The Culling (Early Access)

The setup of The Culling is instantly familiar if you’re a fan of 80s and 90s action films; 16 players are dropped into a large dome containing a few abandoned buildings, some locked weapon crates and not a whole lot else. Weapons have been strewn around the island and there are air drop boxes that occasionally fall from the sky, packed full of deadly weapons. The goal is to kill everyone that isn’t you in the allotted 20 minutes. Ultra-violence ensues. Sound like fun? It is. Created by Xaviant, The Culling is a first person kill-a-thon that brings some interesting twists to your everyday death-match. The paper-thin premise is that you are a participant in a deadly gameshow where the only rule is to kill or be killed.

Come out and play

The coolest aspect in The Culling is the ability to craft items using F.U.N.C., which is crucial to your survival. Finding new items and discovering new combinations and items to craft is always pleasurable, but you need to figure it out fast, especially when you are playing online. I would recommend playing a few practice rounds first, as a lot of the exploratory joy of finding new combinations and weapons gets squashed when someone is making a hatchet in under a minute and braining you with it before you can figure out how to harvest wood. I got my ass kicked a few times until I realized that I could hammer away at a tree with a rock until a branch drops, then combine the fallen branch with my trusty rock to make a crude hatchet. There’s nothing quite like crushing a man’s skull with a weapon you created with your own two hands. It’s a special feeling you have to experience for yourself. And there are certainly a lot of bloody options just waiting to be discovered.

Be Crafty

Setting traps for enemies was a favorite of mine, and a great way to thin the herd and have some fun. Going into a building, opening lockers until you find some goodies, then booby-trapping the hell out of the doorways and waiting for someone to run in to grab the goods is both thrilling and a lot of fun. Or press the central gas button and unleash a huge wall of poisonous gas, then post up with a compound bow and wait for players to come charging out of the forest like rabbits fleeing a bulldozer. The choices are varied, entertaining, and a ton of gory fun.

The game does have a fair amount of “real” weapons, all of which must be purchased with The Culling’s in-game currency called F.U.N.C. You can acquire F.U.N.C. by killing other players, crafting, and finding it scattered around the map, usually clinging to skeletons or pieces of bloody looking meat. F.U.N.C. allows you to open the chests scattered around the island, in addition to purchasing health and other supplies in F.U.N.C. vending machines. You also need varying levels of F.U.N.C. to craft weapons, satchels and other items. Alternatively you can try and sneak up on a player and bash his brains out, and voilà! You now have everything he was carrying, from satchels that allow you to hold more weapons and items to whatever weapons the dearly departed was carrying when you put him down like a dog.

The Killing Joke

Audio-Visual Stuff

The sound in The Culling is effective and well done. Stomping through the brush, your heels clicking over a boulder, lockers banging open and closed- it all sounds realistic. Stealthily rustling through the underbrush, drawing and loosing an arrow, listening as it sinks into a players chest then charging in for the follow up melee kill all sounds how it should. As I mentioned, the announcer gets annoying, but the voice actor they got is spot-on; you can almost see him with a big toothy smile and a loud sports coat.