The Culling 2
Despite The Culling 2 coming out just two days ago, the game can already be declared dead. As of this posting, there is only one person playing the game. Perhaps it's a fluke but let's take a look at the bigger picture.

The game has a 24-hour peak of just 7 players. It has an all-time peak of 249 players and that was right when the game was released. These are stats pulled from Steam Charts, which you can always view for yourself via Steam Charts if you don't believe me. It also currently sits at a "Very Negative" average review score on Steam after 162 user reviews, of which only 22 are classified as positive.

For comparison, the first game has a total of seven players active within the past hour, a 24-hour peak of 21 players, and an all-time high of 12,622 players. That's not what most people would necessarily call "great," but it's still better than its sequel is doing. Hell, even Lawbreakers currently has 35 people playing and people gave that game shit all day, every day since before it was even released.

So what happened with The Culling 2?

Going by the user reviews on Steam, it seems like the biggest complaint stems from a "me-too" feeling. That is, The Culling 2 went so far out of its way to be like competing games such as H1Z1 and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds that is completely lost its own identity. The Culling was a battle royale style game with a twist. It was a game that focused heavily on melee based combat, perks, and the use of traps. It was a game with a bit of personality that managed to separate itself from the rest of the battle royale style games that have started to flood the market.

The Culling 2, by contrast, seems to focus more heavily on projectile weapons such as assault rifles, pistols, and shotguns. Whatever intriguing traits that drew players in to the first game were stripped from the sequel by the developer, Xaviant.

The Culling 2

Beyond that, there seems to be a number of technical issues that plague The Culling 2. There are many accounts of poor netcode or poor netcode prediction, too many purchasable assets, server crashes, missing animations for swimming and climbing, and apparently the list goes on. I cannot verify any of these claims myself, however. However, I did provide an excerpt from a Steam user review for The Culling 2. This person, Lowco, even include a video of nearly 3 hours of game footage if you would like to judge for yourself.
This game is beyond disappointing. Not even as a failed successor to The Culling 1, but as a video game on its own. Graphics are worse than a mobile game, character/gun models/assets all look borrowed, animations are terrible. When you bandage you hold an invisible roll of banadages and there are no quick keys for using bandages/stims (and no way to customize keybinds). Guns are hilariously unrealistic. There are no swimming or ladder-climbing animations, instead you awkwardly hop up boxes to get on top of certain structures and you just walk on top of the bodies of water lol.

If you expected a sequel to The Culling 1, this is not it. There are melee weapons but there are so many guns, melee weapons aren't viable. The announcer exists, but only in sporadic speakers throughout the map. I think I heard him twice in the 15ish games I played. Other than that, this game has nothing to do with The Culling 1.


This might be one of the quickest deaths of a battle royale release I've seen yet, especially for one that was not an "Early Access" title ahead of time. Other battle royale games have already been released into Early Access and are generating a fair bit more buzz than The Culling 2. For example, Islands of Nyne entered into Steam Early Access today and has remained fairly steady at 7,100 concurrent players. Next week, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. looking Fear the Wolves will enter into its own Early Access.

The Culling 2 has been a disaster from the start. I'm not sure there's much of anything that can be done that could salvage this mess.