Recent reviews by Chōkai Chan [鳥海 ちゃん]

THE most un-optimized game on the current market there is.

Just for the record, the recommended specs are as follows:
CPU: Ryzen 5 3600X or i5 10600K
GPU: RX 6800 or RTX 3080
Paired with 32GB of RAM

I am running a custom build system using a Ryzen 7 5700X3D, 64GB of OC RAM and an RX 7900 XTX OC.

The game runs between ok and terrible on 1440p medium/high settings with drops far below the 50 mark. All that with FORCED(!) FSR, even tho it is in Ultra Quality Mode (which can only be disabled via INI commands). This means my system is sometimes struggling to even achieve 35-40 Fps in this title.
The forced Frame Generation might fool you into thinking you get 70-120 FPS, but as it scales of your true frames, using such a tec with anything but above 60FPS results into very high input lag and makes the game feel just as sluggish, as if you would disable it.

Wildcard should be ashamed to have a system this far over the recommended specs struggle to run their darn REMASTER of an already 10 year old game. The fact that they even recommend an RTX 3080 10GB and i5 10600K for this game, while it uses 14-15GB of VRAM and around 80% CPU utilization on my rig (on mid range settings), kinda shows how deep down in fantasy land they currently are.

And that’s not all there is to say. Here is also a short list of things you will encounter while playing:

- Forced AMD Frame Interpolations (as already stated) that lies to you about your real performance, saying you are getting 70fps, but it feels like 35 because of the horrid frame time. (Disabling it via console command shows your true FPS and playing still feels the same, thx Wildcard.)
- Using DLSS 2.5 instead of 3.8 or even 4.0, while this setting is broken at the same time. (You are stuck with FSR 3.0, as XESS isn’t a thing in this game.)
- A very high amount visual bugs, artefacts and weird settings:
For example, your view distance directly controls texture pop-in, which results in useing anything besides the high preset is just a pure mess.
- Constant Lumen flickering, as this game doesn’t allow you to disable Lumen at all and is stuck in one of the earliest versions of UE5 (at least for now).

- The game just randomly deciding to not function anymore and crashing to desktop (yes, this happens with AMD and Nvidia GPUs) for no apparent reason at all.
- Taking 250GB of storage, but when updating deciding to move the ENTIRE 250GB file size for 300MB of patchwork. Problem with this is not only that it takes an eternity, but also it seems to first block ANOTHER 250GB of storage on your drive before installing, meaning if you don’t have at least those 250GB of space left on that drive, Steam will just error out and you can’t update the game. There is no fix for this since launch in October of 2023. Cheers Wildcard.

The list would go on and on, but if I start telling you about all the game breaking bugs and glitches, I would probably go mental, so I will just stop right here.

Honestly this game feels like a very poorly made 20$ indie title with a dev team of eight, working on their ever first game. (Even tho this statement will probably discredit all the amazing creators out there.)
As of now “ARK: Survival Decended” is LITTERALY worse than the first game. ASE is just better at this point in every metric which is a sentence I firmly believed to never say about a video game.

The only positive thing about this game is the truly awesome Modding community which sadly left the first game in the dust. Without them fixing so many bugs, overhauling the function and stats of many items and creatures and giving them full on game-dev-level TLCs which look, sound and feel better than EVERYTHING this developer ever achieved on its own, this game would have been dead on arrival. As much as I want to support those awesome creators and play their amazing mods, I face a huge stepping stone.
I can't (properly) play and enjoy(!) this game on my ~2500$ custom build without getting frustrated after 30 min of just walking around. I feel like all we have come up to with ARK has just been in vain. It’s sad to see that even a 1150$ MSRP GPU, that released not even one year before the games launch in October of 2023, struggles to handle this game on settings that don’t even look that good.
Oh and btw. it is still classified as "Early Access", so Steam won't had to remove/ refund this game day one, which is actually funny to me.

AVOID.

Can't reccomend this version of Abberation.
Lighting and shadows are completely bugged, constant flickering and the shader of the map just looks worse in comparision to what we had before.
Floating rocks and plants, messy terrain, just not a good experience at all.

Also they removed Nvidia Frame Generation with this update. They promised an 80% performance increase. For me this patch meant a 50% performance DECREASE. Forceing AMD Frame Interpolation onto everyone that isn't even setup to support that sh*t isn't called an "upgrade". It just worsens the performance, gives even higher frame times compared to the Frame Gen we had, while makeing your 80FPS feel like 19. Oh and I also crashed or bugged out like 5 times on this map (in less than 10h of playtime), fun! Basically, for me atleast, the game performces worse than it did on release (I also had a worse GPU back then which should tell you about it's current state).

No thank you Wildcard! Big L with this update. Please revert the "performance changes" or atleast stop forceing that unfinished AMD stuff onto ppl who don't have and AMD GPU, give me back Frame Gen. Also look into all the bugs you just created. This would atleast let me play on other maps again without suffering what you did to the performance (again).

Current Mission Objective "Defeat the Corporate Overlords within 3 days" successful.
Next Major order on standby, well done Helldivers!

🖤💛 NO DIVER LEFT BEHIND 🖤💛 WE DIVE TOGETHER OR NOT AT ALL 🖤💛

For Rock and Stone!

100% in 100h.
#MiyazakiBeDamned.
#IhateCaelid.

Got over 3000h in this game playing via their own clint and I have to say:

This game just went to ♥♥♥♥ over the last years and Wargamigs greed and scamming just incresed exponentially.
This company thinks it's ok to casually demand over 400€ for a single event while also ignoring community demands and f*cking up the balance of the game ON PURPOSE. This leads to players being forced to invest to get these OP ships, else they will get bullied by them in the next matches, having no fun at all.
This company is truely one of the greediest and scummiest I have ever seen. At this very moment there are about EIGHT events live and on each of them you can spend hundreds of euros/dollars, while every reward is purely obtained by gambling.

The worst thing for me is still something else: As soon as you voice your concern to the community via Forum or Discord, your imedialty get censord. Posts and threads about hot topics get removed, just as the general feedback of the community. According to the devs the "silent majority" always agrees with their decisions, so they are free to do whatever they want, be it censorship, just outride stealing rewards or trippleing the prices. Oh and the Forums just got taken down one month ago, so all the f*ck ups they made in the past can get erased with them. This company is the next Soviet Union.

Not even starting to go in detail with the ingame balance, bugs and server issues (because they refuse to fix things as this might cost some money), as this would take me hours to note. If you have a question, you can ask me if you want to tho, I have seen it all.

As much as I love the core of the game and enjoyed it in the past, spending stupid amouts of money, I have to finally write this down and warn others about this company. If I had one word to describe modern WoWs in 2023, it's:

Avoid.

Compelted the game on normal difficulty in 22h (100%).

I agree, some Bossfights are difficult and you die a lot at first while you figure out how the boss behaves and how his attacks work. Even tho it takes some time, you get used to their moveset quickly and start to do more damage with special rot moves (now you know how to sneak in some hits).
Important to know is that pretty much every boss has weakspots which, if hit, damages them a lot or stuns them so you are able to land combos, racking in huge damage. If you don't find them at first, keep trying because they may be a bit more hidden (sometimes in their attack animations).
Yes, the fights can take 30-40 min for the more difficult ones if you don't quickly understand how your enemy fights, but its 100% not as bad as Dark Souls bossfights.
Dark Souls is pure roll + attack spam, while in Kena it feels pretty satisfying to finally figure out what you should do to beat the boss or that you found an alternative way to take him down.
I can understand where some people are coming from when complaining about Bossfights and even I got a tiny bit frustrated with some fights at first. The difference is, that after I got beaten up multiple times, I tried different strategies to beat my enemy. Often I finally managed to win after taking a closer look at their moveset.
Out of the 15 Bosses in the game, only two are a bit hard to figure out / win. The Archer was easy once figured out tho, while Toshi was just damn hard to beat.

Personally managed to beat the game without parrying. Atleast doing so not on purpose. Can seem to figure out if its just me who missed the frame to parry or if its not there in the first place.

This game is just all concept, isn't it?
So, after this game has been out for 3 years now, let's check what we got, shall we?
- Only 2(!) playable Dragons for almost 20$.
- A third "Dragon", the Acid-Spitter, which is an 8$ DLC creature.
- Servers that aren't populated much if at all.
- The game, broken down in it's most basic form, consisting of waiting for 2 hours so you can fly properly and then either kill eachother (PvP) or just chill and do NOTHING (PvE).
- Most of the Map isn't finished and is basically empty.
- There are 2 wild creatures to kill for food and both don't put up any fight at all.

Well, what news do we have then?
The next four Dragons which got announced a long time ago by now probably won't be ready for a long time to come. We MIGHT be lucky and get a new one in Summer of 2023.
So we already got a really slim amount of content available, so how could it possibly get worse? I can tell you how:
Two out of the four Dragons that are planned next, will be locked behind yet another paywall. One will be Kickstarter exclusive (so not obtainable at all for people who started playing after the Alpha concluded or didn't find out about this game sooner), while the other one will become the SECOND PAYED DLC in a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ BETA game.
To add on top of this: Those new four Dragons aren't really that much further than shown a year ago. Some animations have been done, but thats all there is to tell about them.

I really like the idea of this game. I really do. Personally, I wish it would become the gem I imagined it to be. The sad reality at the moment tho is that it's just unfinished, boring and a pure waiting simulator with a really slim amount of content to offer.

I didn't expect much, but holy moly I am a bit let down that basically nothing happend in the last year.
Give it a try if you want to, but to be honest you should wait out on this game if you ask me and come back when it actually gets updated.

Must have for everyone!

Always fun with one or two friends to try to survive als long as possible and get on a small hunt together.
The EVRIMA - Beta is also highly recommended and I can not wait for the complete recode of the base game in Evrima style.