Life is Feudal is a game full of big ideas and big landscapes but suffers from poor execution.

It is a sandbox game with a huge offering of 64-players (max) per server, with a MMO planned for sometime next year and is published by Bitbox Ltd. It is similar, in premise, to Minecraft in that the player is responsible for entertaining themselves by shaping the world around them to better suit their whims. However, it lacks the polish and streamlined gameplay which would make it stand out when compared to other games in this genre.

This game starts off with a real RPG feel to it. You pick a character from 3 different races, then modify their appearance and select their starting stats. Pretty standard stuff. However, once you enter the game world the real potential of the game becomes apparent.

You are dropped into a vast wilderness with no goal and no direction. So what do you do? In short, you survive by any means necessary. Foraging for materials, crafting tools, hunting food and manipulating the environment around you to make your life easier. Every action you do, from foraging to building, will give you experience points. This is an excellent idea as it allows the player to dynamically shape a character to fit their unique play style.

The player is awarded with very little experience points for each action they do. That said the base experience multiplier is 10, but can be set all the way to 1,000 if the players chooses. I can understand why this system was implemented as it prevents players from getting really powerful at every facet of the game and makes them focus on one or two skill trees. The lower end of the experience multiplier not only gives the game a harder factor turns the early gameplay time into a grind as the player is not as generously rewarded for completing tasks.

Each task can be performed by opening a context sensitive actions menu and / or assigning actions such as digging or chopping to a hot-key.

The player then needs to search for the relevant action group for the task they want to perform and then select the task from a sub list connected to this group. An example of this is when I tried to dig a hole. I had to place my cursor on a patch of ground, then open the actions menu and select the terraforming action group. From there I had to select the “lower terrain” option from the sub list. Once selected it would take around two seconds to perform the action. I had to do this about five times before I started to notice a slight depression in the terrain I was trying to dig in. This action and many others are obviously alot easier if you opt to assign to a key.

The sound is probably the best part of this game. The music score has a real medieval vibe to it, violins and cellos ebb and flow, strumming out slow melodies that soar to phenomenal crescendos and fade to soft but intense refrains. This is accompanied by loud footsteps and soft calls of hidden animals, conveying the feeling of a vast, expansive and somewhat hostile world.

While this sound design helps to immerse the player in the world and purveys a sense of scale to the player’s actions, this falls apart when the player interacts with the world around them and the lack of feedback a player receives from their actions, which I will discuss a little later on.

The graphics are a real downside to the game.

Low quality character models, low quality environments and poor, janky animation combine to hinder the player’s engagement with the world around them. The developers would have been better to utilise a less realistic art style, similar to such games as Borderlands and Minecraft. An art style less GPU intensive. This would allow for a more streamlined and polished game, and have the added benefit of becoming its own unique moniker which rises above the original game and becomes iconic.

The poor animation further creates a feeling of frustration due to the unbelievable response of the surrounding environment to player’s actions. The felling of trees fells unsatisfactory and comes across as stupid. You cut down a tree, an act which provides poor visual stimulation in the first place, only to have a log pop into existence beside you and the undamaged tree to fall through this log and disappear from the world. They could have animated this much better and made it more believable to the player that they are actually cutting down a tree.

This is not an isolated case in the game. Digging has a similar unsatisfactory impact on the surrounding environment. If the player decides to dig a hole, their action is met by a sub-par and unbelievable digging animation. Only to have, upon completion of the timer, a minor level difference in the ground which is barely noticeable.

There is very little that will keep someone occupied with this game for any extended period of time. Once leaving, I cannot see myself returning to the world anytime soon. The potential replay factor for this game is minimal at best as the alternative characters do not provide enough of a variation to affect gameplay.

Life Is Feudal is a title with big ideas, but the negatives in the game hamstring it too much to differentiate it from the mass of other sandboxes out there. It does not have any real stand out selling point with its potential getting lost in a sea of mediocrity.

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Pulse is more of an experience rather than a game. It engulfs the player in a cocoon of warm, rich tones hindered by undulating optical stimuli, without providing much gameplay more complex than walking and jumping.

The Canadian studio, Pixel Pi Games published this ambitious game with the help of Kickstarter. Their choice of name is quite apt as the game pulsates with excellent ideas and concepts, however, some are poorly executed and these flaws take away from its overall enjoyment.

You play as Eva, a blind girl who has developed the ability to see the world around her using sounds. She is portrayed as a silent protagonist who is more pulled along by the story rather than driving it. There is very little character development and it is difficult to identify with any of the characters. This creates an uninteresting story that adds a real sense of detachment from the game.

The plot is divulged to you by a one-eyed crow in piecemeal and vague sentences which appear to be nonsensical. It is not eminently clear what is happening in the story as the crow’s words flash on screen in short sentences, which dissolve faster than they can be read and are often lost in the background.

Pulse includes interesting gameplay concepts which revolve around sound and vision. The base gameplay is quite simplistic, with very basic and easy puzzles. The player does not interact with the world in any substantial way. You will spend your time moving forward, walking between each check point. The only interaction comes in the form of picking up and throwing these small creatures called Mokos. These creatures are used to solve puzzles and help to open doors.

The real challenge comes from the visual aspects of the game. As the main character is blind, the world materialises around you in pulses of colour as you walk.Winds howl round structures, footsteps echo and reverberate off walls, slowly building the world around you as you move. To stop is to let the world dissolve into darkness punctuated with red eyes ever staring, ever watching you.

It is an intriguing concept as it attempts to model the concept of sound waves painting the world around the vision impaired player.

The downside to this idea impacts gameplay and the player’s enjoyment quite considerably. One consequence of the visuals appearing and dissolving in waves originating from noise sources is that it makes the environment difficult to see. I constantly lost my way, bumped into terrain and had difficulty traversing obstacles all because I could not see or judge distances due to flashes of colour.

These flashes of colour had a secondary negative effect.

These pulsating waves regularly gave me headaches after short periods of play. I can see this causing problems for people with epilepsy. I do not suffer from epilepsy, however, I did feel a lot of discomfort from this visual effect. They could have lessened the impact of the flashes by slowing down the frequency of the pulses and increase the time the images remain on the screen before dissolving to blackness.

The sound is most definitely the highlight of the game. Rich tones permeate and resonate throughout. From your footsteps, to rain drops and the wind howling through openings in some of the environments structures, these lavish and profound tones produce and engrossing and enriching experience. Upon booting the game, I sat listening to the sound of water dripping onto a cave floor for about 5 minutes. I was completely blown away by the intense sound as it reverberated within my headphones. This is one game that must be played using headphones. Speakers do not have the same effect as the beautiful tones are diluted by background noise.

I cannot imagine playing through this game again. While the sound is fantastic, it is overshadowed by the boring gameplay and nauseating visual effects. There was very little that kept me engaged with the game and it became a struggle to finish it. The game could be more engrossing if the visuals didn’t cause headaches. It broke the immersion of the game and prevented engagement with the story.

Pulse is a game of positives and negatives. Small facets of the game are exceptional and will leave you wanting more.

However, the interesting and exciting parts are eclipsed by the unpleasant visual effects and insipid storyline. If you do not get nausea from pulsating lights, colours and images, you may be able to find more enjoyment from this game then I did. However, I can’t recommend this game to people who suffer from epilepsy or sever motion sickness.

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