The Stomping Land steps delicately onto Steam Early Access, offers multiplayer dino-based survival

Rust toys with the idea of pre/post-historic man fighting for survival against the elements and against his fellow man, but what that really boiled down to was a bunch of naked men flapping their dongs around while battering your house down in an effort to nick your stuff. The Stomping Ground, by the looks of things, is the real prehistoric deal, pitting man against his greatest-enemy-that-wasn't-actually-around-at-the-same-time-as-him, the dinosaur. SuperCrit's game feasted on all of your Kickstarter money at around this time last year , and now it's appeared on Steam Early Access , dinoskin-cap in hand. Let's see how it's coming along, eh?

In short: crafting, hunting, underwater swimming, dinosaur-riding, rope-based player kidnap, and other things that look really quite amazing when married to a soaring piece of music. As you might expect from the words "early and "access", The Stomping Land isn't quite done yet, although most of the promised features appear to be in place in some form, including a day/night cycle, tameable/rideable dinos, an offline mode and various other stuff. The developers state that the dinosaur AI is the only element still "very early" in development, so don't expect to be able to recreate Jurassic Park just yet.

You can grab The Stomping Land here , although developers SuperCrit do warn that "if you wish to jump into a more finalized gameplay experience, it is recommended to not purchase the game until release, as all features require balancing, bugfixing, and updates for smoother implementation." The price won't be increasing or decreasing in the meantime, so there's no harm in holding off if you'd rather wait.

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.