Overgrowth: never before has a wolf kicked a rabbit so hard in the face

The lovely chaps at Wolfire are making a game about humanoid animals battering each other.

The lovely chaps at Wolfire are making a game about humanoid animals battering each other. It's called Overgrowth, and while it's still not totally clear what kind of game it's going to be, the videos they've been posting of their progress are getting more and more exciting.

Despite being a tiny indie studio, they've built an incredibly tactile and convincing physics-driven animation system for combat. In other words, things hit each other really hard, and it doesn't look dumb, wrong or fake. They've just added the ability to assign enemies to teams and make them fight each other, so the latest vid shows some brilliant rabbit v. wolf gang violence.

Elsewhere Overgrowth has elements of free-running platformers and open world games, and there's a comic covering the dog-heavy backstory. Wolfire's development blogis a great read in itself - they did an excellent post on PC game piracy versus lost salesback in May.

You can play around with the Overgrowth alpha if you preorder the game($30). But be aware that it's more of a spawn-things-and-mess-around alpha than an hey-wait-this-is-already-awesome alpha like Minecraft.