Like a vagrant uncle, Xaviant is back with another grift.
Let’s start this off by saying something nice about The Culling: Origins on Xbox One. The folks at Xaviant were smart enough to read the room and decided to raise the daily “free” match limit to ten from one. Yes, on launch day and now that the press has already written about their awful monetization scheme. Great works guys, I can’t for the life of me understand how The Culling has failed three times already.
To understand the kind of contempt that The Culling has for its potential audience, you just need to look at the first message to grace player screens upon logging in:
Yes, the game that you either downloaded the 24 hour demo for or paid $6 for is starting off right out the gate telling you that you’re on borrowed time and you’re going to need to pay up soon if you want to keep playing. How wonderful.
The Culling is a battle royale game that drops 16 players into an arena where they beat the crap out of each other until only one person is standing. The concept is great; you have this rock, paper, scissors approach that focuses on melee combat and rewards careful thinking. You have your basic attack that can be charged up, you can block, and you can shove. Shove stumbles block, block blocks attack, attack goes through shove.
In practice The Culling is a janky, poorly optimized, ugly, mess. Battles devolve into two people orbiting each other like chunky planets occasionally hitting one another. The cluttered UI and strawberry jam that The Culling likes smearing on the screen can make it difficult to keep track of what is going on, especially if your enemy is using items like pepper spray that completely black out your screen for far too long.
There is no logical reason why a game that looks as bad as The Culling does should chug as hard as The Culling does on an Xbox One, but somehow Xaviant managed to pull it off. Culling suffers from numerous performance issues including an inconsistent and stuttering framerate. A lot of the time when I’m walking around it doesn’t feel quite like my character is staying in sync with the map and you get a jerkiness to the movement.
The controls also feel terrible, like playing an old PS1 shooter on a controller that doesn’t track well. Movement is janky and often unpredictable in how quickly your character will turn. Animations are stiff and jilted, making it difficult to read an opponent’s movement which is only hampered further by The Culling’s pension for stuttering.
It goes without saying that the graphics in The Culling are god awful and look like assets you’d find on a free 3d sex game. I can understand why Xaviant committed to not selling cosmetics in packs. Looking through the game’s list of cosmetics I actually would find it more offensive to sell these for real money or in loot boxes for real money than it would be to charge for more than one play round per day.
If there is anything to be thankful for it looks like The Culling is once again being ignored by gamers. On launch day the game is already dead as it was with every prior iteration. For the fact that The Culling runs 16 player matches, I can confirm that none of the rounds I checked were even half full. Even worse, many matches I entered had 3-5 players in queue at the time.
At least eight or more of the players in each match were confirmed bots, and I know they were because they used the same names in offline mode.
It’s called fashion, Margaret. Learn it.
The Culling was a failed pay to play game that relaunched as a failed free to play game and is now trying to launch again as a pay to play game. How’s it going to go? If launch day interest (or lack thereof) is any indication, I wouldn’t count on this game seeing its first birthday. Nobody is playing on day one and that is considering 25 free games plus a one day free trial.
The Culling was the original battle royale game, and it died because Xaviant didn’t know how to support a game and drove their player base off to newer, better games with more capable development studios backing them. The latest iteration isn’t so much a reboot as it is a reanimated corpse brought back to life with minor alterations to hopefully grab another crumb of pocket change before it slinks off and dies for the fourth time.
MMO Fallout 