Recent reviews by Flair

The gameplay side of the game definitely needs some improvement especially since the game asks for multiple playthroughs to see the whole story and get all the achievements. Once you beat the game, a chapter select option should be available to try out different routes of the game. At the very least, there should be a auto-forward and a fast-forward button: there is a auto-forward feature if you turn on voices, but then you lose the ability to manually skip the dialogue.

The character writing is poor. It can be more succinct and use fewer references.

TLDR: I cannot recommend the game in its current state, especially to new players.

As someone who has played a lot of the Dark Soul series on multiple different platforms, it really scratches the itch where I wanted more PVP ingrained into its gameplay. It is a first-person extraction PvPvE dungeon crawler which is to say that it has similar gameplay mechanics and aesthetics to Dark Souls, but the idea is that you spawn into a dungeon as if you were to spawn into a random part of a level or area in Dark Souls, and the objective is to retrieve loot and leave before a timer runs out. Extraction -- escaping with what you can is the name of the game. But the monsters are strong, and dying means you leave with nothing. Players also spawn in, and if they kill you, they can pillage your corpse for your loot. After escaping with the loot, you can sell in it in an auction house to other players for gold, which is the in-game currency. At the very least, I like the gameplay loop of the combat with the monsters and the players.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of different issues that has arose that has made this game bleed its playerbase and has made the game mostly unplayable. In Dungeonborne, there are portals that randomly spawn in a dungeon, and these portals are how players escape the dungeon before the timer runs out; most spawn towards the end of the timer, but with the latest updates, the game has fewer portals than ever before. And given the number of portals, a dungeon with a lot of players mean that not everyone can leave even if the players decided to be pacifists. And the recent updates also made it so that players who escape leave with a lot of gold, and most of the loot is now gold instead of equipment for players. So this creates an effect where there is a lack of supply for equipment in the auction house, so because of supply and demand, fewer and fewer players can afford to equip themselves to fight in the harder dungeons and must fight in the lower difficulty dungeons. Since equipment is rarer than gold, players are more incentivized to kill other players rather than engage with the monsters or dungeon itself, so currently, most games in the harder dungeons usually lead into only one player or team escaping. And since fewer and fewer players can escape the dungeon, that means the much better players get richer while everyone else get poorer. This then leads into players who are good at the game but not as good as the top players to play with the lower difficulty dungeons where less skilled players or even new players would normally play. Now the cycle continues again except these players have no other dungeon to go to, so instead, they just quit the game. And since the game has recently enforced having a minimum number of players before they can spawn into a given dungeon, most of the harder dungeons are no longer starting because not enough players have the money or equipment to tackle the harder dungeons. Again, this leads into a cycle of fewer and fewer players wanting to play because they cannot play on the difficulty they want; even at the lowest difficulty dungeon, with a bleeding playerbase, you can expect either a minimum lobby that might all involve strong players who just want to play with perhaps a new player or two, perhaps a full game with mostly new players with a strong player or two who will stomp the dungeon and its player, or the game can sometimes time out because not enough players want to play at all given all I have said before.

I do want this game to succeed since I like its gameplay loop, and I would even engage with the PVE on its own. It is in early access, but it has not received an update (either in game update or news update) in two months. In its current state, I might be better off waiting for another game to scratch my itch.

The writing is excellent. The subtlety is sublime, and the voice acting delivers the subtlety and significance of its lines. As a video game, it can be a bit buggy or counterintuitive i.e. when replaying a section of the game for an achievement, I got a soft lock that require me to restart the game. But I do enjoy what it does with some of its dialogue choices or lack thereof ― a simple, subtle way of telling its story through its game mechanics. That being said, it mostly feels like a short play put within a video game, so for everyone else, unless you are really into story games, I cannot recommend buying the game unless it is on sale. Nonetheless, to put it in another perspective, if you are the kind of person that would pay the cost of about 1-2 movie tickets to watch something like Of Mice and Men or 12 Angry Men, then I can recommend this game.

The control scheme is more suited for a touchscreen than for the mouse. The timing in order to touch all of the prompted colors is quite hard with just a mouse, but with various fingers, all of the potential colors and stars can be touched.

Very funny

Better than Duel Links at least

If you feel like spending money at any point, quit the game. If you stop having fun at any point (which is likely), quit the game. If you like a grind with something akin to Dark Souls combat and the mindset to look up a guide, this game can be fun, but I generally recommend not to play this.

Lost Ark has unique combat for a MMO, but it is still just a MMO.

This is a great free game to play with friends

Truly a unique experience. It's free! Just try it and see if you like it!