Life is Feudal: Your Own Review

Anyway, with terraforming complete, you must then assemble the materials for constructing the shack, cutting down trees, moving logs to the building site, and sawing those logs into boards and...erm...building logs, before shifting them from your inventory to the construction window in order to erect the shack. The strict encumbrance limit means you can only carry a couple of logs at any one time, and tool breakages mean regular stops to craft new implements. You also need to spend ten minutes or so arbitrarily shaping rocks to increase the Materials Preparation skill high enough to unlock the Construction Skill. Also, you need to eat to stay alive, which either means shifting your goal to hunting, fishing or foraging for a proper meal, or guzzling down apples like smarties every fifteen minutes.

It's an astonishingly lengthy and convoluted process, and this is for the most basic structure in the entire game. Now, this in itself is not necessarily a problem, provided each of these stages is interactively compelling. Sadly the opposite is true, because you don't interact directly with anything. Instead, what you do is right-click on an object and select an action from a list of drop-boxes organised by skill. Then an animation plays out while a loading bar fills RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SCREEN, after which the action is complete. This happens for everything, even something as basic as opening a storage box. Hence you constantly feel one-step removed from the on-screen action, and every one of those actions feels identical. It's the absolute worst kind of grind, the sort that became passé when the first Everquest was popular.

The exception to this rule is combat, which is based around a surprisingly deep, direction-based system, and has the potential to be rather fun. Unfortunately, this potential is squandered due to several issues. Firstly, the skill system gates you off from all but the most basic abilities. Want to wield a longbow? Well first you need to level your slingshot and crossbow level to the appropriate number. Given how Life is Feudal aims toward a realistic depiction of medieval life, this is utterly ridiculous. If you want to learn how to use a longbow, you start by picking up a longbow, not by graduating through functionally different types of ranged weaponry. The same goes for melee weapons. Fancy cutting down your foes with a longsword? First you must learn how to...wear armour. I mean...what?

Combat encounters are fairly thin on the ground anyway, because of the size of the environment and the sparse distribution of players throughout it. Unless you put your effort into banditry or are engaged in a player-organised battle between kingdoms or communities, any combat is going to be limited to hunting. This is mildly interesting, save for the fact that animals seem to absorb a pretty hefty amount of damage before falling to arrows, another instance where the game's supposed realism flies in the face of the practicalities of play.

Sadly the problems don't end there. Performance wise the game struggles constantly. In fact, upon release the game was borderline unplayable due to stuttering and regular crashes. This has since improved through a number of hotfixes, but you're still going to require a beefy PC to enjoy even a satisfactory experience. Loading times for servers remain abysmal. The game is admittedly very pretty to look at once you're in it, and there's some fun to be had just wandering around looking at structures players have built. But this could be said about dozen more interesting survival/crafting games currently available.

Ultimately, Life is Feudal simply isn't fun to play. Having a single large server would go some way to enabling the community-focussed medieval simulation that the developers hope to provide, especially given that community is generally very friendly and willing to lend a hand. But even then, the tedious interaction and abysmally designed skill-tree suck out any enjoyment like a black hole crashing a star party. Trapped between several different genres like a failing holdfast surrounded by enemies, Life is Feudal stretches itself too thin and is eventually overwhelmed.