Recent reviews by Agathorn (SH)

Game won't even start

Probably the closest thing to an Uncharted style game available on PC. It starts kind of slow, and honestly I had started it twice but never went far. With time on my hands over the holidays though I started again and played for nearly 8 hour straight well into the night. I was so captured!

On Sale? Buy it
Full price: Wait for now
tl;dr An amazing game overall but extremely rough around the edges
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If you are on the fence about this game. I would at this time advise you to wait for the game to get more matured. It has the potential to be an amazing game, but it isn't there at this point. Many of the bugs and issues reported during the beta are still present in the final release, and apparently the developers need more time to finish baking.
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Pros:
+ It is an amazing game overall
+ Animals look and animate very well
+ Extremely powerful building system
+ Lots of game modes to satisfy pretty much everyone
+ Lots of animals
+ Baby animals are adorable. Really adorable.
+ The management aspect is.. OK. It could be better but it could be worse (and was in Frontier's previous games). I say its passable so I put it as a Pro.

Cons:
- UI and User flow is a disaster. The UI will constantly get in your way or just plain not help you. Lots of feedback on this was given in beta so hopefully over time it will be improved.
- Time moves way too fast, even on the slowest speed. You end up playing on pause 90% of the time.
- The logic on how zookeepers decide to feed animals is really strangely done which confuses many people, and leads to lots of bugs where food doesn't get refilled at all. Keepers should really stop trying to be "smart" and just fill up anything that I put in the habitat that holds food. Even if that's 50 food trays.
- The Franchise mode animal market is still wonky like it was in beta with sometimes no animals showing, or different people seeing different animals at the same times, and as a player controlled market with no artificial controls it really just turns into a mess.
- Breeding is supposed to be a large part of the game, yet the tools given to the player to manage it are basically not existing. You can't even see a family tree of the animals, so you don't know who their parents/brothers/sisters are unless you either keep track yourself or use some silly naming scheme for the children and nothing screams I love you like giving your kids identifiers instead of names..
- Very little intelligent social interaction between animals. There are occasional random animations which look great but there is no underlying intelligent logic to this, its just random, and infrequent.
- Herd animals won't herd, and if you build something like an African Plains habitat with lots of species, they just randomly wander around rather than congregating with like species as you would expect.

Game has serious performance issues that make it basically unplayable. After rewinding time afew times the game always starts stuttering and falling apart until it is restart. And it isn't just me. Tons of people have the same issue as can be clearly seen in Google searches, but the developers never bothered to fix the problem. They just moved on to making a sequel.

i7-4770k, 32gb RAM, GTX 1080ti

Great concept, fatally flawed execution. Recommend a pass on this one unless things change.

The basic idea here is great. A fantasy based survival game like Ark. There was even apparently a lot of technology sharing between the developers of Ark and Dark & Light which should have given them a good start. Sadly, the actual execution of Dark & Light falls very short of where it should be for a game that has been in Early Access for so long.

Tons of bugs, nmearly no polish at all, the game feel completely unfinished and and like a brand new EA title rather than one that has been in EA for years.

Now this is an EA title, so on the one hand you might hope that the developer would get things worked out eventually, but even that doesn't appear to be the case as the developer has inexplicably already jumped ship and moved on to another game (yeat ANOTHER Ark clone), and isn't even bothering to do more than token fixes to this any more. For evidence of this just look at the last game patch that fixed a whopping two, yes two, bugs.

A great idea marred by bad execution and abandoned by the developer almost immediately after launch!

The idea of this game is great, and it is playable, but it is really dragged down by tons of little bugs, confusing information, and outright wrong information as well as English mistakes made by a developer for whom English isn't their native language.

All of this would be fine if they just worked to fix it, but sadly this game received a fix or two the month it came out and then the developer just vanished, leaving the game in this sorry state.

Everyone has seen it happen but usually it happens a year or two or more after the game comes out, not the same fracking month! They basically released it then walked away.

If you can get it for 5 bucks or something fine, otherwise don't waste your money.

Unplayable for me due to random freezes
Always online connection required, despite no mention of it in the game requirements
Yet another bad console port. It is Batman AK all over again.

i7-4770k, GTX 980TI, 16gb ram, Windows 10x64

First of all this game is completely unplayable for me currently as it often and randomly locks up. I haven't not been able to solve it.

Performance:
Performance isn't great but not horrible when it comes to FPS but there is a lot more to it than that which I will get to in a minute.
DirectX 12, MAX all settings, 5k resolution - Average 20FPS
DirectX 12, MIN all settings, 2k resolution - Average 100FPS
DirectX 11, MIN all settings, 2k resolution - 60FPS locked.

Oddly in DX 11 mode this game seems to have a 60FPS cap. How disgusting. This cap does not appear to be present in DX 12 mode.

While framerate is decent, the game has serious asset streaming issues and appears to deal with it in the typical console way. Serious asset popping incluing textures, shadows, and even entire actors just popping into place. There is also a weird cloth sim issue where the closer you get to say a woman in a dress, the more refined the cloth simulation becomes. The game has a VERY small distance in which it switches to the set quality level.

Graphical difference between MAX settings and 20fps and MIN settings and 100fps is very subtle! I mean reall,y it is different but not by a whole lot. Honestly it looks last gen either way. I almost feel like the screenschots and marketing shots are all fake because the game looks nothing like them even on maximum settings. Do yourself a favor and just play on min.

Despite the genre listings of "simulation" and "strategy", this is really a puzzle game, not a builder or sim, so if you are, like me, looking for something akin to a Railroad Tycoon game, then you won't find it here.

The game itself looks decent, though buggy, it just isn't what it looks like it is on the store page.

Played for less than an hour, dealt with the horrible interface, horrible tutorials, but semi fun game. Then quit because of the community where it appears the average player age is about 10.

UPDATE
I should have updated this review a while back and now I feel bad that I didn't.
I said wait before buying, way back when the game came out. If you are still waiting then stop waiting. While there are some annoyances in the game, for the most part they made good on their mistakes and fixed everything up.

ORIGINAL REVIEW BELOW
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WAIT for updates to this game before buying.

While this isn't the worst PC port it does belong on a list of the worst. It is a huge shame these days that big games like this are made for consoles and then ported, often by a completely different developer, to PC and a lot of them suffer for it. This one sure does.

I am pretty confideant that they will eventually make it right, but we aren't there yet right now.

PC Port Problems:
* Capped at 30FPS unless you edit a file
* Textures are extremely low resolution, capped at MEDIUM in the settings and look very bad. They look worse than on consoles.
* Many players even with high end rigs reporting performance issues with framerates all over the place

Myself with an I7-4770K and a GTX 980, with DEFAULT settings in the game, get a min FPS of 15 and an average FPS of just 18 when running the game's built-in benchmark.