Darwin Project (Xbox One)

Technically, most battle royales are a fight for survival. You’re thrown into the same battlefield with a bunch of other players, but as long as you’re the last one standing, you don’t necessarily have to do much work to get there. Darwin Project aims to change that a bit, the goal still being to outlast others, but you need to keep yourself from freezing to death and craft most of the tools you’ll use to snatch that victory.

Darwin Project prefers to throw you into battles without much explanation, but the set-up for this particular third-person battle royale is that the fear of an impeding ice age has lead to some powerful corporations putting together an experiment to see how people might try to survive. However, it’s fairly clear that the premise is more of an excuse for these corporations to put together a bit of violent entertainment, this battle of life and death in the frosty reaches of Canada streamed live to an audience with directors overseeing the action to interfere in small and big ways.

Playing as one of the inmates forced to compete in the games, you’ll be thrown into the same battlefield as up to nine other players, a match of ten players feeling like a small yet reasonable scope for a battle royale but a match can also thankfully begin with as little as two so the playerbase doesn’t need to be too active to find a game. The arena you find yourself in is comprised of seven different regions, and what these are will be randomly selected each match. There is a heavy focus on snowy nature for most, areas like an icy campsite or a snowed over village not standing out too much from each other. There are areas with more distinct area geometry and themes though, like a lava gorge that won’t warm you up as much as you might expect, an industrial area, a small hamlet with little snow, and an advanced futuristic city with roads and tall buildings. Periodically, the zones will be closed off, anyone inside one after it is been forbidden starting to feel a powerful chill that is likely to kill them rather quickly, and as the match wears on, less and less land is available for exploration, pushing players together.

Considering Darwin Project’s focus on survival, you’ll want to spend a lot of your time gathering resources not just for the inevitable fights when everyone is crowded into one small safe but moving spot near the end, but to survive just in general. Your inmate will need to heat up regularly to avoid the biting cold draining their life, although making a campfire to do so is as easy as collecting a single piece of wood. Specific small trees give that resource and are spread out a fair bit, but the greater consideration when grabbing wood is if you’ll use it just to stave off freezing or if you’ll invest in more useful tools. Arrows for your bow and a costly shield that makes the next hit you take deal no damage also draw on your wood resources, and you’ll also want to spend time gathering the more abundant but less efficient Darwinum also scattered around the map. Darwinium can be used to craft upgrades to your inmate as well as new powers like invisibility, radar, or creating an automatic turret. There are three classes with different special abilities, some sharing a few of their powers once you’ve leveled up the class across matches but generally there are some unique features to each. Jet Wings utilizes a jetpack that makes it great for getting to high places or dodging quickly, Grapple Gauntlet has a grappling hook that is a bit less flexible but its default abilities also focus on providing barriers that either protect you or trap players in a space with you, and Headhunter Drone gives you a robotic falcon that can fly off to grab objects or engage with the game’s interesting tracking system.

Whenever you craft something, collect a resource, or otherwise interact with the world, you leave a clue behind. While a player with keen eyes could follow footprints in the snow, if they find the toolbox, cut tree, or firewood left by another player, they can activate tracking briefly, meaning they’ll know where an opponent is and can hunt them down. The tracking will fade after a bit, but this also means your efforts to increase your power or fight the encroaching chill can be liabilities as well. All these mentioned features comprise the survival elements, but sadly it seems Darwin Project’s current state dialed back a lot of features that used to exist. At present, besides having one trap of your choice available for crafting, all other trap types and power-ups are found in loot chests or by killing deer, but it seems you used to have a lot more crafting options like specialized arrows, a broader range of technology, and even special clothing to give you small boosts. Darwin Project removed the more intricate crafting in favor of something that lessened resource gathering’s impact but also made a lot of interesting tools like speed drinks, coffee for quick warm ups, and even first aid kits more reliant on just happening to find them out in the world. Healing in general is quite rare in a match, often only earned through killing a player or hunting the rare deer, and even the first aid kit as is takes time to use, most crafting options also similarly slow so you can’t just warm yourself up in a fight with ease or shore up resources after wasting them.

Despite being simplified, Darwin Project can still have some tense standoffs because it’s not that common for players to have huge resource advantages. However, during the actual fight, your tools for dealing damage are a bit limited. You’re given an axe for resource collection and combat, many fights involving the inmates dancing around each other trying to get their axe swing in, but if you want to mix in arrows, drawing the bow takes a bit so you might not have the space for doing so safely. A few class powers do have an aggressive bent like an ice bolt or a meteor slam, but powers need time to recharge after use so the fight might boil back to axe waving and possibly some attempts to get distance for some archery. Snowballs are an interesting tool at least, landing one requiring good timing due to its wind up but it deals damage to the heat meter instead of life, and there will be a fair few finales decided not by landing attacks but who can’t keep warm when under pressure. Confrontations always feel a little thin unless there’s some extenuating factor, like trying to catch a panicking foe when you’re in a zone that’s about to close or if there’s more than two players so you have to consider more than just the axe swinging inmate in front of you. Matches can also be surprisingly fast despite the survival focus, zones getting closed off at a rather quick pace, but this won’t necessarily make you unable to engage with the crafting and collection since it is simple enough and you often can get most of the basics made before it’s down to the last two players squaring off.

For a different way to play though, Darwin Project eventually lets you try out being the Show Director yourself. Not every match will have a director, but should a player assume the role, they’re essentially a spectator who can interfere in interesting ways. As the director flies their drone around to witness fights or players scrambling for resources, they will slowly build up energy to unleash interference cards. Some of these are helpful ways to tip the scales, like heating up a player or granting them resources. Others can add a sudden variable, like starting the timer for a zone shutdown or even dropping a nuke so you can send the players scrambling. Unfortunately, the cards aren’t all available to the director once you unlock the role, the player needing to invest time to gradually get some more unusual effects like lowering the gravity in an area or ones that can truly spur some fights like providing a bounty on a player or making it so they’re tracked by everyone for a time. The director is a pretty interesting way to engage with a Darwin Project match, although you can run out of cards and be left with nothing to do but watch after a while. Setting up some devious traps with give and take approaches can make you just as hostile as another player, and there is some unique satisfaction in being the one who truly set up a death by manipulating the ways player move around the map.

Darwin Project’s important elements like abilities are tied purely to progression, and by playing classes or the director and doing well, you’ll start to get the few meaningful extra options they receive. When it comes to cosmetics though, you will earn some randomly when you level up your profile in general, but the rest tie to a currency called Ramen that is earned in very small amounts through daily goals that encourage you to play certain ways. Ramen is the premium currency that could have been bought, but considering my time with Darwin Project tended to be made up of matches with somewhere between 3 to 5 players participating, buying outfits for your inmate feels like a relic of the high hopes Scavengers Studio had for this title. Essentially on life support and with no potential updates in sight, Darwin Project feels like it settled into its final form as it sits besides its own campfire, hoping the dying embers might still keep it propped up for those few who are interested in seeing what this free to play battle royale was about.

THE VERDICT: Darwin Project tries to shake up the battle royale format by making you work to keep yourself alive and make your own tools instead of relying on the luck of random placement, but it also has too thin a battle system for the payoff to be that exciting. You will get moments of interesting pressure when you’re low on resources or warmth and fighting off another player while the director role in particular can lead to a unique way of influencing the way events unfold, but many matches boil down to swinging axes and taking rare potshots with arrows. It’s hard for individual rounds of Darwin Project to stand out or feel unique, but there’s still some tension involved in the flow of a mach so you’ll be kept busy trying to work towards a win rather than hoping it lands in your lap.

And so, I give Darwin Project for Xbox One…

An OKAY rating. The nearly non-existent playerbase will scare off people who might have been interested in Darwin Project otherwise, and its options for facing off against AI players instead terminate at Medium difficulty where it still feels too weak to put up a good fight. When you do get a match, be it with one other player or a whole group you’ve managed to coordinate through the small flickers of a community this game still has out there, there can be memorable interactions albeit not exactly incredible ones. Even if you’re just swinging axes repeatedly and trying to find moments to launch arrows, when you’re low on life, heat, and resources while fighting in that small moving safe zone at the end, when the director is being cheeky with bait to get players to clash or enter a zone that’s about to get hot, you can find those moments that almost made this battle royale work. However, despite the small bits of randomization, the zones don’t stand out too much thanks to the overreliance on snowscapes and you as the player have little reason to stray from pretty similar playstyles when crafting and gathering resources. It does sound like the older version of Darwin Project where you had a lot more options could have diversified how players tackle matches and put more strain on your resources, but at least the need to stay warm adds a consistent pressure before you run into other players and the three classes do feel individually effective but with room to favor one for a specific reason. Darwin Project might have needed to give more means to fight to make it more exhilarating, perhaps some costly crafted tools for battle able to give you unique edges but not to the point you’ll be easily outgunned since no one could create them all.

This survival battle royale is on its last legs, the update involving the class system apparently weakening an already waning playerbase. It’s understandable the developers might have been wary about being too complex, a bulky crafting wheel potentially daunting, but Darwin Project aimed to set itself apart by having those crafting elements and survival mechanics so leaning into them would have likely been wiser than stripping them away to pursue broad appeal. There is still room for this specific twist on a battle royale to add a nice extra layer to the action, but Darwin Project’s update actually makes it feel a bit less complete. If this was the starting spot for a battle royale that would add new content and increase the complexity over time this is a fine enough foundation, but instead, this is likely to be the final form as the few remaining embers continue to slowly cool down. Darwin Project doesn’t deserve to die, there’s nothing particularly egregiously off about it, but it doesn’t look like it fought too hard to survive either.