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Nostalgic in all the right ways. Lovely artwork, fantastic music, and a fun spin on a classic game for battles/puzzles.

A worthy addition to my collection.

Ryan makes solid music. There are some incredible and moody textures and soundscapes going on and it makes my ears feel good.

Scratches an itch I've had that lies somewhere between Mass Effect 3 multiplayer and Earth Defense Force.

Super fun, super democratic. Excellent music.

Arguably my favorite game franchise of all time. Or at the very least in my top 3 easily.

-One of the most interesting and compelling games I have ever played.
-Fantastic writing and voice acting (great work Ash & team!)
-Fantastic music and sound design
-Absolutely breathtaking visuals and world design. I felt compelled to explore every inch that I could.
-Legitimately made me gasp when I realized what was happening. I thought I had the plot figured out and it dropped a huge mind-bomb on me.
-Reasonable scope. A great amount of extra quests for completionists, and a solid core experience for the "Just give me the basics--I just want to see what happens" crowd.
-Fun and satisfying combat. It's extremely fun to chip away at the defenses (and offensive capabilities) of the machines, and the game alternates between combat with machines and humans to help reduce game fatigue (not that I ever had that issue personally) :)
-One of the best DLC expansions I've ever played in a video game ever.

I have nothing bad to say about this game. It scratched all the itches, some I didn't even know I had. It literally brought me to tears. It thrilled me. I've gone back and replayed it numerous times and I've never felt the thrill recede during any of those playthroughs.

It may not speak to everyone, but it speaks to me, and hits me in all the right places. From an objective standpoint, I'm sure there are improvements that could be made, but for me personally, a 10/10 doesn't feel high enough.

Thank you Guerrilla Games for this gem.

ARK: Survival Evolved (ASE) is my all-time most-played game by an embarrassing amount, so I'm obviously fond of the base game.

ARK: Survival Ascended (ASA) builds a little on that. Here's the bullet points:

THE GOOD:
-STUNNING visuals.
-I already thought that ASE was beautiful, enough to be the primary reason for me wanting to keep my GPU hardware as
up-to-date as I can manage. ASE leaves it in the dust. It's staggering how pretty this game looks in the UE5 engine.
-QOL improvements. They've streamlined a few things and the TLC is notable. Tracking tames and teammates, automatic coordinates on the map, death markers, and especially some much-needed building improvements (removing engram reduncandy, being able to raise/lower foundations, picking up structures, etc)
-Audio (nothing's really been changed here except a new banger of a Title Screen Theme [by my pal the indomitable Gareth Coker], but I'm still going to gush about the quality of the music and sound design even if they're generally the same as in ASE. Yes, it's that good.)
-(For now) the ability to manually tweak certain settings via console to help optimize your performance and visual preferences
-Mods are popping up at a pretty solid pace to help balance the game in similar ways to all the ones that exist on ASE. I imagine all the popular go-to ones will either be available soon or have acceptable alternatives that fit the new engine. This is good.

THE NOT-SO-GOOD
-Balancing between PvP & PvE remains an issue. Like I've said with any other game that supports both play modes, there should be separate parameters/settings for both, especially on custom servers. Balancing one thing for PvP will inevitably upset PvE players, and vice versa. If it's not an official server, give us the option to decide how to fine-tune our base game. Please.
-Limiting which settings can be edited (compared to ASA). Technically, things *can* still be tweaked if you dig into config files and know what you're doing, but out-of-the box, you can no longer easily adjust certain parameters. And for those of us who don't want to play vanilla settings with the unbearably time-consuming slog of a grind, it's a turn off to be limited to that.
-Optimization isn't *great* yet. I imagine this will change, like it did over time in ASE, but for now, to get the most from the game you're going to have to be willing to deal with occasional performance issues and random crashes.
-Game's in Early Access, so similar to above, there's some frustrating bugs and glitches that will catch you off guard. The worst was probably fighting the Dragon boss, where it simply refused to land and kept glitching outside the arena, leaving me unable to attack it. Other examples include the automatic anti-mesh code kicking in and weird moments and randomly killing my character and/or dinos without warning, causing me to lose inventory and the time I'd invested into the things I lost. Dinos regularly clip through the floor and fall to the bottom of the map where they are generally un-retrievable.

If you love ASE, you'll probably be happy with ASA, more or less. The engine really showcases the future of graphics in the incredible Unreal 5 engine. I can't wait to see how the tech and optimization improves. It's exciting to see a game as big as ARK leading the charge because it's only going to get better.

Excellent game. Feels like Hollow Knight's little brother, but a fine Metroidvania of a game. Nice soundtrack, unique art style and charming story.

It's so good, and it's extremely polished. I love the idea of having to stay in the shadows during the day cycle, it adds a whole new mechanic that forces you to think on your feet a bit if you're caught in a fight when the sun comes up. And the blood mechanic as a stand-in for hunger/food buffs is very cool also. And the building is satisfying and not super hard to learn. I'm just waiting for a mod that lets me play some Castlevania music to come out :)

*EDIT Dec 2023*

I had a blast playing this game initially with friends, but I did have some concerns about the repetition, and then I lost all my progress and it felt extremely bad. I wrote the review below after that happened. Apparently the devs have rolled back that change, and I'm sure there have been other tweaks which really does entice me to give the game another go when I can. I'm eager to try it again (when I have time)

I'm eager to see if my feedback has been addressed. I'll leave my original review below for now.

*********Original Review**********

This game has some fun times, but it's ultimately a hot mess of a game. The session-based approach intrigued me at first, but I assumed there'd still be some stronger feel of progression. Instead, after playing a dozen missions, you still do the Exact. Same. Grind. every time you start a new prospect.

Land > Gather sticks/rocks/wood > build basic shelter and utilities > hunt for metal > smelt metal > hunt for gold (ugh) > craft end-game loot (when applicable) > complete objective.

This stops being interesting after a short while and becomes tedious and boring. Sure you can unlock some workshop gear that make starting a bit easier, but it's just not a very compelling formula for gameplay to essentially land and replay the same to-do list every time.

Additionally, you stop earning talent points after level 40, and have no way to respec. Which means if you aren't quite satisfied with your first character build, your only alternative is to start at the very beginning again with a brand new character. I've read that there are plans to "eventually" put this feature in after the devs make sure that it's "balanced" or some nonsense, as if that makes any sense considering that 1) it's a PvE game and 2) why would you stop leveling at all? What's the point of that? And why not at least make it clear to players that they'll stop receiving talent points rather than just let them experiment with points and better customize their play experience without punishing their early time investments with the game?

Finally, after 66 hours into a character that was level 50, I started a new mission last night. After about an hour, I went to go eat some dinner and had some errands to run. I completely forgot about the mission, which apparently was only hours long (all the missions had been 6 IRL days more or less before the most recent patch). I completely forgot I was engaged in that prospect. I logged in this morning to finish it up only to discover that my 66-hour character had been permanently Lost because I didn't complete the mission in time.

The game is also extremely buggy, even after the patches, there's a lot of rough edges. Items falling through the world, inability to interact with certain object, bad terrain mapping/clipping-through-terrain, wonky bow mechanics, the list goes on.

I had some pretty fun times with this game initially, enough to play it for almost 70 hours, but the grind is a slog and the end game is simply not satisfying. And I just do not understand imposing a progression limit on a player at all. Feels like you're coercing them to just start over for no compelling reason. And this game already makes you start over Every. Single. Prospect.

And then for it to perma-delete your character because real life got in the way of playing the game? Who has time for that nonsense? I have 700+ games on my steam list alone. I'm sure there are plenty of others that aren't going to punish me for playing them.

Dean Hall, this game has potential, but it's terminally flawed. Please take note.

I miss this game so much. To me it was the original co-op campaign/versus experience. L4D2 was basically a more fully-realized L4D1, and yet another example of why Valve is (was?) so good at making games.

I'm really annoyed (like probably every other player out there) that a game could be so successful and here 8 years later we still don't have a sequel. Sigh.

SO:

Objectively the game is great for the following reasons:

-Team based game that genuinely feels like every player needs to carry their weight. Even the best players are going to get pinned or pounced, and will require rescue. It feels good to both rescue and BE rescued. And on the zombie end, it feels good to successfully utilize the special zombie skills to separate a team and pick them apart.

-The source engine, while obviously very dated, still feels really good, even after all these years. The game has always run incredibly smooth without ever having required players to settle for minimal settings.

-The atmosphere has always been fantastic from every angle. Great audio and visuals.

-The campaigns are all extremely well done. You can tell that Valve did a lot of playtesting and it paid off. The flaws are few and far between, and for for the most part they did a great job of utilizing creative design without resorting to cheap gimmicks like invisible walls or ceilings (again, for the MOST part).

-The weapons are fun and offer a good variety that encourages the player to continually switch to new weapons rather than just sticking with one single weapon for the entire game.

-The special infected zombies are all fun and interesting to play, each with a unique enough ability. While some are more fun to play as others, they are each always good for *something*, I'd say that's a solid achievement for the designers.

And now, the cons:

-"The Director", that is, the system Valve developed to randomize the game in various ways to ensure that each playthrough wasn't completely scripted to the point of being obviously exploitable, is still pretty underwhelming. Originally it seemed like there would be a lot more things like randomly changing the available path through the level, along with weather systems, zombie placement, etc. But really this just boils down to minor details like "oh, on this playthrough we go through the right door instead of the left one". I'm exaggerating slightly, but not by much. That pretty much is the extent of it. And in versus, sometimes one team will face hordes of zombies while another breezes through a level with so few of them you can't help but throw your hands up in the air a little.

-The special infected are not without their bugs. Nothing makes you want to throw your mouse at the wall like successfully charging down a narrow hallway only to somehow glitch through all four survivors, or landing a mighty 4 story pounce that didn't actually do any damage, or exploding in hugging proximity to a group of survivors only to watch one of them actually get covered in bile. And let's not forget the jockey, where you can relentlessly hump a survivor's face only to not actually latch onto them. Still though, those things happen for whatever reasons (latency most likely) so it kinda is what it is.

-Ultimately the flaw in the L4D series is that after playing the levels a few times (both in campaign and versus modes), the game becomes a case of simply trying to execute a variety of pre-scripted tactics or getting kicked off a team if you screw up. Part of the appeal to me in the beginning was problem-solving through the levels and the situations that would come up. With a small handful of levels, that went away pretty quickly, it's inevitable. The problem is, Valve had PLENTY of help from the community, which made TONS of new campaigns, and while sure, there's some garbage to rummage through, I probabliy played through at least 10 that were as good as the originals. Unfortunately, there was no good way to matchmake those custom campaigns. I put about 1000 hours into the game and the only way you could ever use the matchmaking was to play the original campaigns. It was a real shame.

I personally would have happily paid some sort of monthly subscription, or even bought some sort of DLC or season pass if it simply meant we'd get new campaign content. But that never happened, so here we are.

8 years later, no L4D3, and while you can still download and play custom content, it's just not easy or intuitive to convince 7 of your friends to do the same.

I miss you, L4D2. I wanted more of you. Things were great in the beginning. But your charming pick-up lines weren't enough substance to keep me interested in the long term. That's why I left you. I loved you, but you clearly didn't feel the same way about me. I was just another notch on your belt. And that is why I left you. :'(

*DISCLAIMER* I have not played the DLC yet, I'm speaking only about the original game.

*************

I enjoyed this game a lot more than I expected to. It's FPS sandbox parkour zombie bashing with loot and guns.

The parkour was fairly easy to master and while there might be a few occasions where you swear that you should have grabbed the ledge rather than just plummiting to your death, it's solid. The grappling hook skill, once unlocked, is interesting; while it's certainly a bit game-breaking as far as some of the parkour and jump puzzles go, I found myslef not caring because of how satisfying and fun it feels to zip around the world like Spiderman. I was also happy the game included a co-op mode, if for no other reason than because it's sometimes fun to just have a friend or three to play alongside with. So let's cut to the chase:

Pros:
-Parkour is fun. Feels good to just jump/climb/explore the city.
-Lots of loot, good weapon variety
-The weapon degradation system encourages you to try different weapons frequently.
-Fun skills to unlock, and mastering them is satisfying
-Gunplay is solid, if not sometimes a bit OP. It still feels good to watch even the big zombies die after a couple headshots.
-Great sound design and soundtrack
-Great visual detail, world building, and level design. Just great atmosphere all around really.
-Grappling hook is a blast
-Co-op so you can play with a friend. Or two or three.

Cons:
-Writing is passable at best, downright silly on average, and cringe-worthy at worst
-The voice acting, with the exception of the Crane, is generally pretty bad
-Prepare yourself for a really mediocre final boss encounter
-I personally would have preferred some really big, tough, boss encounters. There aren't any. It's more like a couple mini-bosses that just become fairly regular encounters towards the end of the game.

In summary: I bought it at half price ($30) and it was easily worth that. Honestly I probably still would have felt satisfied if I'd paid $60 for it. I'm looking forward to the DLC, the idea of driving a buggy around and pancaking zombies on the pavement seems fun. If you like open-world/sandbox exploration games with lots of action and whacking things with a crowbar or machete, or maybe just sniping down from the rooftops, you'll probably dig this. If you get motion-sick a lot and are just generally not into the whole zombie-thing, maybe give this one a pass I guess? But that should probably be obvious already.