Fera: The Sundered Tribes Preview

If I have any issue with survival crafting games it's that moving around can be pretty tedious because it’s usually just walking around. However, this is the area where the latest game by Massive Damage Inc., called Fera: The Sundered Tribes, wants to separate itself. I tried the Early Access to see if this game can take to the skies or if it is better left on the ground.

Firstly, Fera: The Sundered Tribes can be played in both single player and multiplayer, and, honestly, I would recommend multiplayer. The reason is that it allows you and your friends to craft your own stories, which is needed because there isn’t a plot here, so to speak. When you start, you’re not told anything; all you know is that you need to hunt monsters, and you have a primitive version of a wingsuit. This is good because your village floats above the rest of the world, so there’s really only one way down. You do get some more plot when your village elder mentions the eclipse, which respawns all the monsters and materials every three days, but even that is left pretty vague.

But who cares about the plot? None of that matters where there’s gameplay to experience. The main loop is all about gathering resources and building up our village. Fera: The Sundered Tribes introduces a mechanic about tracking animals at the start, but it never really comes up again. These beasts also make up the main combat challenge and are… interesting. While the designs for the creatures are great, the actual combat is weird. The issue is that it's based on stamina, but at the start of the game, you only have enough to do about three swings of an axe. This wouldn’t be an issue if the areas were designed around progressive challenges, but they’re really not: so it can be a struggle. 

Another issue is that this same stamina is used to gather materials. While I like the way the game has you use different weapons to harvest different materials (axe for a tree, hammer for stone, etc), it just takes so long in the early game that it becomes tedious. The gathering is also slow because you have to open a portal, and your villagers will come out and collect stuff within a certain area. Although, annoyingly, the villagers never do anything other than walk, and they’re so slow that I can gather everything before they can grab one rock. 

However, the real gameplay is the flight and aerial acrobatics, and they’re certainly interesting, to say the least. How it works is that you have a wingsuit that you can use to glide and a magical tether that can grab onto certain objects to launch yourself into the air. The flying controls are a bit temperamental, with your character never quite being sure if you want them to angle slightly down or just launch themselves face-first at the floor. Once you get the hang of using the tether to launch up and regain stamina, and then glide, it’s pretty great. The tether can be a bit weird and there are occasions when you just start spinning like mad.

While Fera: The Sundered Tribes is slow at the start, like any crafting game, it does get better as you get more stuff. However, my biggest issue is with the music and the other sounds; I don’t think I’ve played a game with more annoying music. The problem is that what it wants to convey seems to be random. I’ll be in a perfectly peaceful area and the music will go with this weird fast-paced track that conveys a sense of threat. It feels like an afterthought and it kind of ruins the feel of the game.

One thing I will praise is that the world looks amazing, and it's clear where certain things are. There’s some great imagination at work here when it comes to the biomes and what you see, heck the first time you jump off your floating plateau into the world below it looks and feels amazing, and that never really went away. However, finding other villagers is a challenge that (despite what the game tells you) it isn’t always clear where they are. 

You can turn it off but… well look, I’ll be honest: the character grunts a lot when playing, and with no music, it sounds really weird. It's like listening to a tennis match (if you know what I mean). 

Fera: The Sundered Tribes has the makings of something, but it needs a lot of work. The stamina bar is too harsh in the early stages of the game, and the combat is tedious because of it. If Massive Damage Inc. can fix that, and get better sound mixing and audio, then Fera: The Sundered Tribes could be a pretty fun time.