Recent reviews by PhoenixFlaccus

I did almost everything there was to do in this game to distract myself from the void in my life that well adjusted adults fill with family, socializing, and constructive hobbies. At the end of the 1000 hours I began to contemplate what to do next. Start a new character like many of the other Ark players in the private server I joined have done? Start playing a different game? It led me to this existential crisis you see before you. This is a game review, though.

The first objective of Ark is to find a friendly private server community that you enjoy or setup a local instance if you want to play alone. This is because the official servers are so broken they are impossible to play on, especially if you're new. On official, if you manage to stay connected for more than 30 minutes you will enjoy lag spikes in the 10s of seconds every couple minutes and constant rubber-banding; and good luck finding a place to build. Every location on the map either has a base, or posts to prevent you from building in the area. If you manage to stay alive for a couple hours someone will find a way to grief your ♥♥♥♥ and/or kill you. Yes, even on PVE. If you manage to avoid all THAT you probably have someone helping you, but if not you will meet the obscene grind of the default game. You're an insane person if you're still continuing alone on official at this point: godspeed.

So you've played a bit solo to get the hang of the controls and gameplay, gave official servers a shot, and decided on a private server to join. The second objective of Ark is to install all of the mods that your server uses and try to get the game running. This multi-hour process will be quite a hurdle for the less technically inclined. Make sure to do lots of very thorough googling before asking anyone on the discord for help or learn to live with the shame of the snarky veterans' ridicule. To be fair, this is true of most niche communities on the internet.

The third objective of Ark is to play the content. HELL yeah. ♥♥♥♥ yeah, dude. Got those mods installed. Now it's time to play a survival mmo dinosaur simulator. This is when the game itself finally gets to disrespect your time directly. No technological middle-men here: just the grind. Like many survival games you're dropped on an island in your skivvies and have to find food, water, and materials for crafting and shelter. This is pretty straightforward early game stuff, not that there isn't a steep learning curve. You will want a tab or seven open at all times for wikis, breeding calculators, and google searching. If you have end-game goals in mind, prepare to drudge through hundreds of hours of gathering food, hunting, trapping, breeding, building and protecting your base, ect.

This is where it hooks me, though. Seeing the levels increase (however slowly), the gacha pulls of breeding for stats or colors, finding a dino with the perfect stats and trapping it, hell even trying to understand some of the mechanics of the game by looking them up because they're poorly explained in the game itself: all of this releases tiny little microdoses of dopamine to my brain and those like mine. It's fun at first but eventually you realize everything takes WAY longer than it needs to. Luckily you can fix this in settings and with mods, right? The server I joined had 3x tame speed, 3x XP, 2x material harvesting, 50% mating interval, 10x maturation speed, 10x egg hatching speed, 85% egg laying interval, 85% food and water drain, 150% cuddle grace period, 50% cuddle interval, along with other mods that add items to GREATLY reduce the grind. Despite all this it still takes tens of hours before you can tackle a cave and at least a hundred before you can tackle a proper boss. I won't go too deep into each individual grind, but see all those rates and intervals I listed? Each one is designed to waste your time in a unique way while giving that little drip of dopamine juuust to keep you engaged and on the treadmill. Some servers (like the one I joined) have additional items you can purchase for real money to even further reduce or eliminate tame times, give stats, equipment or dinos, or change your dinos colors. The color thing may sound trivial but you could spend hours trying to breed a dino with the stats and colors you want which would take days in real time due to mating and hatching timers.

"Why not just adjust the numbers further?" you ask. Well, one legitimate reason is that it encourages cooperation. I mostly did my own thing relative to other players, but trading definitely made a lot of things much less time consuming. The other, darker, insidious reason is that the mods of your server hate how easy the game is for you and detest your nerve to complain. Just who the ♥♥♥♥ do you think you are? Back when Ark came out they dealt with default timers, lack of many QoL mods, way more bugs, all manner of ♥♥♥♥ design and those sickos loved every second of hating it so much. So much that their blackened hearts can hardly bare to see you fly a Desmodus in a cave, so they inflict as much suffering as they can whilst still managing to play on the same servers; but they've been through hell. A 20min tame at 3x tame speed is baby stuff compared to waiting an hour for a brontosaurus that will die to a glitch on the way home. I can't say I blame them, honestly. It's hard stop perpetuating a cycle of violence, but hopefully it will run out of steam when <copium>Ark 2 comes out and it's perfected the formula: just the right amount of grind, has goated QoL features, and no bugs at all </copium>.

The fourth objective of Ark is to uninstall then find a therapist.

Pretty rewarding exploration and progression. Moves a little slow at times. I had to look up a couple things to progress the story but ymmv.

Very satisfying to select OP weapon combos and maneuver through thousands of enemies. Plenty of unlockables, stages, and modifiers. Great game, especially for the price.

The Yakuza stories are always very well told. This game is no exception. The gameplay is similar to Yakuza 0 with the 4 styles: Rush, Beast, Brawler, and Dragon which are all good in different situations. Tiger Drop is here and OP as ever, but it takes some time to earn. Majima Everywhere has Majima popping up around the city to fight you which will help enhance your abilities and is overall a positive addition to the game, despite him getting in the way at times. The story isn't as gripping as Yakuza 0, but that's a high bar to clear.

Adorable and fun. B.U.D. the drunk robot can't change directions while running all good, but he can grow the crap out of a star plant. Climbing with the left and right triggers on a gamepad feels really good. The cartoony art style of the game compliments the exporative nature of it in a great way. This is the first game I've 100%ed and gotten all achievements in which took about 11 hours, but the short time I had with it resonates more in my memory than games I've spent dozens of hours with. Grow Home. Get them star seeds yo.