Recent reviews by Xarian

This game has relatively few features, overly simplistic graphics that consist mostly of flat or slightly curved polygon with a basic texture applied, and a dizzying (literally) UI that left me both bored and headachy. Different sections of the game - editor, career screen, whatever - all have a separate load screen that takes a second or two, even on a fast PC.

As far as dizzying - take a look at, for example, the tech tree shown in their highlight screenshots. It'd 3d, angled, and can be hard to read. It's essentially a textbook example of bad UI design - a simple 2d menu would have been easier to use, more visible, and less headache-inducing.

There were essentially no sounds. I don't recall any auditory feedback at all, except for a bang or two when landing hard, or when exploding. I was driving around motorized vehicles on dirt - not exactly silent.

All in all, the game feels coarse and unfinished. If you're a veteran of these types of games, like me, you'll probably be disappointed.

This game is unfinished,

The story is rather rushed and somewhat poorly written. Sorry, Author.

absolutely not ready for release

I'm leaving a "do not recommend" on this simply because there's no middle option.

This game is legitimately fun, and the vast majority of the people are normal people who also like to have fun. Most folks - that is, normal people - are pretty understanding if you're new or just bad at the game.

The game balance is generally good between the classes, but there are a few that miss the mark. Fortunately, most of these are on the side of "too weak" rather than "too strong", so they don't really ruin the game; if you get one of the "weak" classes, you have to spend more time on the social (rather than strategic) part of the game. Also, the developers do go in and change things up to add/remove/fix things over time.

However, the community is meh. There are a few people who can and will ruin your experience if you play even slightly differently than the way that *they* think you should play, for any reason, and bizarrely the developers back those people up (when literally their best course of action would be to do nothing - raging guy gets to go sit by himself, and everybody else gets to move on with their lives). These toxic players drive away the "normal" players, and eventually all you're left with is, unsurprisingly, toxic players. Sometimes this is due to players just getting fed up with toxicity, but it's also sometimes due to the developers banning people for not playing "correctly". For example - you're not allowed to lie about your class if you're not neutral or mafia (cult/unseen). Why? Because the developer thinks that you shouldn't be able to play that way - not because it isn't occasionally useful (for example - because you think the king is evil, because you think that your allies won't protect you if you're a vulnerable class, because you don't want to make yourself an Assassin target, etc).

The developer is also fairly toxic and has some weird ego issue. All you have to do is look at the responses to the negative reviews for this game. The developer tries to "prove" that their game is good by arguing with negative reviewers.

I have no interest in being attacked by some random game developer simply because I don't enjoy being attacked by random game developers or told that I'll be banned if I don't play to whatever the "meta" is at a given time.

Very well written.

For all of its good points, the game relies way too much on random number generators. It's simply not fun to re-play missions over and over again with literal rolls of the dice deciding on whether or not you get to actually continue playing.

When I got this game, I was hoping for at least a Dawn of War 2.5

However... the missions are slow (like, you spend about 70% of your time waiting for resources or simply walking across the map) and not very interesting. The units are extremely similar and the "micromanagement" is silly. The art is quite lazy - about half of the projectiles in the game (including Lascannons, Missile Launchers, and Wraithguard) basically look like "plasma machine guns".

There aren't really any mechanics that make it interesting, either. No cover, no height or flanking bonuses or anything like that. You just throw your units at the enemy and make sure to use each unit's unique ability whenever you can.

Your elite units are basically the entire battle, and the non-elites (with the exception of some tanks) are just cannon fodder. And seriously cannon fodder - the "rock paper scissors" elements are massive, and you could easily lose several "paper" units in one attack because someone brought the "scissors" unit. I really like counters to certain units, but it's pretty silly in this game, even compared to previous Dawn of War titles; for example one volley from some rocket launcher-wielding enemies will destroy a tank, but won't even put a scratch on an infantry squad.

I really wanted to like this game. I've been a big fan of the DOW series from the very beginning, and I was excited to see where the franchise was going after DOW 2. But this game is basically an "insert generic RTS game here" with some 40k models slapped on top of it.

I did like the voice acting and character models, however. But that's not enough to carry a game.

Do you enjoy spending hours upon hours doing mindless things that barely affect the game, only to have them destroyed in a matter of seconds by game bugs, malicious players, or random things that spawn directly on top of you? If so, this game is for you.

If, on the other hand, you are a fan of development studios that work to improve their game - such as by fixing year-old game bugs present since day 1 release, making gameplay more fun, or allowing you to do something other than stare at an unconscious dinosaur for 10 hours - then you should go play something else. You certainly won't find any of that with ARK.

Despite the "early access" tag, this game has hardly changed since its initial release, except for different flavors of dinosaur. The development studio has not fixed any bugs in 14+ months - the day that it was released - even severe and common ones, such as falling through the world or animals literally sticking 80% of their bodies through walls. The studio has instead elected to put in new pieces of structures and dinosaurs and ignore game-crippling bugs. All new content is gated through progressively increasing time requirements. I am not exaggerating about 10+ hour times to tame a single dinosaur, and I am likewise not exaggerating how frail any actual progress in the game is - purely due to bugs. This is well-beyond any actual difficulty found in survival games.

Further, performance is horrible. Even top-end systems find themselves struggling due to the exceptionally poor optimization; the game features zero geometry culling, for example, which means that every polygon of every object within range is rendered, whether you can see it or not. This is most noticeable on PvP servers, where you can usually see the inside of other players' bases before you can see the exterior walls. Like every other bug, this has been reported many times by players and was even prioritized for fixing by the development studio - then quietly removed from any sort of priority lists and forgotten completely.

Playing on remote (non-LAN) servers is also an exercise in frustration, as rubber-banding is ceaseless and caused by somewhere between 5 and 10 separate bugs. You will often find yourself fighting against dinosaurs that pin you inside rocks or their own bodies thanks to a lack of proper collision handling. Harvesting corpses is likewise plagued by the same issues, which may find you wandering around swinging your tool at empty space in the hope of finding the location where the server thinks the corpse is located. Oh, and let's not forget the official servers, where the severs freeze for 10-30 seconds roughly every 5 minutes, warping you back and re-queuing whatever actions you tried to perform during that time - which may involve interacting with buildings that you are no longer near. To make up for the very obviously exploitable behavior of ARK's client-server interaction, they chose to implement an anti-cheat program rather than fix even a single piece of the underlying problem.

This game is not worth your time.

Firstly: this is not a game. Your character makes zero decisions. You have literally zero options in this "game".

This isn't even interactive fiction - there's no interaction. You walk around looking at things, while your personal voice tells you how much of a piece of ♥♥♥♥ you are. Your character is mean to himself and mean to others. There is no insight into depression whatsoever.

Again, you don't get to make a single decision in the game. It's just a poorly-written short story and a waste of the 20 minutes or so that it takes to finish.

Don't buy this steaming turd. If you want an actual game with depression as a theme, there are better ones out there that actually let you play them.