Arken Age Review (Shmraggon)
9/10 VR Game. Excellent all-time VR experience that I can see why is on a ton of people's 2025 VR Game of the Year shortlist. About 12-14 HRS of action adventure FPS/melee hybrid game play, The Devs managed to fix every complaint I had with the game from initial launch within 2 months with steady patches directly targeting and addressing player feedback. Extremely well polished and well performing game from such a small development team. Played with an RTX 3090ti on PSVR2 via PC adapter, and had literally no issues.
Note: the game has a lot of turning, so a cable management system, snap turning, cable guardian warnings, or a wireless headset maybe more conducive to game play. This did not really bother me. I have an overhead pulley system, and had to take my headset every 45 minutes or so and spend 10 seconds unwinding the turns in my cable.
The game is essentially a medieval Arthurian knight inspired tale, set on an alien sci-fi world. Story is decent and engaging, but not world changing. Story is told mostly through environmental storytelling, with minimal long-winded cinematic or scripted event included to drag on the game's fluidity/runtime. Nugs to collect in the world unlock more of the world's history/story, in addition to weapon modifications that can drastically change your play-style. The art design of mixing fantasy medieval with cyberpunk is very well done.
The game looks, and runs very well. Progression through the game is fairly linear. However, each level/area has good variety of layout design, with verticality, multiple paths of travel, shortcuts to unlock, swimming sections, and hidden nugs to find. The areas are a decent size, crafted in a way to be engaging combat scenarios with the enemies, encourage interesting exploration, and get you right to the action quickly.
Your character model is fully rigged, which allows for some interesting positioning during melee and gun-play. In addition, you are able to "flick out" ice picks from your wrists, which can be used to climb trees and terrain. This feature is way more awesome than it sounds, and is one of my favorite aspects of the game, as it makes exploration and movement really fun in the game, and makes my wife laugh every time I am doing it with the headset on.
The combat is fun, consisting of solid FPS gun-play with a pretty clever modification system that lets you change out and customize your pistol, rifle, and sword with different effects ranging anywhere from creating a saw-blade launcher to a plasma cannon, to the needler from Halo. Standard pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, and sniper options are available as well. The Dev did a really good job of balancing the damage and characteristics of all the melee and gun options in the game. Nothing feels bad to use, and all have their unique aspects that make them fun to swap out and play with.
Enemies are fully rigged as well, and makes melee combat really fun in this game. However, the enemies can be a little "floaty" and goofy with melee, like 80's movie rag dolls. I think this adds to the fun and charm of the game. Many parts of the enemies can be dismembered and collected for scrap to build more items in the game. The animation for beheading with the saw-blade launcher is pretty hilarious.
Enemy AI is pretty decent, where they will flank, bum rush, get into position to snipe, take cover. I do think that once your figure out their patterns, that they become a little less surprising and engaging, and a little more enemy variety would be a big plus for the game. Backpedaling in the game often leads to enemies either bum rushing you or running to the next predictable cover to snap to. This allows for you to predictably set them up into a kill-box. You start doing this instinctively, which hurts the experience.
There is no "clever girl" moment where you have backpedaled to setup a kill-box and suddenly are flanked from the side or from behind. The AI will use grenades to flush you out from cover, but the fuses are way too long, and they often do it at the same time they are running straight towards you.... which means you are shooting them in the face as you flee the grenade, or more hilariously you run past them, turn around to melee them and watch them die from their own grenade.
I really enjoy the melee combat in this game. Throwing grenades back at the enemies is super fun. The devs kind of cheat grenade throwing, where if you are in the general vicinity, the grenades will turn into a homing beacon towards the enemy. This is a nice compromise, compared to how frustrating throwing can be in most VR games. I never really found a reason to use mines.
The game's boss fights suffer the same issue most FPS games boss fights do, where it is hard to make them interesting in a shooter. However, the final boss of the game is appropriately epic, and one of the better boss encounters I have ever played in a first person shooter. The last boss fight in this game really elegantly ties together all of the elements of the game seamlessly. It is a crime that only ~10% of players have/will experience the end boss fight. I know that fight took an incredible amount of resources time and effort to put together, but they really need a similar experience before the 2 HR mark in the game (before return window), and at the midpoint of the game to hype folks up to keep going.
I am very much looking forward to what this Studio does next.