The Culling

If you've watched Battle Royale or even The Hunger Games, you'll instantly be familiar with the concept that underpins The Culling. In this online multiplayer title the player (or players, there's a co-op mode) are dropped into a large and detailed arena, and given one simple task: kill everyone.

This is a last man (or woman) standing affair, and from the minute you burst out of your cage at the beginning of each match you're on a constant hunt for new tools to aid you in extending your time in this digital world. Often your time there is brief, other times you can go for a while without seeing another soul, but always at some point you'll encounter other players who are all hell bent on your imminent destruction.

Conceptually we really like The Culling, and there's much to admire in its design. Crafting is simple and reasonably intuitive, and those that have played survival sims will quickly get to grips with how it all works. Elsewhere there's items hidden in crates and in cupboards dotted around the place. Players must enter buildings and rummage for supplies, or collect up FUNK from body parts and canisters placed around the world that can then be traded for more deadly weapons that are found at certain stations placed in select locations.

The constant need for health and endurance boosts, armour and equipment (including the man tracker, which does exactly what you think it does), and improved weapons, keeps players on the move, but the fixed locations of the buildings means that contestants in the macabre game are drawn to the same areas, even more so when loot airdrops appear mid-match, and you have to risk running into more heavily armed opponents if you want to grab the good stuff.

There's other elements that we found particularly pleasing, such as the scoreboard that's etched in the sky overhead. The announcer utters the odd funny quip. There's a lot of customisation options not just cosmetic but various tactic-changing perks that can be used around to enhance an individual play-style. As the match progresses the boundaries shrink down forcing players into the interior of the map and towards more frequent enemy encounters.

Combat is where, for us, The Culling falls down, and it's a real shame because so much else is executed with style and careful consideration. There are a few different weapons and attack animations, granted, but many of them don't feel particularly different beyond the damage they dish out, and they certainly don't offer much in the way of feedback. Players are generally blocking, pushing, and swiping away with whatever they've managed to rustle up before the encounter, but this system feels a bit cumbersome, clunky even.

If you've played a survival sim like Rust, or tried to kill someone with your fists in DayZ, you'll have a fair idea of what to expect here, but the melee combat in those types of sandbox survival games is never the selling point, and we were frustrated by the setup here given that the combat is the central mechanic. We wanted it to look and feel meaningful when we took a swing and hit someone with a meat cleaver, but all we were given was a dwindling health bar to admire.

Our biggest frustration with The Culling was that combat often descended into shoving matches, with people blocking powerful attacks while holding weapons that couldn't conceivably do what the simplified combat system ensured they could. On top of this, fights go on too long, and let's face it: there's only so many times you can get whacked by a deadly looking combat blade, or shot with a bolt from range, before you'd start breaking up into pieces.

After a while we were longing for a mode that let us get into quick battles, where damage received or delivered was fatally realistic. Or even better, where damage was allocated to the appropriate body parts, so shot in the leg would having you limping, a knife in the gut would slow you down as you bled out (to be fair, you can bandage up wounds), and a spear in the face would mean instant death. There's certainly room for improvement in terms of the overall combat system, but more than anything we'd like a mode where instead of all the strafing and jabbing and unrealistic blocking, we got brutal damage and quick deaths.

The slow and cumbersome combat occasionally leads to what feels like a drawn out match (especially when you don't run into another player for ages), but that's not a big issue, and we were mostly impressed by the overall pacing. In fact, the way Xaviant draws in a match to its conclusion is just another example of something they've executed well. Another is that you can't jump into matches with a co-op buddy outside of the co-op mode, and even strangers can't team up on an ad hoc basis, and they've gone a great job of ensuring it stays a free-for-all. You can play a private match if you've got the numbers, but we also found that if you boot up at the same time as a friend or two, you'll often drop into the same match.

Played alone or with friends, there's much to admire in The Culling, but there's work to be done if we're going to be convinced by the combat. Trading blows in the deadly game is certainly acceptable, but it could be so much better, and a couple of overly simplistic systems in this one key area are contrasted by a wealth of clever design decisions made elsewhere. How much can be changed ahead of its final release remains to be seen, but we'll be keeping an eye on this one to see how it develops.