At first glance, Scavengers doesn’t do anything particularly new. All of its elements are relatively familiar. At first glance, it’s your run-of-the-mill third-person multiplayer shooter with scavenging and crafting elements. Actually playing it, though, reveals a highly compelling player-versus-environment-versus-player genre mashup that is well on track to being greater than the sum of its obvious parts.
In Scavengers, the Scourge are alien parasites that came to earth after an asteroid crashed into Earth, plunging our planet into perpetual winter. Ice storms of varying categories – Category 1 being easily survivable and Category 5 being highly lethal, much like the classification of hurricanes – constantly swirl around the landscape. The Scourge have infected plenty of creatures, from people (called Outlanders) to bears (think South Park’s ManBearPig), and it’s just one more nasty force to deal with.
Source: IGN.com Scavengers Wants to Totally Nail 'Coopetition'