Life is Feudal: Your Own is definitely a product of our ongoing craze and love for the survival, sandboxy, constructive and destructive genre, while taking another step towards its logical extremes. The game is a beautiful one, the graphics and the lighting do not fail to impress, which helps bring life to a vast world filled with trees, mountains, swamps, beaches and the ocean itself. Although at the time of writing the game is clearly an Early Access one with plenty of missing features, what's there is evidently plenty to hook people in.

The game gives you plenty of options on how you'd like to play it. You can set how fast or how slow your skills level up, from a glacial crawl to rocketing into masteries. You can set skill caps, either letting the player master every profession, or give them just enough to master one and dabble in one or two others. The latter adds an incredible amount of flavour, where you see farmers who are actual farmers, carpenters who are actual carpenters. They've specialized, they've mastered their trade, and although they may have the ability to help out here and there, they'll never become the town's second blacksmith. To some this may sound bad, but look at it this way: this is Life is Feudal. You're building a town, and in this town everyone, every player, has a purpose. They become gears in a grander machine, where everyone relies on everyone else.

In that kind of game, on that kind of server, you won't find that one guy that's a master blacksmith, carpenter, architect, herbalist, and so on. You won't find a massive castle built by a single person, vast and full of every imaginable thing, but equally lonely. During my play I was invited to join a town. A small one, admittedly, but immediately the community became evident and clear. You had farmers with their plots outside the walls. You had the blacksmith with his shop, a herbalist with another. I was lucky enough to be apprenticed as a carpenter, witnessing wood cutters at work, hauling timber to their newest farmhouse.

That doesn't mean it has to be though. If you're the kind of person that prefers the Minecraft approach, worry not! As I mentioned before, the skill rates are completely up to you. If you want to master the art of logging from peeling the bark off a tree, you can set those settings up and just jump in. You'll be able to master every skill and build your own little kingdom. This goes in multiplayer as well, meaning you can have a small group on a high skill rate server that'll be able to rival a low skill rate server's larger community.

Nothing is perfect however, and this goes doubly for early access. I don't fault the game for any of its bugs or glitches, but it helps that I honestly didn't run into many. The only thing that actually showed up was that sometimes items wouldn't load in and I had to restart the game. No crashes, no memory leaks, no massive frame drops out of nowhere. The frame rate, admittedly, was pretty awful even on the lowest settings, but that's par for the course during early development. It can only get better. Yet this doesn't leave me with a lot of complaints! The UI is a little clunky, but that tends to be cleaned up during development. Wolves are a bit deadly when you're starting off as well, making running into one early on a deadly affair -- and honestly, that's about it.

There's already a good selection of servers out there with a modest but dedicated population, too. For anyone who's been seeking a game like this, I find it easy to recommend. Just be warned; this may be a little too hardcore for a jump directly from Minecraft, at least for some players. For the rest, that's most definitely a good thing!

Life is Feudal: Your Own is definitely a product of our ongoing craze and love for the survival, sandboxy, constructive and destructive genre, while taking another step towards its logical extremes. The game is a beautiful one, the graphics and the lighting do not fail to impress, which helps bring life to a vast world filled with trees, mountains, swamps, beaches and the ocean itself. Although at the time of writing the game is clearly an Early Access one with plenty of missing features, what's there is evidently plenty to hook people in. The game gives you plenty of options on how you'd like to play it. You can set how fast or how slow your skills level up, from a glacial crawl to rocketing into masteries. You can set skill caps, either letting the player master every profession, or give them just enough to master one and dabble in one or two others. The latter adds an incredible amount of flavour, where you see farmers who are actual farmers, carpenters who are actual carpenters. They've specialized, they've mastered their trade, and although they may have the ability to help out here and there, they'll never become the town's second blacksmith. To some this may sound bad, but look at it this way: this is Life is Feudal. You're building a town, and in this town everyone, every player, has a purpose. They become gears in a grander machine, where everyone relies on everyone else. In that kind of game, on that kind of server, you won't find that one guy that's a master blacksmith, carpenter, architect, herbalist, and so on. You won't find a massive castle built by a single person, vast and full of every imaginable thing, but equally lonely. During my play I was invited to join a town. A small one, admittedly, but immediately the community became evident and clear. You had farmers with their plots outside the walls. You had the blacksmith with his shop, a herbalist with another. I was lucky enough to be apprenticed as a carpenter, witnessing wood cutters at work, hauling timber to their newest farmhouse. That doesn't mean it has to be though. If you're the kind of person that prefers the Minecraft approach, worry not! As I mentioned before, the skill rates are completely up to you. If you want to master the art of logging from peeling the bark off a tree, you can set those settings up and just jump in. You'll be able to master every skill and build your own little kingdom. This goes in multiplayer as well, meaning you can have a small group on a high skill rate server that'll be able to rival a low skill rate server's larger community. Nothing is perfect however, and this goes doubly for early access. I don't fault the game for any of its bugs or glitches, but it helps that I honestly didn't run into many. The only thing that actually showed up was that sometimes items wouldn't load in and I had to restart the game. No crashes, no memory leaks, no massive frame drops out of nowhere. The frame rate, admittedly, was pretty awful even on the lowest settings, but that's par for the course during early development. It can only get better. Yet this doesn't leave me with a lot of complaints! The UI is a little clunky, but that tends to be cleaned up during development. Wolves are a bit deadly when you're starting off as well, making running into one early on a deadly affair -- and honestly, that's about it. There's already a good selection of servers out there with a modest but dedicated population, too. For anyone who's been seeking a game like this, I find it easy to recommend. Just be warned; this may be a little too hardcore for a jump directly from Minecraft, at least for some players. For the rest, that's most definitely a good thing!