The first thing I noticed was how concrete hard it quickly gets. Successfully batter them all senseless and then it's on to the next area – lush valley, desert dunes, snowy mountainside. This almost exclusively involves being plopped into a wide open level with a set number of guards to knock out or kill. At this point, it’s time to join Max Payne and the ten million other protagonists on the same bloodthirsty quest for revenge. He’s living in a nice grassy village when suddenly it comes under attack and his wife and child are killed. Your rabbit, Turner, is said to be a martial arts master. I felt like this was enough to finally give it a taste, and while it’s admittedly very gamey (nyuk nyuk) it’s still undercooked. It has had an Arena mode and two-player Versus mode for some time but last month it added a campaign mode, based on the story of its predecessor Lugaru. But it doesn’t mean there’s any real game here yet. Which makes the creation of the complex combat, the physics, the parkour, the AI and the levels an impressive thing. The reason it has taken eight years, and will likely take even more time, is because all the programming has been on one man, David Rosen of Wolfire Games. But unless you reeeeeally like that, the joy of it soon dries up.
There’s a lot of pleasure to be got from executing the perfect series of kicks and punches against its tough, intelligent opponents, especially when they’re armed with heavy one-hit-kill swords. An anthropomorphic fighting game of swift kicks and raw punches to the side of the head, it is beautifully animated, pleasingly ragdoll, and Bruce Lee fast. Overgrowth is a game that has been eight years in the making and still isn’t anywhere near finished. This week, the rabbit kickboxers and ultra strong wolves of Overgrowth. Every Monday we send Brendan into the early access fighting pits to face all types of terrifying wildlife.