Wolfire Games just released an official alpha for its new game Overgrowth (http://www.wolfire.com/overgrowth).  Overgrowth is the sequel to the classic indie title Lugaru (http://www.wolfire.com/lugaru) which achieved fame for its fast-paced, physics-based melee combat.  While Overgrowth will inherit Lugaru’s tried and true fighting system, it will also be exploiting every cutting edge feature that Wolfire’s new Phoenix Engine has to offer.  The alpha includes the beginnings of Overgrowth’s map editor and showcases the game’s terrain with advanced effects like, multi-sampled HDR framebuffer objects, dynamic blurred cube maps for ambient lighting, object and tangent space normal maps and atmospheric haze (just to name a few).

Even though Wolfire is just a small independent games company, Overgrowth’s graphics seem to be on par with AAA titles.  Screenshots of the Phoenix Engine are available on the Wolfire Blog (http://blog.wolfire.com/) and updates are coming fast.