Another day, another apocalypse and the need to survive on your wits. Nether thrusts you into a devastated world, where one wrong move will mean a swift death. Set in the urban decay of a dead city, you start the game with precious little: a knife for defence, which honestly will do you little good against the teleporting nether creatures, so it’s time to scavenge, trade and create. In order to survive this pitiless world you will need the best weapons you can get...

Nether is a new post apocalypse online first person shooter. There are currently a lot of servers online so getting into the game is pretty easy. The only problem I had was in first creating an account, which took several tries. If you buy the game through Steam then it insists that you link your Nether and Steam accounts, there is no way of getting out of this and it took forever for the two systems to talk properly to each other. The next issue was a missing dll file, if you have ActiveX 11.2 then you going to have to go to the Windows site and download the DirectX runtime to get the missing file.

So, after a bit of blood sweat and swearing Nether finally cranked itself to life. The first thing you notice are the high graphic detail in the open city and the creepy ambient music, which sets the tone for the game superbly.

Moving around with the keyboard was easy enough, but a gamepad would have made the fighting a lot easier. Along the way you can pick up a few supplies, bandages, a backpack and various low level items. Here your enemies are not only the Nethers, but potentially the other players, this is a dog eat dog world. There is the option to band together with your friends, which would increase your overall chance of survival or go it alone.

Each server can have sixty-four players at a time, which may seem a lot, but given the size of the city you can spend a lot of time creeping around and not seeing anyone. That does not necessarily mean that they are not there as the city is rendered as a true three dimensional area. It’s a fine balance between making you feel like you’re the only person around to keeping in mind that every corner and window could be a source of danger. This is helped by the copious amount of rubble, abandoned cars and general vegetative overgrowth.

The game is designed for players to link together, following which if the group is strong enough they can take over a building, being off the ground will aid in your survival, especially as the world persists even after you log out of the game, so starting in a safe area is a bonus. The city contains free zones, which are relatively safe places to trade found or crafted items, for food or better weapons. Teams can also set up camp here as a safe alternative to taking a building.

Overall, so long as the number of players remains high, Nether offers a good survivalist experience.

8

Charles Packer