FEROCIOUS

FEROCIOUS drops the player on an uncharted island where mercenaries, mechas, and dinosaurs all pose a threat, and survival depends on scavenging resources to craft weapons and gear on the fly. Developed by small studio OMYOG and published by tinyBuild, it's a single-player, first-person survival shooter that blends open exploration with a distinctive hook: the player can take direct control of smaller dinosaurs, using them to attack enemies, force open paths, or slip past guarded checkpoints. It released as a full, non-Early-Access title on 4 December 2025 for Windows, priced at US$24.99.

Turok and Far Cry, filtered through real ambition

Reviewers reach almost unanimously for the same comparisons: Turok, Far Cry, Jurassic Park's Trespasser, and Ark. One reviewer sums up the mashup as "Far Cry, Turok, Crysis, and Jurassic Park Trespasser in a blender," and calls the result "incredibly ambitious" for a $25 indie release, adding that "it's very charming and enjoyable at face value." Another, more measured reviewer who initially bounced off the game on launch day writes that after nearly seven hours they came around, saying it "harkens back to the days of playing Turok on the PlayStation" and crediting the developer for shipping a patch the day after launch.

The dinosaur-control mechanic and the island's atmosphere draw the strongest, most consistent praise across the entire review pool. One reviewer calls the environments "spectacular" and says "so much love has gone into this," while several others single out the ability to "pet the smaller dinosaurs after picking them up" as a small but memorable detail. Even reviewers who ultimately don't recommend the game tend to carve out an exception for the setting itself, one writes plainly that despite a long list of technical complaints, "the graphics look good, and the game runs pretty smoothly for a Unity engine game."

AI that snaps to you, dinosaurs that don't move

The most consistently repeated technical complaint targets enemy behaviour. One heavily-voted review describes human enemies that "shoot you when they are looking in other directions and just snap onto you," while a dinosaur-specific complaint recurs across multiple reviews: predators that "stand essentially in one location and do nothing" until the player gets close, undermining the ecosystem the marketing promised. Another reviewer notes the opposite problem just as often, enemies that alert their entire group instantly once one is spotted, removing any real stealth option despite the game nominally supporting it.

Performance complaints are widespread and not limited to weaker hardware. One reviewer reports issues "even with a 5080 and i9 13900k," calling for the game to be "put in the oven again for more cooking." Others describe frame drops, stutter, occasional crashes, and a lack of graphics settings to tune performance manually, one reviewer capped their experience at 25 to 40 frames per second on what they describe as a reasonably capable laptop. Progress- blocking bugs show up too: one reviewer reports a cable car that was supposed to advance them to a new zone instead resetting their entire save back to the tutorial, a bug that support acknowledged but couldn't resolve before their refund window had closed.

Steam's own achievement data reflects a player base that mostly hasn't pushed deep into the game. Of 20 tracked achievements, the most commonly earned, a first kill, sits at just 13.1% of players, and achievements tied to fully befriending or reuniting with dinosaur companions sit in the 1.7% to 2.4% range. That's a low ceiling even accounting for a game that only released in December 2025, and it lines up with the volume of reviews describing early hours spent fighting bugs and unclear objectives rather than settling into a smooth loop.

A crafting loop that can't keep up with the ambition around it

Where the island itself draws praise, the systems built on top of it draw the opposite reaction. Several reviewers single out crafting and inventory management as the game's weakest link, one calls the inventory "jank" and says stacking and sorting resources feels like fighting the UI rather than using it, while another complains that ammunition caps are set so low that a single firefight can leave the player scrambling back to a crafting bench mid-fight. A few reviewers note that the crafting recipes themselves are thin, amounting to a handful of weapon and tool upgrades rather than the deep survival-crafting tree the genre comparisons might suggest, and that resource scarcity feels tuned for a slower, more methodical game than the one FEROCIOUS actually delivers in its firefights.

The story leans hard on its Jurassic Park inspiration, a research operation gone wrong, a cast of mercenaries hunting or fleeing the island's dinosaurs, and a player character caught between both sides. Reviewers who finished the campaign describe it as serviceable rather than memorable, useful mainly as a thread pulling the player from one distinct set piece to the next rather than a story worth following for its own sake. With no multiplayer component and an asking price of $24.99, several reviewers frame the game as a bet on a single studio's potential rather than a fully realised product, worth the price for players drawn to the premise, a harder sell for anyone comparing it directly to bigger-budget survival shooters.

Final verdict

FEROCIOUS is a clear case of ambition outrunning execution: a small studio's distinctive dinosaur-survival shooter, built around real atmosphere and a genuinely novel dinosaur-control mechanic, wrapped around AI, performance, and bug problems severe enough that a majority of its critical reviews describe the 1.0 launch as feeling like an unfinished beta. Worth admiring for what it's trying to do, and worth revisiting after patches; less easy to recommend at full price the day one hardware and AI issues get sorted out.