Recent reviews by CodingSloth

Home base navigation, load times, and UI all suck, but once you actually get into a mission, gameplay is awesome. Good story, co-op is great (wish more of the main storyline was co-op), good graphics, excellent cosmetics, powers, upgrades for each character, beating up enemies is very satisfying.

I just wish we could have PvP as well, would be fun to throw down with a buddy wearing hulkbuster ironman while I'm the hulk.

Game is a total blast. Hopefully they improve the ease of loading into missions for the Guardians of the Galaxy game they're releasing this winter.

No Man's Sky was rough when it initially released in 2016, missing a variety of core functionality and features (such as multiplayer) that had been promised to the fanbase in the lead-up to launch. Despite the missing functionality, I *still* enjoyed NMS, sinking in numerous hours on my PS4 and later doing the same on my PC. The variety and scale of the universe has always been awesome from the beginning.

When NMS released and a veritable ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ descended upon Hello Games (developer) over the missing features, the dev team hunkered down, went silent, and started working hard on fixing bugs, performance issues, and working towards a series of large updates to the game to provide features and functionality that were missing from the start.
After 2 years of steady updates, NMS had already undergone some great changes. Now we're at 4 years since initial release, with even *more* ongoing updates that have been released. The game still resembles what it was at original launch (at least when you start out a fresh game), but *so much* has changed. Since launch we now have first & third person, we have VR support, even more planets and biomes have been added. Weather is more dynamic and versatile. Caves, mountains, volcanoes (added), oceans, are all more extensive and varied. Lighting has drastically improved.
There are new modes to play in (Normal, Survival, Permadeath, Creative), full-on multiplayer exists, full-on base-building exists, ship customization is more versatile, more variety in flora, fauna, materials, colors.

The depth of building and construction in the game approaches almost the depth of Space Engineers, but unlike Space Engineers, that's not even the focus in this game. You can build on any planet / moon / whatever. Exploration is awesome fun, and the amount of ridiculous views you'll see almost everywhere will make you want to constantly take new screenshots and create new video clips. It's so easy to find a view that resembles what you would see on the cover of a sci-fi novel, which is amazing (and really was one of the goals / inspiration of the developers).

I highly recommend this game. The only thing it's missing is PvP, but that's fine, there's plenty of other games where that is a focus, and really PvP could end up ruining the experience of this game for the explorers pretty quickly.

The fact that the game supports cross-play means you can have friends or family playing with you, regardless of what device they're on (Xbox One, PS4, PC), which is great fun.
Definitely a must buy.

10/10, would stab friends in the back again

One of the few strategy games I've played where the art, sound, environment, and gameplay so completely suck me in that suddenly the game I started that morning is still going strong and it's dark out...

Highly recommended as an alternative to opiates.

strong learning curve, and not really fun until you start getting to the higher skill level matches. quite rewarding once you've put some time in, quite fun as well.

Fun, creative, challenging colony survival game. Quite fun!

Very addictive, great graphics. Highly recommend

It was a good game, but Developer/Publisher are no longer supporting MKX on PC. Do not buy.

Was a great game, but has been sliding with each DLC update. The microtransaction update is a horrid addition, do not buy.

This review is based almost solely on the presentation & performance of the game.
I simply cannot get into a game that has poor animations, unimpressive graphics, and for which the maxed out settings don't really improve the visuals but simply worsen performance.

I really want to like ARK, but for the above reasons, I cannot like or recommend the game yet. Still screenshots look good, but playing it myself, and watching any gameplay videos, all that stands out to me are the flat repetitive textures, poorly animated wildlife, and overall presentation of the game. It leads to a total lack of immersion for me. Sure, the scope is quite large, but I'd be fine with much smaller maps if the game at least looked/behaved anywhere near something like Far Cry 4 (presentation, wildlife).

This also gives me a bad impression of what Epic's Unreal engine is currently capable of handling, but who knows, maybe these things are just low priority right now, so the visuals, performance, etc, will all get a massive overhaul prior to the gold release... Here's hoping, but I'm not holding my breath, as it seems standard that most any open-world survival game tends to look pretty bad...