Manager, Skyrim, and Garry s Mod by many thousands of players and it was developed by a sixteen year-old. It s an amazing story the kind only possible on PC but is the game itself actually any good?

You can play it for free, but with the option to pay $5 to access gold servers, which grant you double XP, boosted loot drops , and other benefits. So it s possible to play the game without spending a penny, but the business model is clear get players hooked on the F2P version and they ll eventually reach for their wallets. Free-to-play developers are starting so young these days.

The survival elements are what you might expect from a game with DayZ s blood running through its veins: hunger, stamina, and so on. But, unlike Bohemia s game, you don t spend half your time running through the wilderness, only to find a rotten banana. Loot in Unturned is much easier to find, and it was only minutes into my first life that I found a rifle. If you never had the patience for DayZ s drip-feed of rewards, this might appeal, but it does make stumbling across a firearm feel less special.



The Minecraftian landscape is chunky and colourful, scattered with towns, military bases, and even a golf course. Here you ll find loot and, naturally, zombies. Hey, this is an indie survival game after all. They re fast and vicious, and it s easy to get overwhelmed by them. But once you ve found a weapon, and built yourself a base by harvesting raw materials in the world, you ll last longer and fight harder. It s a structure you ll have experienced in a dozen survival games before, but it works.

You can play solo, but the game feels tailor-made for multiplayer. A large number of servers already exist you can find a list here although there s no in-game browser yet. Teaming up with friends to battle the hordes and build bases undeniably enhances the experience, although hackers have, predictably, targeted many servers. Developer Nelson Sexton is combating these with frequent updates, as well as fleshing out the core survival and building mechanics.

There s no getting around the game s low production values. I mean, a teenager made it in his bedroom, so that s to be expected. You ll have to decide whether you can endure its lo-fi look and feel. If you can, you ll find a game with an impressive amount of features, including driveable vehicles and crafting, but also one that is completely derivative. Everything in Unturned has been done before, and better. But for the competitive price of nothing at all, it s worth a look. If it gets its claws in you might end up handing over that $5, but for now my wallet is remaining firmly in my back pocket.
Verdict
Unturned has few real ideas of its own, but is a simple, accessible survival simulator. If you can stomach the low production values, you might find something to love around its rough edges.
Outlook
The runaway success of the game means Sexton will no doubt be updating it frequently. If enough people pay for the gold upgrade, expect more elaborate new features to be added.
Details
Version reviewed 2.1.3
Reviewed on i5-3570K 3.40GHz, 16GB RAM, HD 7890
Recommended 2GHz CPU, 2GB RAM, 1GB GPU
Price Free
Publisher Nelson Sexton
Developer Nelson Sexton
Multiplayer Online
Link Steam