Ark: Survival Evolved Review (Vixikats)
I cannot fathom how a game like this could last this long and be developed for this long without ever iterating or improving on the actual game design, EVER.
Every system in this game is like it was designed by a 9th grader and implemented by a 7th grader. The ONLY things going for this game are:
A) It has dinosaurs
B) It has base building
THAT'S IT.
Seriously. The only possible thing that makes this game fun rely 100% on having a community that's fun to play with, in spite of how dreadful every facet of the experience that Ark tries to serve to you is. Ark is never fun because of the game mechanics. It's fun in spite of the game mechanics.
The taming mechanics are absurdly unintuitive, not engaging in the least, and do not pass any metrics of good game design.
The level system and dinosaur stats have no rhyme or reason and seem arbitrary at best and deliberately useless at worst.
The spawning system has no purpose or reasoning behind it. Max level dinosaurs and alphas can spawn at the starting locations just as often as anywhere else, meaning there's both no reason to go anywhere outside of finding new dinos, and, critically, zero protections from getting overrun with a bad start. It was literally implemented as, "Hurp derp. dino_level = rand(1,130); spawnDino();"
Breeding is like it was just picked out of a hat at random and thrown together in 15 minutes and never touched since then.
The progression system and bosses have no bearing on one another and you can effectively play the entire game without ever looking at a boss and you'll have lost nothing of value. And what bosses you do choose to fight aren't interesting fights at all. They just stand there, smacking your inevitable horde of tames like two morons trading slaps until one side falls over.
In fact, that's literally all of combat in the game is standing face-to-face with another creature and slapping each other until one of you falls over. Sitting in the heaviest armor with the max HP and weapons is literally the most effective way to play the game.
None of the game's fundamental mechanics have any cohesion. They're all completely separated and divorced from one another on all levels logically and functionally. Each independent system has as much iteration and design potential thrown into it that a literal child would.
This game, PixArk, and now "Survival Ascended", all had the potential to be great games, but instead, the absolutely pathetic studio designers would rather focus on shameless cash grabs relying on pretty graphics to fool you into believing the game is worth anything, instead of spending the same amount of effort hiring someone who actually knows how to make games fun and who might actually be able to turn this colossal shitstorm of high-def assets into a functional gaming experience that doesn't need to rely on a laundry list of mods to make 1) work, 2) performant, and 3) fun.
A company that can make as much money as Studio Wildcard and still have this ass of gameplay in their game is honestly unfathomable in game development. It's lead by a bunch of sociopaths with zero care for actually making a game and who want to find as many ways of peddling the same dross over and over again to the masses driven by nostalgia for a game that never existed.
You took advantage of a community for a decade. A community that prayed that you would take your cobbled-together product with infinite potential and polish it into the game they believed it could be. But they were duped. Every last one of us. Once you got your money and 15 minutes of fame, you jacked the price of your shitty alpha test to triple and you genuinely thought you deserved it and never bothered to finish it.
I mean, why would you? The community was already lapping your piss off the floor. Why actually bother to make the game good if you can just exploit the hype instead? You never have to do any real work and you make the same amount of money.
Yeah, fuck you, Studio Wildcard. Fuck this dogshit ass game that we tried so hard to enjoy in spite of your presence. Fuck Survival Ascended and fuck Ark 2. It's gonna be the exact same game as this. Dogshit. You will fix nothing. You will serve slop and you will demand the masses enjoy it because you have actually, unironically, drank your own kool-aid and you believe you are God's gift to game development. You fucking suck at developing video games and until that changes, this review will stand.
Eat shit.