Recent reviews by coyotes

first i am going to give this game a lot of the praise it deserves.

this game has me by the BALLS. this is the first game i've preordered since fallout 4. i've had my eyes on it for a long time and i'm happy to say it has lived up to my expectations. i haven't been as excited to come home and play a game every day like this in years. the art they went with for this game is very strong and distinct yet as realistic as it needs to be to feel feasible and immersive. the gameplay loop is addictive and i see myself getting another 100+ hours out of it, even if it's just for the hilarious prox chat interactions i have with players. the community for this game is pretty unique, it's a PvPvE game but most players are scared of ARC to the point that you frequently have friendly interactions with complete strangers, which is weird in a game that's about trying to get the best loot possible... but the loot you can find on your own without killing other players is decent enough that i think many players are satisfied and just want to get out safely on their own. that being said, the combat and PvP does feel really good when you are fighting people. (i also think it's worth mentioning i haven't once encountered a cheater in the time i've played, and if you do get killed by a convicted cheater they give your loadout back. my friend got killed by a cheater, went to bed and the next day he got his loadout refunded.) the guns in this game feel like the metal and rubber parts and duct tape they're slapped together with in the best way possible. there is some small desync/interp issues during gunfights here and there but haven't experienced it nearly as bad as some clips i've seen online. normally i'm not a big fan of 3rd person shooters but the way this game works with shoulder swap feels pretty fair even though half the time i'm owning people i'm just playing cover and 3P'ing them lol. tying into the 3rd person design as well, the directional audio in this game is phenomenal. you can tell exactly where everything is happening, and the audio truly feels in relation to where your camera is, not your player. the audio design is fantastic (excluding voices, which i'll address in a bit)- each ARC enemy has a very distinct sound for every action it does, so with enough knowledge you can know exactly where any ARC is, what its doing... players have all unique identifying sounds for healing, shield recharging, fully recharged, broken, guns reloading, mines/traps, looting, etc... everything you could imagine needing to hear and understand is very clear with a bit of experience. there isn't enough positive things i can say about this game- while some of the community can be annoying about glazing this game like it's absolutely flawless, it deserves the praise i'm giving it and so much more.

BUT NOW TO COMPLAIN!

first off obviously there's a lot of discourse around embark using text to speech AI voices (as well as an optional voice changer for voice chat, which i guess is ok for anonymity? but everyone sounds like a 12 year old southern boy.) the datasets they have are from paid & consenting voice actors. in my opinion, this isn't nearly as big of a deal or moral failure like some are acting as using gen AI for 2d/3d art, and the voices aren't a huge part of the game. but that being said, the average player screaming on prox chat after i shoot them in the kneecaps has SO much more life and sounds 100 times better than any of the voices in this game. they aren't even doing anything cool with the TTS either like giving support to other languages. how this game has such a strong confident vision in so many ways but has terrible voice acting/design boggles my mind, it really feels like some person at embark is super hellbent on hating voice actors and doesn't want to EVER WAIT on ONE SINGLE VOICE LINE or whatever (when in reality, everyone has a voice! and i'm sure plenty of their own team there could deliver VO for the game every time they needed it and it would sound SO much better than this)

the second thing i want to talk about is the skill tree. there are enough comparison videos out there that show that many of the skills are pretty useless, and many don't even truly do what they say they do. there is also a lack of raw values/percentages of each skill change so we have to rely on random youtubers doing tests to compare. obviously, there has to be a level of balancing here... but at the same time, i wish for how much of an XP grind it takes the average gamer to get to level 75, it would be a little more useful... and to not feel like any points were wasted by the time you finally reach level 75. recently they nerfed the security locker breach skill which was one of 6 final skills you can get from the 3 skill trees (you can get 2 options from 1 of the 3 tree branches after putting 36 of your 75 total points in) and even after the nerf it's still objectively the best choice, which i think says a lot about how much of a redesign half the skill tree needs. and this can transition into my next complaint, which is...

...how long embark takes to fix issues with their game. the security locker breach skill is a good example of something that took so long for them to change only after tons of people already spent so many points in the survival tree. this wouldn't be an issue if you could respec, but you can't! and it wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue if it was addressed faster, but changing it 2 weeks after the game's launch feels a bit silly. the people that are no-lifing the game got to abuse the security lockers for all this time, but people that don't have the chance to play as often are now left with a skill tree mostly spent towards the broken security lockers they never got to take advantage of themselves... but i guess it doesn't matter that much if the rest of the entire skill tree sucks, right? lol. another major example that comes to mind is the glitch players have been using to clip through doors that normally require rare keys. this has existed since the server slam and i thought for sure they would address it by launch... yesterday, nearly 1 month after launch they FINALLY addressed it. something that has been giving players & exploiters SO much free loot- i have spent multiple keys and gone in the rooms to them fully looted even in fresh games. my inventory was FULL of keys for weeks after launch because i felt like it was a waste to use them if players were just glitching into the rooms, and kept holding onto them thinking they would fix a relatively simple issue... but right after i start burning through them and selling them for inventory space they finally fix it. if they really intend on never wiping the servers, the fact they let so many exploiters get away with this for so damn long and acquire so much free loot doesn't make sense to me. it's frustrating to think too that i am at a disadvantage for not being scummy and taking advantage of exploits like many other people. although, it was fun when some guy on solos asked me for help with the glitch and then i shot him in the back of the head against the door he was trying to get me to clip him into.

a final complaint i have (that many others share) is how late the spawns can be sometimes, especially when bringing your own kit. if the games are 30 minutes, i should not be spawning in with a $70,000 kit at 18:50. i had multiple games in a row where i spawned close to 10 minutes late with a very good kit and joked to my friend we needed to spawn with free loadouts to get fresh games... and then we got 3 fresh games in a row with free loadouts. it's really frustrating.

overall the game is absolutely fantastic and i'm loving it a lot. but i'm hoping embark can continue rolling out updates for this game a little smarter than they currently are, but also it seems like they have their own vision for their game and don't gaf what idiots like me have to say so i gotta respect that too

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☑ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☑ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☑ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☐ Teens
☐ Adults
☑ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☑ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☐ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 15% of your 1TB hard drive
☑ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☑ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☑ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☑ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☑ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☐ Worth the price
☑ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☑ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☑ 10

Pacify the captured warclaw.

I just cant carry all these fish. Im spinning them in my inventory as much as possible and they just dont fit. And i can't stop catching them ... big problem for me

game of the year hands down

I hope you get to kiss rytlock at the end of the story (Please no spoilers,i cant handle the potential disappointment right now)

if golf was actually this fun i would live at the country club

it's hard to believe a video game so perfect actually exists.

I am the Milkman. My milk is delicious.

twin towers dlc pls