Darwin Project vs Rend
Darwin Project
Darwin Project is an early access, third-person battle royale game that combines the game show-theme from The Culling with the unique art style which made Fortnite Battle Royale so easily recognizable. Unlike most battle royale games where you'll have to compete against 99 other players to survive, this game only has 10 players, including yourself. However, the game spices things up with a ton of challenges, much like those featured in the Hunger Games, that are designed to push you to your limits.Not to mention, the game adds a nice tracking mechanism. Players in the game show will leave clues when they pass by an area and you can use those very clues to determine where your prey is heading to or hiding in. There are plenty of fun power-ups that you can collect, including temporary invisibility. Although you can't craft new weapons, the bow and shovel that you get can be upgraded to increase their deadliness.
Best yet, you can also play as the Director of the entire game show. As the Director, your goal is not to survive but to hype things up enough for the crowd to go wild. You are managing an exciting game show, after all. With feedback from the audience, you can decide which zones to drop a nuke on or which zone to freeze over, or even when to drop a "care package" for the participants to fight over.
Darwin Project manages to breathe new life into the slowly-stagnating battle royale genre. It is definitely a fun, thrilling and unique competitive MMO - one that fans of battle royale would just love to play.
Rend
Rend is an up-and-coming, Nordic-themed, team-based survival game that is set in a wild and ruthless, fantasy world filled with fantastic creatures, where only the strongest are able to ascend to the realms of the gods. In this game, players are separated into their respective factions at the beginning. They are then given the freedom to explore the many biomes and harvest resources from the environment whether solo or co-operatively. The resources obtained can then be used to craft better weapons and tools or can be reinvested into the faction stronghold to fortify it from potential attacks from players from a rival faction and to advance your base just so you can unlock new technologies. Players have their own skill systems and talent trees as well, and these are the main ways for a player to customize and tweak their characters to their liking.The ultimate goal of the game, however, is to reap as many warrior spirits as you can by battling and defeating rival players and deposit the souls at the Divinity Stone in the middle of your faction base, that is if you're not slain while carrying such precious loot. Somewhat similar to grand strategy games, Rend is more of a continual game. It has game cycles of 2 to 3 months, in which the winning faction of each cycle will get a nice pile of rewards at the end of a cycle.
Rend has a really unique take on the survival genre and this might just give the game the fuel it needs to rise to the top. The game is currently in Alpha and its release date is still TBD.