Recent reviews by hallow, dmitri!

This game has some nice depth and potential, however this is heavily marred by very bad controller support and very bad menu and interface design. Navigating and working in and around menus and cross-hair options is awkward and clunky at best, especially when you're trying to build and place non-snap-able objects with clear sight-lines and precision or try to master the general workflow of motions. In fact, No Man's Sky does this best with their 'maneuverable camera orbit' option for object-placements and the Ark devs should pay very close attention to that if they're going to be staying in the 'dev open-world survival' game at all so that they can learn from it.

Even the creative mode and console commands system is extremely awkward and poorly implemented. This must seriously be one of the worst and most awkwardly designed games (that also has such depth and potential to be great, I mean) that I've ever seen. Because there's just no good sense of work-flow to be found when trying to develop a groove with the game's mechanics. I spent so much time recently trying to "correct" the game when it bugged out on me or simply refuted my intentions that I can't even enjoy what I've managed to build out of it anymore.

And forget about doing anything on the fly with tamed dinos in any surprise enemy AI (solo) situations with any skill and grace. The erratically spazzy cross-hair highlight system is more than likely to trip you up and cost you a tamed dino or your own character's life in such situations. Meanwhile, enemy melee AI has perfect aim and never misses. Oh, were you trying to ride your suddenly spazzed flying mount to get away from an enemy ambush of all perfect attacks? Well, because of the erratically appearing and disappearing cross-hair options you have to perfectly spam the ride button -- just don't overspam since that will just dismount you again right into the loving arms (or more appropriately the toothy maws) of your enemies!

...Of course this game requires a high learning curve to master, is ultimately designed for PVPing mega-tribes, and has much tweaking options for private settings -- I am well aware of and fully accept all of that. What I cannot accept is all the inherently bad interface designs that go along with it. When, patiently try as you might, session after session, the 'work' aspect STILL exceeds the 'fun', then you know you've got a horribly interfaced game. (Maybe M+KB is better but I refuse to play exclusively that way and already have to combine in some KBM anyway in order to try and find the best rhythm of play for me.)

P.S. I have many more hours offline and other campaigns both online and offline in this on another account, and have read some of the wiki, so I know how to play this game fairly well already.

P.S.S. Devs need to pay close attention to two very important and much better designed (imo) games and those are 'No Man's Sky' and '7 Days to Die'. They are of course not perfect in every sense, but they do all my complaints here far better justice. And any minor grievances can easily be worked around in order to achieve what the goal of the game should always be once the learning curve has been satisfied for the most part: and that is to have fun.

Grind-core data collections game at its finest. That aside, I actually don't even like the game at all, even if they weren't attempting to keep my solo game online (and give me the full game for that without bugs) so they could scour my data for profits. And since crafting/survival is my favorite genre of game I can safely say that even without the data scrubbing and resale it's easily the worst one in my collection by far.

The game looks great and has fantastic source material and artwork, however the enemy combat is badly stacked against you and thus badly balanced. Especially on hard mode this game will be punishing you with OP battles very early on. And in spite of the fact that you're supposed to get better loot for hard setting battles, you don't really seem to get that much better loot than in normal mode. Not enough to make you feel like the "risk" and (very hard) work was worth the "reward" anyway.

Also, the hard mode is quite rude towards the player as you can literally and quite often be a tiny split-second away from inputting your final choice and the game will quite suddenly and rudely interrupt you with enemy attacks, which can happen quite often. This is because, in hard mode, you can't soft-pause the enemies while you're in a skill type window looking up the specific attack type you want. But how about just give us the option to remove this or remove it yourself entirely? Because it's a completely tacked on mechanic and completely unimportant to the hard mode balancing when most battles would still be considered OP anyway without it.

Most battles are completely ridiculous. Even if you grind for the best upgrades, enter all the QTE events perfectly, and make all extremely sensible and well-thought out and well-timed choices, you will often have to bank on some extra RNG LUCK to actually win some of these tougher battles (like enemies just happen to miss you, something very rare without using a skill of some kind, just often enough that you can win, for example). I'd swear they always seem to give every enemy just enough health so that you can almost never dominate them with a flurry of successful attacks. And that they give them enough damage potential to make you swallow uncomfortably every single time you get hit. It's like it's not really a game, but more of player-punishment simulator.

Also the button-mashing vs. timer QTE shows up quite often, and sometimes without any tactical benefit at all. This should have been made less frequent and made to give more of a real reward for completing. With the amount of times they want you to do this I just bind the button to a controller with a turbo function and be done with it. Otherwise it's just too much work for too little gain.

If, however, you want to enjoy the layout and feel of the game and whatnot, and not worry about the difficulty so much, then just play it on easy and hope for the best with some of the battles. I've only played it on normal and hard but I'd bet that easy battles are still hard, just a little less so maybe. But as a "video game" that's supposed to be "fun" I can ultimately only downvote it, mostly because of the lack of proper combat balancing and rude designs.

I love the game, but not this port. It's like Tomb Raider meets some retro '98 version of Dark Souls set in a trapped magical dungeon. For such an old game, it has surprising depth to its movement and combat system and can be very rewarding once you learn how dominate the levels and gameplay.

-Has some minor annoying port faults but is totally playable with widescreen and full controller support. Just map out your controller using third party software or use my own "P!mp3d" steam configuration file in the community section for this game if you can use an xbox type layout.

-Low FPS is tied directly into the game mechanics so you must play it that way. Plus loading between menu, loading, and game screens is bad and the steam overlay only shows blank windows (screenshots and controller configs still work). Music tracks are bugged, but there is a fix you can apply.

-Well it's certainly a bit of old jank with some new "port-jank" tossed in for good measure, yes, but not without its core enjoyment despite the problems I listed, if you can overlook them. (Either way, on sale for a $1 it's still a steal.)

-Just treat it like a retro souls-like in terms of movement and combat and try to master this aspect as it's totally doable, and all on controller too.

-Please check out my guide for all the good info you'll need in preparing for this imperfect but still enjoyable retro curiosity:
https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2662812352

This game is a very strange combination of linear progression, heavy dialogue, repetitive QTEs, and pseudo/limited open-world map exploration. The cinematic and heavy dialogue sections can be charming and is well done if you like interactive movie-type games (I am fine with that part) but at least one of the supposedly pseudo open-world segments is so linear that, like me, you may have to fail at it your first time around in order to understand how they want you to play it exactly. (i.e. Caspian map radio tower mission – don't bother shooting any mutants because they respawn until you reach their objective marker and you will just unnecessarily waste ammo.)

My main issues:

-At least some painful indoor lighting (or good lack thereof). Some of the inside darker areas are very hard to see in, even with night-vision which seems to have a realistic filter but can be just as hard on the eyes when you're trying to navigate, explore, and look for loot. I don't know how to resolve this with immersion, but human eyes do adjust to different lighting if you give it long enough. I have 20/20 vision, never needed glasses, and some of the darker inside areas just make my eyes beg me to turn off the game.

-The loot system is horrible, especially with the metal detector which constantly beeps at you while you're trying to clear an area either with stealth or full force. There should be some way to turn off the sound without having to go back to a workbench in order to assign another component in its place. Loot should be highlighted if you're close enough and can normally see it. Of course you can easily argue that this will break some immersion, but I would argue that if you want to always make sure you didn't miss anything then it's better than fumbling around the area for potentially long periods of time to your own mounting frustration. Plus, I would rather have the metal detector highlight the loot if I'm in range and it's not behind a wall or something, or as I said, at least be able to turn the sound off. That constant sound can be rather annoying when trying to deal with enemies, especially when using stealth or searching any maze-like area. The main problem here is that the loot blends in with the rest of the static background objects way too well. They should have added a highlight system or just somehow just made their loot stand out more.

-Mutants should at least usually spawn some loot, if only some meager amount of components for crafting, and maybe even very rarely to give you something extra nice (that would be really nice). Killing mutants in this game is ALWAYS a waste of time and ammo UNLESS you can't stealth past and they are an immediate threat.

-Can't fit all the loot found? You only pick up what you can fit and any excess is gone forever.

-Huge missed opportunity: Personal preference probably, but they really should have made Moscow at least a little tiny open world area you could mess around in. I've been wanting to explore that outside area open map style (even if it's just really small) ever since playing the first two games. Maybe I've just played too many Fallout games in my time, but what they give instead as the first open-world area is painfully average at best in comparison to the potential of even just a tiny section of Moscow that you could dig into.

-Can't change general volume with my HyperX keyboard and I have to alt-tab and adjust it from my task bar if I want to change the volume. This is not the case for any of the 100+ other games I own. I think they made a deal with a specific company for game-controlled RGB effects and it was a very bad decision (as one might argue, the whole Epic fiasco as well, but I digress...). They might as well have a FO76-like money-suckering store as far as I'm concerned.

Overall: This game feels like it has an identity crisis or maybe I'm just not understanding it. At first I though it was better than the first two games but now I'm not so sure and think it might actually be the worst one in the trilogy due to how schizophrenic it seems to be. I both liked this game a lot at first and wanted to keep liking it, but soon found quite a few game-breakers for me personally at least.

My hat is off to you if you generally like the entire game at large and have little to no issues with it. I tried and tried, took a deep breath and dove in again with no expectations, just to have at least some marginally enjoyable times. But alas, no. For me it was not meant to be. And this down review is only a cautionary tale to anyone who may feel as I do. At some point I may go back and play the first two games to compare, because I highly suspect that I will find both of them a much more enjoyable experience overall compared to this.

My Alternate Review: A sim where your wife constantly tells you where to go and what to do while constantly arguing with her father, all while you wisely keep your mouth shut and just do what you're told, just like in real life. (May include some gun-play but this is only incidental.)

Edit: Some revision for better clarity.

Don't let the price fool you. This is a full-on AAA game title only its origins hearken back to the glory days of the PS2 and was only recently re-introduced for modern PC game play. Loved it both back then and now even more. Plus they just gave out for free some new skins - I mean what a chad dev team. Gameplay is very well-nuanced in that you can approach missions in a variety of ways although if you want to complete every last optional objective then you will have compromise on this a bit of course. How lucky are we (those that love classic PS2 games like RE4) get to play them on modern PCs with full support! I know I paid them for the game (even pre-ordered to get those extra skins) but I still must thank them for not even remotely misplacing my funds whereas this fine gem of a game is concerned.

Update: I've been playing on and off since the beginning, have many more hours offline, and am currently playing my second character with a slightly different build. I've never had many bugs since the beginning but they've since fixed things like the driving mechanics and some objects not being loot-able sometimes.

~Play-style: Upgrading hacking skills is most fun. Mixed with stealth and sometimes explosives, you can dominate most any enemy group on the hardest difficulty. Putting some points into crafting is also good so you can create useful tech and upgrade it. Stealth + hacking + guns + explosives + crafting + upgrades = extremely fun game loop. Take down enemies, scrounge up every last tasty morsel of loot, earn money, and buy different gear and vehicles as they unlock.

~Ambiance: Then there's the incredible atmosphere. You need to walk every place nearby at first and then drive there yourself. Never fast travel unless you've already seen the same route at least a dozen times already. This game stands on its own just as a worthy walking sim. Crowd AI and LOD vehicles are dumb though.

I can't say I care for the story much, but the visuals and 1.5 level of game-play style are still good enough for me. They can always make the content a bit richer in a variety of ways, but it's still a pretty solid game-play and atmosphere title right now. 8.5/10

This is the scariest and most immersive horror game I've played since Cry of Fear. Ignore any comments about graphics being dated at all because it actually fits this style of game perfectly and looks much better (more detailed gfx) than Cry of Fear anyway. It's almost like a game from 10-12 years ago that got a remaster and optimization for modern PCs. I haven't finished it yet and people say it's short but for the price that's probably more than fine.

1 hour in - It's like a modder lovingly made this for some nameless old FPS and didn't care about money. Except in this case it was the developer themselves that made this and I hope they made a ton. I actually had to stop and take several quick breaks to sit in awe of this game and just look at my time played at time of review. That time probably includes at least 5 minutes of me just pausing the game to pick my jaw off the floor at various times all in the starting area. I'm not worthy.

11 hours in - The game has a hardcore and realistic feel that's very rewarding on many fronts once you get used to how the game dynamics all flow together in this viable world. In some small ways it reminds me of / has some flavors of Morrowind, DayZ Arma2 mod, and Fallout, all mixed together in a tidy package with their own added twists. Not gonna pretend that it's perfect or doesn't have bugs, but so far I haven't had any real issues and am eager to progress in missions and find new areas.

Game has a fun loop but there's no end-game and the devs are very shady in general. Their publisher and every game under them spams ads for their other games all over each of their store pages, most especially in their news feeds when you're expecting news and updates about the game itself.