Recent reviews by Xerotion

When I stumbled on this, I had no idea that I needed this in my life. Already enjoyed the gameplay loop of Mothergunship, so why not go into VR?

I'll be totally honest, for the format and how it's designed? It works very well. It's not quite the same degree of bullet hell you'd expect from the original, but this is a great game as it's very accessible - even those not familiar but enjoy VR will find this easy to pick up and play, even with a limited space. It was a little daunting to learn how small the platform you navigate is, but it makes sense. Your actual hitbox is generally speaking, your chest and head. So in the grand scheme of things, not very big. So you don't need a huge space to bounce around dodging extremely fast projectiles. While a mode like that would be fun to have for VR vets, it doesn't detract from the gameplay.

I've only got a small amount of playtime in, but it's worth the experience you get out of it for 20$. Seriously looking forward to future updates expanding the gameplay.

For starters, I'm going to be clear - I don't play on the official servers. The base gathering rates in ARK are positively atrocious, and to play PvP in any extent, you will need a MASSIVE amount of time & a significant desire to suffer crippling losses in the span of a few minutes - and this is work that you will spend literal days amassing, within a tribe of friends.

If you're considering getting the game to play casually, you need to be able to answer 2 questions with 'yes.'
1. Do you enjoy sandboxes with no clear objectives or quest line to string you along?
2. If you want to play on a server, are you ready to dedicate a large amount of time to maintaining a base & dinosaurs?

If you're still reading, this review is for you.

So ARK has been in development for a very long time, and is a behemoth of a game that, for any new player not joining a friend or wanting to play solo, is an incredibly daunting task to learn. The sheer amount of nuance in the mechanics of ARK have a great amount of depth, but is not without faults. And unfortunately, there are quite a few that, even from early beta, still frustratingly exist. I can not possibly recommend buying the game at its base price at any level - as the quality simply does not match the price tag. Terrible mesh terrain problems, unoptimized memory consumption, absolutely gigantic downloads & patches on a near daily basis, to name the most crippling faults. Even on the Island, there are many areas where your character can be trapped falling, and your only saving grace is either death or having a flyer handy (Or if you're clever, a spare grappling hook.) And this is a massive issue within the caves, where you need to survive very powerful dinos that become that much more dangerous by these issues.

Asides that? It's genuinely fun. Each map is unique & enjoyable to certain extents, especially with boosted rates. The modding community is incredibly active and adds genuinely excellent quality-of-life mods on top of the base game. The level of detail in taming & breeding dinos, and progressing up the material crafting tiers feels like an achievement each time. It has a great deal of challenge as well - IF you pursue it. You could easily just focus on building cool structures on the beach & never put yourself through any serious challenges, and the single player level of configuration easily allows you to fine-tune your experience. All of the different kinds of dinos make each experience unique, and the ability to take your dinos with you freely to different maps along with your survivor makes it very enjoyable to experience all of the content.

Just... Seriously, don't subject yourself to suffering with playing with the base resource rates. Guantanamo Bay doesn't even subject their prisoners to that.