Recent reviews by Yisou

A twist on the Lethal Company model.

While still prone to a few bugs (both software and head-eating kind), the game has neat environments designed to set the tone well.

Environment, lighting and general tone is solid.
Enemy types are interesting, though a little hard to predict or be aware of.

Come for the coop horror.
Stay to pet kitty.

Update: Some of the economic updates have come through and certainly breathed new life into the game. The biggest benefit now is the reduced stress and increased aggressive plays due to the better economics.


Context prior to the June and July 2023 economy updates and why War Thunder had a negative review prior:


Years of worsening economics.

War Thunder has been, is, and likely will be a game I enjoy.
However, it has also been a game in which I have put up with eight years of watching the developers continue to worsen the game's economy. Sometimes publicly, sometimes in 'stealth nerfs'.

If you're a new player interested in what War Thunder has to offer, I strongly recommend against it. The game is not kind to new players. This game heavily rewards map knowledge, vehicle knowledge, and experience.
In addition, the game compounds the above by making progress extremely slow.

There comes a point where a new player has to contend with the fact that:
Even if he unlocks everything on his vehicle, his crews fly worse, drive slower, reload slower, aim less accurately.
And most of his time will be spent discovering that his new vehicle lacks additional equipment that veterans already have unlocked.

The icing on the cake is the most recent debacle from the company, yet another worsened economic update.

Good with friends.

Reviewed during 0.2.0.4.0

Pros:

It looks pretty, the detail (such as individual weapons having models on the ships) is nice.
Special effects are impressive.
Space looks neat.
Simple/Easily accessible gameplay.
Spaceship models are pretty.
The opening for the prologue is good! (But it gets quickly mowed down by the rest of the prologue)
Crafting looks intriguing
Lots of ships, variety is spice.
Guns do different things, again variety is nice especially given that some weapons bypass shields etc.

Meh:
Spaceship models are all from a publicly sold pack. This is neither good nor bad, that's just where game development is these days thanks to the costs. You can find all the ship models on CGtrader if that interests you.

Music. I could take it or leave it.

Cons:
Prologue written entirely out of Scifi B-movie clichés.
Yes, the abandoned freighter has been preyed upon by pirates.
Yes, the unnecessary comic relief character squeezed into the prologue has all the clichés you'd expect from this level of writing: corporate, lazy, weedy voiced, you name it, he didn't just get it, he decided to corner the market on it.
Yes, the big bad will spend time explaining to the audience that he doesn't want peace by ... turning up and saying as much.
Yes! The good guys (c) will literally drop the phrase "What is the meaning of this?"
Yes! A literal melodramatic "You and who's army" cliché is also squeezed into the prologue.
Yes! The phrase "You won't get away with this!" and its variants are thrown about with the same fervour with which I hammer the 2 key for the nuke missile.

The bad guys (tm) have red decals. That's how you know they're bad guys.

Control system is... not ideal. You'll learn it, but it'll definitely feel like it could be better.

Voice acting isn't bad. Clichéd? Sure. Melodramatic lines? Sure. But the voice actors are fine.

The prologue is let down by a mediocre conclusion. Spoilers to follow:

^ Characters we have met for all of a half hour or so are dying courageously in a manner that would have been almost heroic if we had been emotionally involved. Seeing as we've had close to zero interaction with them, the effect is lost.
^ The above emotional moments are also ruined by the fact that they occur at set intervals in the dialogue. Your ship takes an arbitrary amount of forced damage and X has his send off moment. Continue until only Captain is left.

The Captain ('You' in the prologue) fires an energy weapon to destroy the Big Bad (TM) by diverting all power to a weapon system that neither exists on the inventory pages nor exists on the model. In fact, as far as I can tell, it simply manifests itself in order to propel the Captain into matyrdom.

This is all while non-stop screaming lines about how Nartos 'won't be allowed to get away with this' and how she'll 'hunt him down no matter the cost' etc etc.

Now, I do get that the death of the captain in the prologue is an inversion of the above clichés, but nevertheless, having to sit through such dialogue to get to that inversion doesn't really make it any better.


----

However, would I recommend it?

Yes. It's a shame its dialogue writing lets it down so hard, but while I might despise bad writing, the game is still enjoyable. It has a crafting system, a crew management system (such as it is) and spaceships to earn, fly and shoot people with. And that's all good fun.
And that's all a game really needs to be, isn't it?

This is a cool game, featuring 3 races from Warhammer, but I don't get why the Devs decided to add the fourth fictional race into it.

Everyone knows that there's no such thing as 'a skaven'.

Sure, my cousin Friedrich from Nuln claims his friend Uther once talked with a gutter-cleaner that saw a ratman, but this is the same cousin that used to say that his local butcher was mixing rat into his sausages.

Needless to say, I heard cousin Friedrich was taken away for spreading slanderous lies.

Good riddance if you ask me.

At the moment there's a lot of salt. Enough to preserve as much meat as you'd ever want.

I'd recommend you ignore both the salt and the recent reviews. A lot of the reviews are directly due to people's issues with regards the new DLC.

If you're interested in purchasing the game, then I can only recommend it. You'll get a good game, that's still being updated (despite claims to the contrary).

It's a good survival game and the salt you'll see at the time of this review is simply an extension of that. These aren't reviews saying: "The game sucks." These are reviews saying: "Selling DLC in EA sucks".

These are from players who dislike what they see and care enough to display their anger, yet don't dislike the game (since it's aimed currently at devs).


If you like survival games, you'll enjoy Ark. That's what matters.

Are you going to have fun?

Yes.

Go to space, purge heretics, kill xenos, and save Mankind for Truth, Justice and the Imperial Way™

Warning: Imperial Way is not for children, xenos, mutants, heretics or witches. Keep away from Chaos. Side-effects include: Incoherent prayers, a desire to build your own private Geller Field and an near fervent and fanatical devotion to the God-Emperor of Mankind, blessed be His name.

Was once a fun and enjoyable game.
I recently decided to get back into it, only to find my region is banned from playing it.
This isn't a local decision this was a decision made by PWE to ban my region.
My /entire/ region.

That's both insulting and annoying.
Wouldn't recommend it.

One of the most reassuringly NON pay-to-win games I have ever seen.
Not only can every basic unit be bought with the ingame currency (which is easily achievable), in addition the game's 'special/unique' units which appear in the weekend deals (available for ingame currency) are not able outside of those deal occasions.

This game literally cannot be defined as pay to win.
If you enjoy turn based games, you'll like this.

Some key points:
This isn't a WW2 game. It is WW2 like Red Alert 1 is. Thematically more of a mix between WW2 & Steampunk/Industrial Punk.

See you on the field commander!

A brilliant real time take of the Space Empire series, feels and plays similarly to those old classics.
Did I mention real-time?

Sadly, dropped in favour of developing Stardrive 2.
Product remains unoptimised and buggy, but is still enjoyable.