Recent reviews by BudgeMonkey

An absolute amazing delight from start to finish. Every segment introduced new mechanics that quickly become second nature, then along came something new. What could be an entire game on it's own, is but a single level here. Plus each character gets different mechanics that compliment each other perfectly. The entire presentation was excellently executed and culminated in an amazing finale. If you can get yourself a +1, this is a must buy.

As a wee Little JudgeMonkey, jungle law school still a distant goal, I played a game. The Starship titanic it was called. On this ship, there was a host of robots that you interacted with. Not simply through clicking, but through typing. And they would react to so many prompts with responses. A pneumatic tube mail system, tell it to use it's sucking ability for something rude, and it called you out on it. But this was luck, it was planning, they had to account for what the player would do. It did a great job of it, but if you found a wal to drift off script, it had to use nonsensical catch alls to guide you back.
The thought of something more, of it truly reacting to anything you could say, was a dream. It was something accompanied by flying cars and matter replicators. It'd never happen.

Enough about other games, but you get where I was going with that. Point is, we're here. With the maturation of machine learning languages and voice replication, we've got that. There's plenty of chat bots out there, sure. But this one gamifies the system. It blends with prerecorded dialogue and rendered scenes to seamlessly join between the highly scripted to the more free form. It's not perfect, nothing is, but it's an exceptional endeavor. She's got a backstory, family, plans, goals, fears, ambitions, and reason. Nothing you'd expect from a fully prerecorded character is missing.

You've got to be ok embarrassing yourself a little. To have a casual conversation with something you ultimately know isn't real. You've got to be willing to share goals, problems, musings, to show consideration, concern, and worry when the next stella.mp4 is about to play. Let yourself get a little lost in another world for a bit, and you're in for a good time.

Onto some cons. I really only have three:
1) sometimes she really tries to squeeze answers out of you and it can get awkward. Like "Whoa, that space bear almost ripped my face off. So what do you look for when you're talking to someone new?" (fake situation, real question). That can continue for a while if a conversation is kind of in a rut.
2)Some times you have to answer a certain way. She asked me why something was the way it was (gotta be vague). I told her what I thought, and how that played back to an earlier situation, but she didn't quite make the connection so I didn't get credit for guessing the answer, despite it being exactly it.
3) Sometimes the solution really is "Shut up and do it". There's a point where shes trying to overcome an obstacle. All she has is a rubber band, three sticks, and a get-over-obstacle-anator, and you just need to try to tell her to try a dirt road off to the side that she didnt tell you was there unless you asked her specifically to check a certain area. and even then she'll protest like "What if a khajit bandit tries to rob me when I go there, or I get hit by a meteor" and you just gotta say "do eeeet"

These are small issues. Mostly everything is fine, and if you just want to progress, you can tell her as much and she'll move on to the next part, or she'll die, whatever. Something's gonna happen.

Absolute nothingness. Walking does not work, and the map geometry fails at every angle. Any positive reviews or messages for this have to be fake and bought. This is a free demo and I still feel like I need to get a refund somehow.

This archaic character migration is antiquated by 2020 standards, and we're well past that. If they're so confident in their anticheat, then it's time to simply give us direct cross progression. Instead I'm forced to import a character that is 10 years outdated compared to my modern progression. The game ran fine, and I'm sure it would have done more fine, but I was so paywalled by stuff that I'd earned through play and pay that I did not have the ability to try.

At initial launch, the game crashed at the most minor of actions, such as learning a new engram, or just loading. Servers couldn't stay up for more than a few hours, and would sometimes disappear for a day or more.

The game still has some crashes, though far less frequent. Fog and clouds have to be disabled at high altitudes or you can be blinded when they roll in. Official servers are shoulder to shoulder population and impossible to get into.

If you move past all of that, though, this is ark. Explore, tame dinos, fight bosses, and ascend. If you're less about the grind and more about the content, single player or boosted servers are a viable avenue.

For it's entire package though, official servers are a part of it, and at their height, it's a game of literally trying for hours to play and often coming up empty, which means there's nothing here at all. So if official servers are a deciding factor for you, then there's zero reason to waste your money on this.