Soaring above the landscape of Fera: The Sundered Tribes, I spot a hulking, icy, behemoth roaming the wetlands below. It doesn’t look that big from up here, but I quickly find out it’s just far away.
Slamming down towards the clearing, I land a solid blow on the beast, but it’s only wounded and it’s dangerous to stay on the ground.
Monsters in this world command the elements and the cold-blooded creature just started whipping up a roaring blizzard. But as diamond dust whisks through the air, I follow suit, hooking onto a crumbling ruin nearby to grapple back up above our battlefield before somersaulting forward with my axe raised – a whirling flurry that stops the snowstorm in one shot.
Everyone wants to hunt monsters, but Monster Hunter isn’t for everyone. It has a very particular cadence as you contemplatively trudge around quite a limited map, before your character unhurriedly unsheathes their equipment and breathes a solemn sigh as they heave their weapon towards the rapidly onrushing creature – usually a flaming anteater or an evil monkey or something – that’s bearing down upon you.
Then a lot of Monster Hunter-like games – I’m looking at you Wild Hearts and Dauntless – lift Capcom’s loop wholesale, with the same slow tracking phase, huge, hefty weapons and chunky combat.
Fera: The Sundered Tribes however, takes things in a different, fast-paced and free-form direction: up into the skies.
Around its open world filled with cloud-flanked rock formations, ruin-strewn deserts and dense forests, Fera anchors swing points you can latch onto with your mystical tetherhook, which then let you launch yourself into air either to rip off slingshot attacks against enemies or open out your wingsuit glider.
Gliders all get lumped in with Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom these days, but in Fera it actually plays more like Batman: Arkham Knight, where you can pitch your wings down to gain altitude before slowing into a measured descent to plot your next dive bomb on unsuspecting prey.
The grapple points are attached to ancient structures scattered throughout Fera, and it can be a little clunky to get a feel for exactly where you can catch onto – particularly if you go into the game expecting to start web-slinging like Spider-Man. But once you get into the swing of it and you realise it’s more akin to something like the Wirebug in Monster Hunter Rise than a superpower (which makes sense, really) it makes for an interesting take on the genre.
The alpha-build I played at Gamescom 2024 had a really nice sense of scale to its world, with different kinds of monsters – each with their own quirks, attacks and elemental abilities – wandering the varied biomes.
You’ll be able to hunt three variants of monsters in the full version of Fera: adult, elder and ancient – but I only got to fight the first two.
The adult creature was definitely the easy mode. Maybe I’d been buffed up with powerful equipment, but it went down with just a few well-placed piledrivers. The elder though, which happened to be a flying monster as well, was a whole different story.
Apparently during development, the team at Massive Damage found that fights were too easy against ground based foes when you had such a massive movement advantage with your tetherhook and glider. This led them to design huge, AoE-focused movesets for their monsters, with the aerial baddies in particular getting attack patterns more resembling a bullet-hell shoot-’em-up than an action-RPG.
But once you actually defeat a monster, carving their meat into crafting parts is a bit more involved too. Different weapons will allow you to lop off different grisly bits, which you can then use to power Fera’s survival and town-building mechanics, which see you unite and lead a tribe of people as you construct and level up their homes and amenities.
I only saw the very start of this, but it seemed like another interesting twist on both the monster hunting and survival genres, combining a more complex and satisfying combat system than most survival games with a more interactive and appealing city-sim system than you get in most RPGs.
I think the crucial factor for Fera will be how smoothly it can interweave its different parts together – like the crunching gears between finding a grapple point and taking flight, or whether the city-building brings everything to a screeching halt – but there’s not long to wait.
Fera: The Sundered Tribes is due to hit Steam Early Access on September 17th.