Recent reviews by Angelik

• Lost ARK is a pretty immersive experience. It is the type of game that makes you grow roots on your chair while playing. I, myself, played for 18 hours straight when it first launched. I played before on the Russian server and I loved it, so I gave it a try here as well. For a free to play game, it's awesome.

• After 60 more hours, the game mostly becomes a grind and a rinse and repeat, but that's not necessarily unpleasant. However, I am obliged to give it a negative review because of the experience I had with the technical aspects of the game.

PROS

-> Hundreds of hours of content with a progression that feels really smooth and linear.
-> Co-op oriented, I could play literally 90% of my playtime with friends.
-> Various build mechanics such as skill trees, engravings, stones etc.
-> Diverse maps, mobs, quests that generate well-written story which keeps you intrigued.
-> Stronghold and lifeskills feel quite like a relief after questing, and they are really fun to do and focus on as well sometimes.

CONS

-> It's too addictive. It's a co-op top-down Black Desert, but worse when it comes to addiction.
-> Too many quests, which are sadly the only way of leveling. Players just complete quests on autopilot till level 50 and even afterwards, and I am talking A LOT of quests.
-> Too many currencies. I honestly cannot understand why are there so many currencies for everything. Royal Crystals, Blue Crystals, Gold, Peons (why would you need a currency to BUY items at the auction house ???), Silver, Pirate Coins, Tokens bla bla bla etc. Not at all user-friendly as pointless, since you can exchange some of them to another at an awful rate.
-> Gender-locked classes. Why ?

USER EXPERIENCE (besides the actual gameplay).

• Plain f*****g awful. Almost a week after the "official" release and there are still no improvements to the servers. Queues are 10k on the new servers, can't speak for the founder ones. Wait time gets to 1 hour. When you finally enter the game, it all seems smooth till some abyssal dungeons, where the game tends to glitch and can't start or kicks players off. Say that is solved. The market malfunctions 23/24. There is also heavy traffic and it can't be accessed.
My personal experience with the store was terrible. I bought the level 50 complete pack which gave me 2600 blue crystals. I pressed buy on a skin for 820 crystals, it just bought 3 of them. The store simply malfunctioned. When I contacted the support, there was nothing they could do. So basically I have 3 identical skin packs in my inventory which I cannot trade and no more blue crystals left. Just like that.

TL;DR

• Game is a wonderful MMORPG which can get you hundreds of hours of content, but its technical aspects requires a lot of attention(and they probably won't get it), which was expected from Amazon after the New World incident. Players are just ignored when they have problems. If you're okay with that. play it.

Pros:

Some of the additions are nice to the game:

- The new faction is cool and adds some diversity to the game ( Beastmen )
- A new equipment system which is not influenced by campaign is well-suited for new or just casual players
- The new map is fun to play and even re-play for challenges
- 5 new weapons that are actually cool

Cons:

However, I think the devs rushed too much with the launch of this particular DLC.

- The 3 or 4 repetitive maps which you play on when you do weaves are extremely boring and glitchy and not optimised at all. Sometimes, when you just climb a stair, the map glitches out and you see nothing. Also, enemies teleport randomly when in large quantities.
- The weaves are not well-thought, they are really bad copies of campaign missions spiced up with extremely unenjoyable challenges.
- The apperance of beastmen on normal campaign maps after you buy the DLC destroys the whole game experience. The beastmen hit way harder than the rats and last but not least, a lot of archers can melt down a whole team. I do not think DLC content should interfere so much with starting campaign content.

Regarding Cataclysm difficulty, I cannot pronounce myself, because I have not unlocked it yet, but the elements I talked about above make this DLC not worth even 5 € for 1 map and 5 weapons.

TL;DR

Do not buy this at all if you just want to have fun. It feels like a burden after you unlock it.

Played a bit, very nice and helpful community !