Recent reviews by Jkar

Potentially a great game from a legendary franchise, currently in the process of being run into the ground by out-of-touch and incompetent developers who not only refuse to listen to what the majority of their long-standing, ultra-loyal player base asks for, but are in fact hellbent on doing the EXACT OPPOSITE to an extent that borders on the spiteful.
I've been playing Tekken with a passion since 1999 (Tekken 2) and after 26 years of loyalty and dedication I am now at the point where I have absolutely no trust in the current development team and their vision going forward.
In the hope of being proved wrong, I'll leave this review up until persuaded otherwise by the developers' actions.

The game is really fun and intuitive, the production value is quite high and the animations, sound effects and interactions in general are very polished and pleasant. The possibility to make your own combos and strategies is quite high, and they have recently added a VS mode as well. As such, I highly reccomend this game to anyone who wants a hyper-casual card game to play in their spare time while slowly collecting cards and cool visual variants.

Still, I have to remove 1 star because of the 11€ season passes, which so far have been absolutely and blatantly pay2win, since they all give out a rare and powerful card basically on the spot, while a non-paying player would instead have to find it in random lootboxes with a 2.5% or even 0.5% drop chance.
As a reference, I have played this game for 85h on Steam and at least triple that amount on mobile, reaching Collection Level 2300+ ....and I still have not found a SINGLE card of those included in the season passes. Cards which, by the way, have just been nerfed substantially as it turned out that they were (surprise surprise) absolutely broken and lead to decks with a 75% average winrate :P Quite dissapointing...

When I play an MMORPG, I want to be able to get immersed in the game, see my character as my avatar in a large and interesting world and feel the excitement to explore it, meet new people and have crazy and unexpected things happen to me and my friends.

That is why, in my personal opinion, this game is not an MMO at all, and after playing it for 3 days I have no interest nor motivation to keep playing it.

- ZERO interactions with other players. They run around killing things. You run around killing things. Not a word is spoken. The end.
- No type of bond whatsoever with my character (aka the most realistic, good-looking and detailed 200x100 pixel stain I ever had in the middle of my screen). "How does this new gear look? Well, let me get to a safe place and zoom ALL THE WAY in, so I can manage to see my f****ng character in a reasonable size"
- The world is a series of small maps linked together by loading screens. Each map is filled with instantly respawning enemies (to make sure you feel like you had no impact whatsoever on the world), the usual npcs to sell and repair, and occasionally some interest points to vary things a bit. Good enough if you want some slaughtering grounds where to farm mobs - really boring if you want something remotely inspired or interesting.
- The story goes from "comically bad" to "unbearably bad". I'd define the voice acting as "torture", but you can skip most cutscenes, so there's at least that...

That said, it's not an ENTIRELY BAD game: the combat feels nice and the abilities are spectacular and flashy, the graphics are quite nice and there is a lot of content such as collections, achievements, cards, etc.
In other words, Lost Ark does a pretty good job at being "eastern Diablo multiplayer".

However, I came in for an MMO, and what I found is NOTHING like what I consider an MMO to be.
But hey... if you are the kind of person that can get attached to minuscule characters and get excited exploring a foreign world exclusively by looking down at the ground, then...sure, give it a try.

A wonderful reminder of how videogames don't need photorealistic graphics, triple-A producers, crazy animations and skin stores to be good: they just need to be FUN.
Everything in this game feels as if it was made saying "Sure it is budget and looks crappy, but it is fun to play with, so in the game it goes".
Props to the developer for making such a great little game from what clearly started as a parody-tribute to Castlevania (90% of the names in the game are puns in italian :P)

At the moment it costs less than 3$, which is an UNBELIAVABLE deal in terms of entertainment/cost.
I mean... it's the cost of a medium Coke at Mc Donalds, and you'll enjoy it way more and for way longer!

Basically, get this game right now.

I tried this game for almost 40 hours with a group of 4-5 good friends, over the course of a week.
In the end we were so frustrated and fed up with it that we used Discord to coordinate so what we would all uninstall it in sync.
Here is why:

THE CORE LOOP
Normal games have a Core Loop (aka something you will be doing most of the time) and then some Extra Content around it (aka additional stuff that provides extra depth and fun).
Not this game.
In this game, the Core Loop will take about 20% of your time and it the OPPOSITE of fun.
The crafting is very basic, the interface is a mess, the gathering is boring as hell and I cannot even BEGIN to describe how bad the combat is.

THE ADDITIONAL "CONTENT"
The remaining 80% of the time you will spend doing literally just CHORES . That's it.
All mechanics in this game are designed not to IMPROVE your gaming experience, but instead specifically to PREVENT you from playing the game. They honest title for this game should be "Do Endless Chores Hoping That Eventually The Real Game Will Begin Together".

TRIAL AND (FATAL) ERROR
This game is 100% a Wiki game. You CANNOT play this game without gathering massive amounts of info and knowledge about its mechanics.
Why? Because not knowing ONE THING is likely to cause your death or the loss of all you have built.
Don't know how to deal with cold/warm temperature? Enjoy being a prisoner in your base for hours or just straight up die. Haven't thought about crafting an umbrella? Well, enjoy being miserable for the entirety of spring. Managed to survive rain, cold, heat, hunger, sanity loss and monsters? Aww, that is cute...too bad you didn't also thing of finding a killing the Summer Boss. If you are asking yourself "what even is the Summer Boss?", chances are you are about to be blessed with summer earthquakes that surgically snipe your base, demolish all your structures and permanently scar the terrain making it unhabitable.
Long story short: knowledge in this game is not "power": it is the BARE MINIMUM to even be able to play.

TUTORIALS, EXPLANATIONS AND OTHER THINGS THAT ARE NOT IN THE GAME
But wait: a game like this, where every piece of information is CRITIAL and can determine losing countless hours of progress, must SURELY have some sort of info, tooltip, perhaps a TUTORIAL of some sort, right?
WRONG. This game tells you ABSOLUTELY NOTHING . The level of info displayed in the tooltips is unironically on the level of "PLANT: This is a plant" or "WEIRD ROCK: Can be used to do things...probably"

THE FINAL ISSUE
All of which brings me to my ultimate point on why I absolutely REGRET giving this game a try: this game deliberately and intentionally WASTES YOUR TIME.
Because if the boring mechanics, the bull***t disasters and the endless chores were not enough, this game proceeds to purposely hide all information from you, forcing you to wonder in the dark for hours until something that you don't know will kill you or make you lose most of what you have painfully managed to put together until that point.

As someone who plays games mostly for the challenge (Souls-like, Getting Over it, Tekken, etc.), I do get the appeal of "difficult" games. This? This is NOT difficult. This is a BORING game, where EVERY FEATURE is a CHORE meant to take your fun AWAY from you, designed to FRUSTRATE you by not explaining ANYTHING and then punishing you needlessly hard for not knowing enough.

I have played this game in intervals, serveral times, in the corse of several years.
I recently came back to it with the hope that they might have fixed the bugs and made it more interesting and varied.

They didn't.
This game is not worth your time, as much as I desperately wanted it to be.
- Cluncky and extremely limited combat
- pitiful variety of creatures
- boring and empty world
- enemy AI that redefines the concept of "braindead"
- bugs and inconsistencies that will frustrate you to no end

This game is an interesing game....for an alpha.
Not worth even half of it's current price (33€).