Recent reviews by Novix

ive only played for 7 hours, beat the game once, went to do it again with a new character, found more mechanics i wasnt even aware existed during that fight that insta killed me.

this game is gunna be my obsession for the foreseeable future

Fun game, but putting this into perspective. I have 4 top tier premiums that I bought to help with the grind, it was already, really tough to grind, then they reduced rewards in matches, it took a lot of hard work to be able to have a positive income in matches due to repair costs of the PREMIUM vehicles, which are actually really cheap. AND i have a premium account, which gives even MORE bonuses, but I still played because I generally still enjoyed gameplay. with a lineup of mostly premiums that averaged around 8.7, I was trying to grind out the 7.0 Tier, and it worked, every 2-3 days I was able to get a vehicle, and ONLY because of these bonuses I PAID FOR, was I able to even dream of it and after purchasing said vehicle I STILL, was broke after buying each one. now? im grinding 8.0. same premium benefits, Each match now gives me maybe 4k-6k SL and thats IF I get a few kills, which isnt easy with some of the tryhards in top-tier. new tank will cost around 400k to buy, and another 300k to train the crew, PLUS the fact that I dont even have the option to buy it yet, with the amount of RP I get towards it I'd be hard pressed to unlock it within the month. WITH, ALL THE SAME BENIFETS, THAT I'VE DUMPED MONEY ON. however, according to gaijin the old system doesnt work because they don't earn enough. please explain then how I've seen more and more premium vehicles than ever recently no matter what tier I play. gaijin is literally making the game unplayable for anyone who isnt willing to dump a couple hundred bucks on them PER nation. it is no longer free to play.

So far I'm loving this game, loving the genre and so far the community is already doing decent I'd say.
Some things to note

so far the only major bugs I've seen
Clicking on the mini map deselects your units, would be a minor annoyance but the maps are so huge its faster to click on the map than to scroll most of the time, so fixing that would be good
The chat only scrolls for so far and then it breaks meaning the only message you can see is the most recent one sent, making fuller lobbies harder to keep up with chat
When you are typing in chat the inputs still register for the rest of the game (every time I pressed E on the keyboard while typing made my screen spin, and since E is a common letter you can imagine how annoying this was to deal with)

BALANCE
Early game the human faction honestly comes out weaker, their resource gathering unit is slow, very difficult to maneuver and its huge frame makes it a huge target, it makes up for this with a relatively large health pool however that doesn't mean much (I watched a single crab player destroy a guarded harvester because it crawled on top and none of the protecting units could shoot up there, which I could argue is a feature but that's up to the Devs but personally I enjoy it) However the human faction doesn't need as much micromanaging in proportion to the alien faction as the game moves on. Example, humans don't need to expand as far, they just need to go to a resource field and come back safely, their guns and ranged attacks make doing this relatively easy as long as you play a small amount of attention to where the enemy is compared to you. As the game moves on however the weapons the humans get become much more longer range and more accurate and devastating, and with simple kiting you can easily wipe out a large group of aliens. The ONLY way for an alien player to effectively combat humans is to literally swarm with strong units from all sides, however the slow speed of the aliens in comparison to human vehicles makes this next to impossible. especially since much of the map is open sand dunes. Alien econ is also extremely difficult to maintain, the shrimp unit (the alien resource harvester) is only about as fast as the basic combat unit, which is nimble, and easy to maintain, however you need a lot of them to get resources at the rate that humans do, which wouldn't be a problem except for the fact that the biomass resource pool drains, WAY too fast. with 8 shrimp I can almost fully drain a biomass pool in 2 trips, before they start their journey to the next one, as the game progresses having to send nodes out to make their return trips shorter means the micromanaging becomes SUPER intense and inefficient, taking up much needed attention as the human faction gets access to new weapons that can kill your strongest unit in a few hits, with range to do so long before said unit can even cross half the distance. said unit is also VERY expensive, making the insane amount of effort to get resources as an alien even more frantic. One issue I also noticed is that the alien and human base both spawned with nothing but an open dune field between them on the right side of the map, making the left side of the map unnecessary as both teams were too focused on defending and attacking rather than expansion

Suggestions
Make alien endgame units tankier or faster, as it's just a huge unfair advantage that the humans get with range.
More balance towards resource cost and availability
Perhaps multiple tiers of resource and resource gatherers? (For example have different values for the size of the resource pool/area, and different values for how much resource gain, making finding the higher quality pools better for short term and the larger pools better for long term, with rarity to make it worth exploring the map of course) and instead of the humans having to start off with the large and vulnerable resource gatherer first have a smaller one, that's less effective but because its harder to notice and attack it nullifies the issue i mentioned above where you can cripple the human economy with just a few crabs if you hit early on enough. and then later on with research you gain the ability for the large harvester and the aliens get their own version as well.

Additions I would personally like to see:
-I see a lot of people mentioning air units and seeing air units for both humans and aliens would be neat, although finding a balanced way to make that work would be tricky.
-more unit and map variety of course
-Rally points for unit creation structures
-a more intuitive UI, as figuring out where all the buttons are at first is a little confusing.
-Special unit perks/abilities, like some of the bugs having the ability to ambush burrow, or if you have a squad of like 3 riflemen you can have them setup like a little sandbag area that gives them better cover and bonuses to aim or fire rate.
-More defensive options as all I've seen for humans is the ability to build the main building which has turrets but it is expensive and not worth it, same with the aliens defensive structures I built like 10 of the things and watched a single tank destroy all of them, 10k resources drained because they didn't have the range/damage output to keep up lol.
-better building indicators on when you can/cant build something, as all it is right now is a brightness change of the structure preview and on a bright background for smaller buildings its kinda hard to tell at times.
-Better indicators for team and all chat? idk if there even are any because everything in the chat looked the same whether or not i send it to my team or to all chat.

Got on first submarine
placed welding fuel in oxygen mask and died
second try
get about 200 meters down with the starting ship, got attacked by 4 crawlers and barely lived
next station
steals tobacco from the trash can and gets brutally beaten by the station security
3rd try
get pretty far, then discover the joys of an endworm as my ship sinks into crushing depth
many, many more tries and chaotic deaths later
watching my new friends I introduced to the game die in all the ways that I've already died, laughing and trying to teach them what they did wrong so we can keep going through the mission
still dying in new ways that I didnt know were possible before, but now it's cooler
still screaming down in the depths of Europa as my ship sinks
still 10/10 as clowns overload my ships reactor and blow us all up, would recommend to anyone who enjoys chaos, skill, luck, and most of all, clowns.

A lovely game for meeting a ton of interesting people in ways that are much more interactive than most other online platforms, I've made real true friendships here that really have brightened my day. a lot of people tend to hide in private lobbies nowadays because the quest kids but honestly?.. thats.. kinda ruining the fun of the game. its to meet people and explore all this user created content with these people to BUILD friendships, I understand not wanting a 9 year old calling you racial slurs but.. thats any online game, block em if it annoys you that much lol. there are toxic parts of the community and also crashers, hackers, etc. but safety settings and a could other precautions are easily available to help with that, even if it is annoying. the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in this game are god tier and the friendships and wholesome moments are so much more and very much worth getting screamed at by a bunch of random children who will deal with the same thing in a few years lol.

Edit: EAC Has been implemented, and Honestly I cant say I support the choice. I spent a few months after trying a few other platforms however and unfortunately as of now VRChat is still the most accessible option for social VR platforms, I will keep an eye out on others but will continue to try and relax and chill, but cautiously as now that my anti crashing modifications are gone, crashers have been able to knock me out of lobbies left and right simply for being a furry. Clients also still exist except most of them are mainly malicious, meaning EAC, failed. big surprise. people are being crashed, avatar assets ripped and stolen, and things have only gone downhill.

1. Install Warframe
2. Beat Vor
3. Gets a kubrow
4. Gets a flamethrower and sprints around putting everything in sight on fire
5. Get crushed by an eidolon
6. get a group of friends together
7. we all get crushed by eidolon
8. find an OP player and bribe them with flattery to help beat the eidolon
9. finally beat the eidolon

12/10 would be a fire ninja again

This game is simply amazing, I’ve never felt so small in a game until I’ve looked out the window as a soldier to see a monolith fighting several carriers and battleships

10/10 would explode from monolith again

this game is single handedly the best RTS game ive ever even heard of, while the graphics look old the gameplay is so in depth that after a few minutes you dont even notice anymore, want to use your navy but its a mountain map with no water? dig a canal and create a Navy that dominates, want to block said navy on enemy team? simply raise the terrain above water level, enemy building massive artilary? bring up sheilds and create a massive skyward mountain that blocks the shots until you can create a counter offensive, every unit has a counter so none are overpowered, and you can literally shape not only your in game wars but the map as well to allow you to do... pretty much anything you want! and if you get a few friends to play this game with you itll be insanely more fun and add so many more hours of gameplay

After seeing so many reviews on this game giving it a hard time, i decided that i would write a review showing a thunbs up instead. First off, im not saying that no one out there has legitimate points being made or that they are all whiney loosers or some ♥♥♥♥ like that, but ive seen a few that are quite amazing in the fact that they have little to no point at all, just complaining. now that thats out of the way, onto the review.

I bought this game after watching one of my favorite youtubers play it, right after it first came out, its the reason i got steam at all! I got into a server, official of course, and was gunned down on every spawn or killed by some random creature, not a good start. but eventually i found an unofficial server with official stats, and i survived long enough to craft some basic gear. I met a few people and we tribed up, then the server went down a month or so later and we had to move on, i followed one of my friends onto a server that had an insane stat gain, over 200 times what you would normally get in every stat! dinos were almost instantly tamed no matter what, and their stats were the same. When i logged on the next day, i was kicked from tribe, and in a cage, my own friend yelling at me that i betrayed them, turns out we were raided and the raider claimed i let them into the base. so i left that server, and my only friends on steam, behind. later on my PC was destroyed internally by an electrical storm, and it was months before i was able to get my pc to be able to run ark again. So i moved on to other games, but when i met with 2 others that played ark, i decided to come back, we went to 3 different servers, all unofficial, and settled on a quiet server, only one other tribe we knew of, and we had allied with them, we logged off, 2 days later i came back, and they had killed us, all our dinos, and took all our stuff, while allied. They then left the server with thier base fortified enough so we couldnt get anything back. eventually, we killed all of thier dinos and stole our gear back, and took some of thiers. and again we settled. 2 months later another tribe joins, a massive group of people who make a massive stone base in minutes, it was unofficial with 7x rates so stone wasnt suprising, but they had rexes, a huge stone base, like it was MASSIVE, in a few days, and they outnumbered us 3 to 1, in an effort to keep the peace, i gave them our ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ascendant gear, that way we could still defend ourselves if they decided to attack, they didnt, and eventually we became good friends with thier tribe.

That was a long time ago, one of the origional members of my tribe went renegade, and caused chaos in the server, getting him a ban from the owner of it. I still play, most of my other friends dont, and the admin is always watching to make sure that no trolls join who raid just to see others rage, if you are raided once, and it was a legitimate pvp raid to take your stuff, no tricks, no alliances, no offline raiding, then they arent a troll and arent under fire from the admin, but if you raid, just to blow someone elses ♥♥♥♥ up, then the admin keeps on your tail for the rest of the time your on his server. I myself have had enough pvp to last awhile, and i like the quiet, the server is still dangerous enough to be interesting, but there are no massive tribe wipes to make you fear logging off every night, so if anyone complains about official servers but you still want the game, try it, try official first, see what you think of it, but if you dislike it, find an unofficial, with a good admin, nice stats, and the right amount of people for you, they say the ark was made for the devs to get money, and thats kinda true, they say the games buggy af, thats really true, but when they say the game can never be fun or relaxing, they dont know what they are talking about, the ark really IS yours for the taking, if you choose to take it, thank you for reading this review and i hope this lets people know that this game still has some good in it. good day

i would highly recommend this game, IF you are someone who has the patience and willingness to learn how to play it. in all honesty, i didnt get to play with other people in sandbox, i got the game a few patches AFTER they removed it, but to hear so many bad reviews because progression takes so long, it may be 3 hours but at least there isnt like, 20 adult rexes going after you 24/7. so many people give this game and the devs heat, but the devs arent making the game just as the players want it because THAT is how a game that had potential goes down the drain, the devs have a plan for the game already, i have seen videos of what dondi plans to do with this game, and i havent ever really been as excited by the future plans of a game as i am now. this game is already an amazing game, no pay to win, hackers are NOT tolerated, and a plan to make this game even better. there ARE bad things about the game, like server connection issues and the fact that people with their settings low can easily see you in what for you is impossibly long grass that you cant see yourself in (if YOUR settings are set to high) but the rest of the game is amazing and has so much potential. but enough about how amazing this game is, the best way to know is to play it yourself, if your still not sure, go look at the other reviews of more experienced players, good and bad, see if im right on people complaining about proggression, and so forth. as i said in the begining, if you are a hardcore game player who has a ton of patience, or if you for some reason liked the game nether XD, this game is for you