Darwin Project is a 10 player battle royale game with a simplistic and cartoonish art-style with similarities to Fortnite and Overwatch. The game differs from its predecessors in many ways, making it fresh and unique in a genre where the way to be successful is to copy the last one and maybe add one or two more features (or in PUBG's case, make the graphics look better than H1Z1's and add a few more guns).
Unlike other games, Darwin Project is built for streamers and esports. The Show Director is a player that controls the match in multiple ways to make things interesting for both the other players and the audience. To prevent abuse of the system, the Show Director cannot directly harm the players, they can only use each of their abilities once in a match, and they need to wait for their Action Points to recharge to prevent spam of abilities that drastically alter the game, such as decreasing the gravity or granting a certain player invincibility. The Show Director also can directly interact with players via voice chat and can lock down certain zones to get the players close enough to fight each other. While it is possible for the Show Director to show favoritism to the point of making the game unfair, players can vote on the performance of their Show Director and if they get rated poorly enough times, they lose the ability to use player-based abilities such as healing and teaming between players and between player and Show Director is against the rules anyway so they would eventually be forbidden from being a Show Director or be banned from the game entirely if their behavior gets worse.
The other unique thing about the game is the way it plays. In other battle royale games, you parachute off a plane, pick an area to go to and hope you get a good gun before anyone else. In this game, you spawn already on the ground with a bow and axe and that's it. Instead of scavenging for weapons, you scavenge for materials to give your character slight buffs, build traps and arrows, and prevent them from freezing to death in the tundra that you play in while trying to track down other players by following the footprints in the snow or finding the maps that tell you where the other players are. Another cool thing is the way the game handles melee, in other battle royale games and survival games, melee is either nonexistent or completely broken to the point of uselessness. In Darwin Project, melee is half of the combat in the game and you can deflect arrows and other axes if you time your attack right, so winning a fight isn't impossible if you are out of arrows.
Overall, this game is a 10/10 for me. Despite it still being in beta, it is 99% bug free and the mechanics balance each other out, making the game entirely skill based and fun and entertaining for both the players and the audience. I hope this game becomes the esport it was built to be.
Also open beta is going on right now but it ends on Monday, so if you want to try it for free out you can get it on Steam, otherwise the game is locked until release.
