Gore in FEROCIOUS

When I first came across Ferocious the focus on response immediately caught my interest. Seemed like the combat took place in nicely responsive environments and the response on the enemies for the hits looked quite interesting as well.

Playing the released game now, the destruction seems to leave a lot to be desired, but the gore side does have quite a lot going for it, so let's get right into it.

Body damage

First up - dismemberment is very much in. With 2 points of amputation for the arms, one for the legs, the head can come off or get several damaged variations (one of them is a Ready or Not style "unface"), and you can either have the upper torso or the whole body obliterated.

As you can see in the demonstration video above, the cut in half variation gets a nice stump model with guts and a part of the spine visible. The heads look largely OK with the unface variation being best. But, the stumps for limb dismemberment and full head removal kind of look like a sheaf.

Not the finest stumps we've seen in a game

The obliteration is better than what we have in most games. You will have the character (or half of him) turn into bloodied bones, some meat chunks and a bunch of blood splats.

Yes, it could have been messier, you could have mangled variations of large chunks of the character rather than just bones (I keep coming back to the explosive variations in Left 4 Dead 2 as my example of this). But overall it does look better than some AAA obliterations I covered on the channel.

The activation is neither great nor massively bad. Limbs and heads come off with the shotgun and explosives, but they can come off on shotgun shots from a distance too.

Gibbing for a small hand grenade is excessive.

And what really shouldn't be happening is gibbing the upper torso for a close up shotgun shot. When you don't have gory variations for that, just a big decal will suffice. I haven't seen it happen often, but it shouldn't be happening at all.

Now, speaking of decals - when approaching indie titles I'm dreading the aspect of non dismembering damage a little bit. We've seen a wide variety of issues with that on the channel, ranging from floaty decals, activation issues to just a lousy generic overlay divided into head-torso-limbs.

So, to my absolute delight, this aspect is largely good in Ferocious. Wounds will happen at the point of impact, this feature will be consistent and for the pistol and SMG they look quite decently good.

Now on the shotgun it could be better. I think for that you have the same wound, it's just enlarged. Not a major issue for a closeup shot, but you have those enlarged decals used for pellets from a distance too.

In the clip below you can see a single shotgun blast from a distance taking an arm off, about a quarter of the head and leaving some big pellet wounds on the body:

A few more issues with the body damage (some seen in the demonstration at the top):

• You won't have wounds for the takedowns. It's not the first time I'm seeing something like this in a game that does have a wound feature. Always found that to be really odd.

• No wounds for the spear impalement too.

• If an enemy is finished off by the local wildlife you just see an attack animation, the enemy is ragdolled and there's no body damage whatsoever.

• Some non human enemies won't have wounds when you shoot them

While those are all things that you will very much notice, at the core the mechanic is good. And when the foundation is good, issues like the ones mentioned above should be very much fixable.

There is however one massive issue that you can't miss out. It's not directly a body damage thing but I'll mention it here, and that is the absolutely hideous highlighting of everything that's lootable, which includes characters too. In a game with a big focus on immersive visuals and an otherwise bare minimum UI (which I do appreciate), I truly don't know how that made it there in the first place.

The only way to disable it is to play on hard difficulty.

There really were so many ways they could have gone about it. From milder indicators, to just a "focus" mode that highlights lootables when you activate it (we've seen that in some games), or even just a "toggle highlight" button.

With the way the game is designed the highlighting is a useful feature, but it's implemented in one of the worst possible ways.

Environment

As for the initial response, for gunfire you may or may not get a stain on the surface behind the character when he's shot.

I first tested that with the pistol, but I checked with the shotgun to see if the notably larger splashes will leave anything. Nope.

On dismembering hits there will be more mess. I've sent one character flying and that left a blood trail from where he was standing to where he landed.

I've consistently seen stains where severed limbs landed.

But not every dismembering hit is going to be particularly messy and the blood pouring effect from the stump is not going to be leaving any stains of its own.

See all of that below:

What will be consistent is a blood pool mechanic after a character is killed. You can even see the beginning of that in the otherwise bloodless crab kill in the demonstration at the top. It can get pretty massive and it's just a circular pattern, but the color of it is really good and as someone mentioned in the comments on the demonstration - it just looks very nice and wet. Not all games get this one that good, including bigger titles.

Another thing that is absolutely commendable is the aftermath. The only thing I've seen vanish is severed limbs, but other than that - the bodies, the stains, the blood pools, the wounds are all going to remain, giving you basically the full aftermath of every encounter.

Testing it on a livestream on the channel I have seen bodies vanish after you leave a location (and then return to it after some time), which is not an issue as far I'm concerned.

Animations

You will have response animations on impacts, there are 2 finishers that I saw - for knife attacks from the front or the back, and there is a cool feature of characters surviving arm dismemberment and either kneeling or sitting by a wall awaiting their doom.

But, the ragdolls are going to be very janky. There are no death animations so that's going to be the response you'll see and they just don't feel right.

And the feature for the loss of arms is the only change of behavior you'll see. Characters will keep going after a non fatal hit unbothered and leg loss only activates the ragdoll.

So unfortunately this is the weakest and jankiest feeling aspect by far. Fixing the ragdolls to deliver better feedback is the most important thing on the response side, but I really hope that at some point they'll go beyond that, adding more injured behaviors (for characters who are still able to fight and characters lying in pain on the ground), and perhaps even an active ragdoll.

But fixing the ragdolls absolutely has to come first.

What stands out

• Solid wounds functionality with better than average looks

• Obliterations are better than in most games I covered

• You get almost the full aftermath for every fight, which unfortunately is not something you can take for granted

Key points of feedback

• The highlighting feature that can't be disabled is a massive issue.

• The animations aspect still needs a great deal of work. This one is massively important to make the fights feel better. At the moment it is a notable contributor to the combat feeling janky.

So I can't recommend this one for the gore, but you can tell that this aspect wasn't an afterthought and work has been put into it.

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