FEROCIOUS Is the Dino FPS Where You Fight and Control the Beasts

Indie shooters about monsters are nothing new, but FEROCIOUS is trying something a little wilder than the usual corridor of jump scares. The debut title from small studio OMYOG, published by tinyBuild and powered by Unity, strands you on a secret Pacific island ruled by mercenaries, prehistoric predators and experimental technology. It is a single player first person FPS built around survival, exploration and a surprisingly emotional bond with the very dinosaurs that are trying to rip you apart.

The game is launching on PC via Steam on December 4, positioning itself as a pulpy mix of King Kong, Far Cry style sandboxes and old school dinosaur shooters.

Behind FEROCIOUS is a tiny team with experience that belies its size. Creative lead Leonard Saalfrank openly cites the tragic majesty of King Kong as a major influence, and you can feel that in the ruined temples, storm swept cliffs and colossal silhouettes that loom out of the fog. Level and sandbox design are in the hands of Mark, a veteran who previously worked on series like Far Cry and Battlefront II and knows how to build arenas that invite experimentation instead of just funneling you down one obvious route. The writing team, which includes Jörg Ihle and Dominik Hochwald, comes from film, games and even theme park storytelling, bringing a cinematic flair to cutscenes and environmental clues rather than relying only on text logs.

The basic setup sounds familiar at first: your ship goes down, you wake up alone on a hostile island, and everything that moves wants you dead or captured. Human mercenaries roam jungle outposts with patrol routes and searchlights, while herds of herbivores stampede through the undergrowth and apex predators stalk both of you from the canopy above. Resources are deliberately scarce; ammo, medical supplies and crafting materials have to be scavenged from crashed aircraft, abandoned bunkers and hidden caves. Do you waste precious bullets on a raptor that could tear you apart, or try to sneak around it because you know a squad of mercs is just over the ridge? FEROCIOUS constantly pushes you to make these trade offs, giving the sandbox some teeth instead of just filling it with collectibles.

Where the game really pulls away from the pack, though, is the dino control device that sits at the core of its fantasy. Early in the campaign you recover an experimental gadget that can scan a dinosaur’s brain patterns and mimic their vocal signals as ultrasonic calls, a bit like the resonant chamber trick glimpsed in Jurassic Park 3 but pushed into full science pulp territory. Once a species has been scanned, you can quietly command an individual dinosaur to follow you, hold position, move to a vantage point, charge an enemy, smash through a fragile wall or even fetch an item that would otherwise be out of reach. Not every creature is obedient, and some species are simply too wild to tame at all, but learning the personality and capabilities of each controllable dinosaur becomes its own meta game layered over the shooting and sneaking.

That ability to weaponize the ecosystem opens up situations you do not see in most shooters. You might lure a pack of unsuspecting mercenaries into a canyon where you have already positioned a hungry carnosaur, then sit back as nature does the dirty work. Alternatively, you could use a gigantic herbivore as living cover, creeping alongside its flanks to slip past searchlights and security drones. Because commands are context sensitive and limited by the temperament of each species, there is always a little friction and unpredictability; your scaly ally might panic, ignore your call, or decide that you look tastier than the soldiers ahead. It is exactly the kind of slightly chaotic system that will make some players fall in love with FEROCIOUS and make others roll their eyes and dismiss it as dumb dinosaur fun, but that divisive edge is part of its charm.

The presentation aims to sell that fantasy hard. Dense foliage, volumetric lighting and heavy storms push the Unity engine to create a thick, tropical atmosphere where visibility is often limited and sound becomes your best early warning system. Roars echo through ravines, trees shake as something huge pushes past and distant rotor blades tell you when a helicopter patrol is sweeping in. It is not chasing photorealism in the way a massive AAA blockbuster might, but instead leans into bold silhouettes, saturated colors and strong composition to make every encounter readable amid the chaos. If your hardware is up to the task, you can expect the recommended specs to ask for a modern Intel Core i7 or Ryzen 5 3600 class CPU, 16 gigabytes of RAM and a graphics card roughly in the NVIDIA RTX 2060 or AMD RX 5600 range, along with around 25 gigabytes of storage space.

Those on more modest rigs are not completely left out. The minimum configuration targets a 64 bit version of Windows 10 or 11, an older Intel Core i5 from the fourth generation or comparable AMD chip, 12 gigabytes of memory and a widely owned mid range GPU such as the NVIDIA GTX 1060 or AMD RX 580. This is still an indie project, even if it looks far glossier than that label sometimes suggests, so expectations around pricing are that FEROCIOUS will launch at a budget friendly tier rather than full blockbuster cost, though the publisher has yet to officially confirm a number. For now, interested players can wishlist the title on Steam, watch the release date trailer to see dinosaurs being unleashed on hapless mercenaries and decide whether this particular blend of survival tension and creature commanding chaos is genius, ridiculous or maybe a little bit of both.