ARK: Survival Evolved - Early Access Review

Since I heard about a survival MMO with dinosaurs, my interest was peeked. After debating long and hard about my interest in joining the Alpha process, I held back until it came to Steam on the early access program. With Jurassic World just around the corner, its safe to say that this release is a big one which has seen almost 50,000 people on at this very moment. One of those being myself and I've thoroughly enjoyed myself. Its nature as an early access game means that the review is based on what I saw from day 1 onwards but it has seen a few gigs worth of updates since then to improve its optimization issues.

So ARK is a game you may have heard about. In fact, you should have heard about it. The game is a survival world dominated by dinosaurs. Your aim is to live, tame creatures and make your way to the end game bosses. Now its been a week since I started this review. Why I've taken so long? I got incredibly involved with the game. I'm now sitting on around 30 hours of gameplay with a crew of about 10 people starting out on a new server and we are no where near the end game. As an online experience, it is one of the best I have ever had. From starting off with a humble straw hut as I wandered around solo trying to navigate the map, my area and the gain a general understanding of the creatures that rule over the land. Its safe to say that you will spend some time trying to level up and gain better access to food. Although a little punishing to begin with, once you get a feel for the lay of the land, starting up is an easy task, as long as you don't wander near any of the carnivores.

So, for its early access release, there is just over 50 creatures in game from the little Dodo to the end game Dragons. With towering Brontosaurs and T-Rex there is a wide variety to see all across the map. So the work that has gone into them is extreme and stands to reason why the game is so poorly optimized. With a minimum requirement of 4GB of RAM, the understanding is that it should run at a fairly decent quality at that point, however, this is not the case. To run the game at medium settings,

my 8GBs are having trouble keeping up at times. Framerates can fluctuate at 10-15 with background processes or windows in the background or 15+ without it but no where near a decent 25FPS to give smoothness to the lower qualities. Even those with extreme PCs struggle with its epic scaling. Alongside this we have characters never leaving the server. Unconscious bodies litter small huts and bases, ripe for the picking. Without a wooden hut or a secure base, don't expect to be alive when you come back. Raiding is rife and you are a prime target when near a spawn.

Its not the only bug, but this is a game that only appeared officially to the public on the 2nd and is already blowing other games out of the water. With a plan that looks towards the groups developing a console version for the Xbox One and PS4 in a little over a year, early access is only a step at drawing attention and hopefully will become the first survival game to actually come out of early access without suffering from the DAY-Z syndrome.

ARK is incredibly fun. Taming creatures and working together as a group to achieve a goal is great but its so much more than that. The exploration and online community make it that much better. Unofficial servers draw the better groups of people and these people instantly talk to you and give you a helping hand if you're out and about on your own walking for 30 minutes with nothing but a Dodo to keep you company. RIP Billy, you fought that Megladon like a champion, you will be remembered. They share food, dive in to help you fight something or invite you to their tribe. As a tribal unite, the game only exceeds expectations. Never fight alone again and wage a war with a rival faction and enjoy the company.

Get this game, participate in an online community that are excited and passionate. Play in a world where you can ride a T-Rex into battle and fly a giant eagle across the skies, who wouldn't like it!? 8/10!

Hatred - Quicky Review - Just because you can, doesn't mean you should...

You've most likely heard of Hatred if you have anything to do with the gaming circles. News of the so-called hyper violent top-down shooter couldn't have arrived at a worse time. This is because Hatred places you as a mass-murderer. Given a multitude of weapons, your only aim is to kill and massacre everything in some sort of holy crusade. When news broke about this, there were several mass school shootings and murders , so this glorification of violence to this degree has struck quite a few nerves. Understandably, the game thrived because of the controversy, as did GTA in it's fledgling years, but Hatred took it a step further. By claiming that they have creative freedom, they appealed to a lot of the hardcore free-speech members of the internet gaming community but was it really necessary? My opinion, not really. Its a bit insulting to say such a thing when you know your games only aim is to kill innocent people without an ounce of sympathy with an extremist. Without any justifiable story behind the character or why you pursue the actions, the game is simply senseless. It doesn't help that the achievements are rewarded for killing people, more specifically cops with certain achievements rewarding you for over 1000 kills.

The so called story is that our nameless lead hates the world. Everyone else is evil and inherently bad and the world must be cleansed. With little quips and quotes eerily reminiscent of an extremist, its a god given crusade. I hate it. Over top-down shooters have a form of narrative no matter how simple. This is really just killing people for the shit of it. Is it ground breaking for gaming? No. Its not innovative and its not creative. Levels are lacklustre, the art style is fitting but requires polish and the system is slugish. With a recommended settings such as 8GB of RAM and a multitude of others, the game is slow. It assaults the system with specs that are exuberant of what it should really be. Its poor optimization means that the framerate plummets and the game lags behind. My gaming laptop is nothing short of expensive and powerful for what it is but to have an issue running a top-down shooter is absurd.

As I mentioned above, the level design isn't great. Repetitive corridors, streets and homes with a few explosive barrels indicate what to shoot and general movement through them is hampered when you keep getting stuck on trees or in doorways. Everything looks very copy and paste and the art works makes the game a nightmare to play.The black and white often blends the aiming cursor meaning its almost impossible to see at the best of times. Not including the fact that its general movement speed is awful. Our lead is a combination between She-Hulk and Medusa with long black hair that flails around frantically at walking pace and gets even worse when running faster than Usain Bolt and a voice that grates more than Steve Buscemi's teeth. Other than that. The guns and general action were quite good but the AI is atrocious. Planned to make it easier to kill? I don't know but when you have simple civilians wandering around without a care while you murder the rest of the population, you would think running away would be the basic reaction. Nope, they run at you and nudge you along gently in their efforts. Then finally the set pieces. I never realised how poorly constructed American homes were. Everything falls apart on a blocky fashion, as if the walls are only made of plywood from a single round of buckshot. 

As a shooter, Hatred could have been a great game. With a few tweaks and a major overhaul of its premise, it may have been far more enjoyable. I agree with the argument for freedom of creation but just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should. The creators should really take a step back and look at what they've done. They have caused a big stir and put themselves on the map for the time being but as an independent group, funding will run dry and its employees may struggle to get work when they're associated with this project that they all seem to be so proud of.

Overall the game is a bit of a disappointment. I wasn't expecting the release trailer to show the complete introduction to the game and I was really hoping for something that had an interesting story to coincide with its dark premise and at least give some sort of reasoning or next level philosophy. Instead I was caught up in they hype for a generic shoot-em up that used shock to sell a game that is glitchy, poorly optimized, slow and unnecessary.Because its on release and there has been about 3 updates since I came off yesterday, I can't attack its optimization solely so the game gets 5/10. Its no Hotline Miami and its certainly not worthy of its fame, much like Kim...

Armello review - A good first step but a long 9999 to go.

Armello Early Access review

This card placing, dice throwing, role-playing board adventure game has been in early access on steam for a while. With its colourful cartoon art style and its so called strategic game-play, it was immediately peaking my interest.

Now, playing board games isn’t something I generally do, unless in the middle of a blackout with the family after the battery on my tablet has died. Let alone playing digital board games on the computer which is also damn useless in a blackout. In fact the last digital game that involved a dice was Mario party 5 back in 2005 on the Gamecube, due to the fact that I generally get very little entertainment from games which are determined from the outcome of a dice roll, and itself involve very little knowledge or skill to win, I was generally surprised on how much time I actually spent with this game. 

The context of the game is that the world of Armello is under threat. The Rot is creeping in, corrupting the land, spawning monstrous creatures that terrorise villages while it plagues the King slowly turning him mad. You play as one of the four Anthropomorphic animal heroes on a journey across Armello to take the throne for yourself and your clan and save the kingdom. 

Reading it back to myself it does sound like a fairy tale adventure, straight out of a children's book with its bright and colourful animations. Each card in the game looks amazing, each has a unique animated picture that really bring the game to life, to the extent that I wanted to see every card. Luckily there is a gallery mode to admire every card you play.
 

Players must travel across a hexagonal tiled game board to reach randomly placed quest tiles, which upon arrival are given 3 choices to a problem for example a abandoned kart in the road do you do option A,B or C. This is the so called "role-playing" portion of the game however, there seems to be no consequence to the choices you make making it fairly irrelevant to the gameplay thus shaping weak role-play. No matter which choice you make, upon completion you gain prestige, a currency to win the game, which is a bit too easy to acquire.

The most satisfying about Armello is the combat which is very much decided by chance with the roll of your dice. It is possible to win the game without fighting a single opponent or other player, you can easily hinder other players adventure using traps and magic which cost gold or magic.

Armello is the first initial project of “League Of Geeks”. The Australian indie game company originally announced Armello to be released as an Ipad exclusive which has still yet to be released, however they later made it available for Windows, Mac and Linux through the Steam client. You can still feel the initial tablet interface through the game play and I would Say the game would be more enjoyable with a touch pad interface.

League Of Geeks did start a Kickstarter campaign to raise a massive $200,000 to increase development to full time and for the extra support to the multiple platforms, which is pretty daring feat to ask for. By being a funder of the game, League of Geeks offered bonus content on release of the game with 4 extra characters known as the “Bandit clan” and access to another 4 which would come available as DLC to non backers, and it worked. To this date they have raised over $300,000 with 6239 backers and more money coming in with the early access on steam. 

The game looks promising, with its beautiful animations standing out, however it does come with, in my opinion a few problems. On single player watching the A.I take its turn was painful with only their character model moving a few spaces on the board which gets dull very quickly. The idea of setting traps, which in the game is known as perils is fairly worthless as players can just step out of the way. With each character having its strengths and weakness it both limits the player on what victory they can achieve making the multiple victory options pointless. The A.I. constantly starts fights with NPCs which it gains no merit from defeating, in this case the kings guard. Rot victory impossible! Gaining that much rot before the king dies isn’t possible. You have to be defeated by rot creatures to gain rot points which also immediately ends your turn. You have to lose to a rot creature every turn to have a value higher then the kings which is madness! I understand that the game is still in development with the early access but the rules of the game need a lot of revision. Despite all its initial flaws I actually enjoyed the game. I played it multiple times with different characters to hopefully achieve each victory option (still cant do rot victory). Hopefully upon the full release of the game they will iron out all of these problems.  

Overall if you like fantasy, turn based games with beautiful art then this game is for you. With updates around every other week the game is steadily evolving. I look forward to playing the finished product, thus Armello gets my full recommendation.

7/10