Stacklands is cool! But short. But also only $5! So I recommend it.
Click this image and get the game!
I like Stacklands. Like many things that I enjoy, I wish there was more of it. But for what it cost, and what I got, I’m satisfied, and I feel confident recommending it. I have a few minor gripes, but in my time playing, I didn’t encounter any major bugs or flaws. So yeah, I recommend it.
Stacklands is also the first time I’ve played something by Sokpop Collective that I’ve really liked. Before Stacklands I’d kind of written them off as an indie arthouse studio, partly because I’m an asshole, and partly because they didn’t seem to make games with gameplay.
I’ve used the word “Engine Builder” more than I usually would in recent writing, at least for writing about video games, but I think it’s pretty accurate for Stacklands. I guess you could call it a progressive management game instead, but that just sounds like your boss decided switch the team to a 4 day work week.
A clean, untouched board. Don’t worry, that won’t last long.
In any case, here’s how Stacklands works: to start, you’re given a single booster pack of cards. After opening it, you’ll get a few different cards, and a villager. The other cards are also important, but if all your villagers die, you lose.
At least to start, most cards require you to place a villager on them to generate a resource. That’s kind of a cop out, but let me give a few examples. The Berry Bush card does nothing on its own, but when a villager is placed on it, the villager will harvest 3 berries from that card before it disappears. The same is true for cards like the iron ore vein, or trees, though they give different resources. However, some cards like the lumberyard and quarry, can’t be exhausted. They can be harvested any number of times (though usually slower then the impermanent cards).
Villager working on a Berry Bush. Gif shamelessly stolen from the Stacklands itch.io Page.
So, how do you get cards ? There are two primary methods. The first is to buy card packs. You buy them with coins, and almost every card has a coin value. You can unlock several types of card back, and even if you die, pack types that you unlock stay purchasable. Each pack gives different subsets of cards, and while some are available in multiple packs, most pack types have at least one or two unique cards. They also have ‘ideas’.
Ideas are the game’s recipes. You only have to unlock them once in order to be able to use them in future runs. In order to use them, you place the required items on top of each other. A countdown starts, and when it finishes, you get the item from the recipe. One minor annoyance I have is that while you can use a recipe without discovering it, the game doesn’t reveal those recipes if you find them by luck or clever experimentation. You still have to get the idea card.
I like farms and carrots. Can you tell?
Villagers can die in a couple different ways. It’s possible that you don’t have enough food to feed them all at the end of a round, and so they starve to death. It’s also possible that an enemy just murders them. Enemies can spawn from exploring certain locations, or buying certain card packs. They can also be spawned by a mysterious portal, which show up on specific numbered rounds. There is one more way to spawn an enemy, but that one’s a bit secret, so I’m not gonna spoil it here.
There are also some other mechanics that I haven’t really covered here, including exploring, villager promotions, and storage limits, but I also don’t have anything useful to say about them in the context of this review.
I do have two gripes with Stacklands, one of which is legitimate, and the other I think might be a design choice, but it’s a design choice that I find really annoying! The second strikes me as something that might have been intended to function like that.
First, the legitimate gripe! When you mouse over a card pack to buy it, you’re given a slowly scrolling list of text in the bottom left corner that lists what you can get in the card pack, and I hate this. I hate having to wait for the scrolling to see what I could get, and I really wish I could either click on the card pack to see a list, or have the text box expand or something. I really wish I could see everything at once.
Second, the “I just don’t like this design choice” gripe. There are a variety of cards that produce cards either when you put a villager to work on them, or when you place various resources on them. It’s never really clear to me where the produced cards will end up. Let’s use the farm as an example. You can plant a crop on top of the farm card. When the farm card finishes ticking down, a new card is created. But when a farm produces, the new card(s) appear someplace next to the farm. Since I was growing carrots by the truckload, I then had to 1. Replant the carrots and 2. Keep moving carrots around to keep everything organized.
Like. A LOT of Farms.
Stacklands as a game isn’t long enough for this to become super tedious, and I feel like this is a specific design choice to make growing certain crop types more mentally taxing, but I did find it annoying.
Stacklands is $5 on itch.io, and $5 on Steam. Gametrodon editorial policy, dictates that “The people that make games should be the people that make money.” So buy it off itch.io rather than Steam. Look, you’re probs gonna buy off Steam anyway, so I’m going to make you google it.
Weird West claims to be an immersive-sim, but the only thing immersive about the game is the story and worldbuilding. Everything else is janky and awful.
When I first started writing this article, I’d played 8 or so hours of Weird West. At this point, having written most of it, and just editing the writeup, I’ve played about 18. Normally I don’t write about games until I finish them, but in its current state and price point, I just can’t recommend Weird West. I would really like to though, because the story and world building is top notch. Now, it’s possible I’ll play a lot more Weird West, and change my mind. Based on various story mechanics, I would estimate I’ve played through 50-60% of the game’s main path story.
And it is a good story! I’m putting this entire paragraph here, because I cannot praise the writing and world building of this game enough to do it justice in this writeup. The Weird West setting feels on par with something like the Fallen London setting, from well… Fallen London, but also Sunless Sea.
Unfortunately, Weird West’s writing is shackled to some truly awful gameplay, gameplay which I am going to tear into in a moment.
Weird West describes itself as an immersive sim, a genre I’m not super familiar with, but includes games such as Prey and System Shock. I decided to go read the Wikipedia page for the genre, and it describes it as a genre “that emphasizes player choice. Its core, defining trait is the use of simulated systems that respond to a variety of player actions which, combined with a comparatively broad array of player abilities, allow the game to support varied and creative solutions to problems, as well as emergent gameplay beyond what has been explicitly designed by the developer.“
I disagree heavily with Weird West calling itself an immersive sim. It does not meet this definition, because ‘Emergent Gameplay’ doesn’t feel present whatso-fucking-ever.
Almost all interactions with NPC’s are pre-scripted, and there’s no ability to for example, recruit anyone into your party. Even when you’re given optional side quests or routes, they show up in the quest tracker the same as everything else. They’re specifically present because the designer put them there.
Today, I woke up and chose violence. Because I can’t choose anything else.
Now it’s possible by emergent gameplay they mean “You can kill everyone and still go through the game!” This isn’t good enough in my book. It’s 2022. Killing a quest-vital NPC, and then finding their diary that contains the information you needed from them isn’t impressive. At best, I’d call it “robust.” You’ve made a game that handle the player being a psychopathic murderer well. I don’t know why I’d want to do that. Even if I wanted to, this brings me to the next point: the combat in Weird West is fucking awful.
Combat in Weird West is real time, and it’s primarily influenced by your abilities and your weapons. There are five weapon types, which from what I can tell are pistol, rifle, melee, shotgun, and one I haven’t encountered yet. There are also a variety of explosives. Your abilities require mana to use. The game doesn’t call it mana and it’s purple, but it’s mana.
Okay, so that’s enough about how combat works from a high level. Let’s talk about why it’s awful. While combat wants to be real time, the actual way the game controls is incredibly clunky on both mouse and keyboard, and controller. On mouse and keyboard, you use WASD to move, so you can only move in 8 directions, and you use your mouse to change camera direction. Except when you actually pull out your weapon to shoot, you can’t rotate the camera anymore, because now you can only control the direction your character is facing. So if you end up in a enclosed or complex space, the controls completely fall apart, and reorienting the camera to see the bear coming to maul you requires you to put your gun down, which you usually don’t want to do, since you’re trying to reload.
And it also just feels like shit. In addition, ability slots aren’t customizable, they’re hard bound to the weapon, so in order to use a base skill, you need to not have any weapons drawn, and holstering a weapon changes the menu the second you start the holster. I think I accidentally used the “slow down time” power at least a dozen times while trying to use the ability on my rifle, because I wanted to readjust the camera angle for a shot, which meant I HAD to holster my rifle.
In addition to this, Weird West has verticality. The game has a auto-aim feature for determining what you are aiming at, and locking on appropriately, except it doesn’t actually work well. There were several situations where it simply refused to let me aim at a sentry overlooking a clearing, and forced me to aim at a horse standing between us, simply because the line drawn between me and the target intersected the horse. To be clear: The horse was not between us on the horizontal plane. It was below us.
Artist Rendition
I ended up having to kill two horses before I was able to shoot sentry. Of course, it didn’t really matter that much, because the AI in Weird West is both janky and dumb as hell. Every enemy has apparently attended the “video game enemy school of guarding” which teaches that the only true way to stand guard is to wait around, and just because Tim walked away, and then you walked over and found him shot in the head, doesn’t mean there’s any reason to stay worried for more than 30 seconds. Now, to be fair, it’s not just the enemies that are stupid and buggy. I had a posse member who would cheerfully walk straight ahead, regardless of what was going on, whenever I entered a map instead of following me around. I’ve also seen other villagers just get stuck in doorways, repeatedly opening and closing the door.
Okay. So we’ve talk about why the game doesn’t feel like an emergent sim, since the only “emergent” portions of the game are related to combat, and the combat fucking sucks, because of the controls. Let’s go back to those controls for a moment, because they really suck. I covered combat earlier, but all the menus use that weird “large reticle to mouse over things” setup that Destiny seems to have popularized, and is somehow awful on both MKB and controller. Don’t make me “Hold down a key” to dismantle something, and tap the key to drop it.
Also, while we’re on the subject, here are some more minor gripes I have with the game. The menu to forge ingots/unforge ingots is shit, and unintuitive. The quest tracker only tracks 5 quests at a time, and doesn’t let you choose which five. Almost all random encounters are unavoidable combat, and the combat starts instantly, with no way to avoid them. The inventory is far too small for the amount of shit we’re expected to carry, and equipped items are still IN the inventory, meaning you can accidentally sell/breakdown equipped items, and have them eat an inventory slot. The game is also often buggy, with corpses spazzing out and launching themselves through walls, which is much less amusing when they have a key that’s the only way to open a jail cell with someone you’re trying to keep alive on the other side. Saves don’t go back far enough.
What does each of the options do? Why is it that disassembling ore makes you lose nuggets? Why is the UI set up so you can misclick immediately after clicking an option, and effectively just destroy resources?
So what does Weird West do well? Well, the story and writing are top notch, and are the only reason I’m still playing the game. While I suspect that I’m likely to be let down by the big reveal at the end, the smaller stories and individual side stories do feel meaningful, and I like the mechanics that allow characters you’ve saved (or otherwise helped) to show up to help you out.
The highest praise that I can give the writers is that I’m interested enough in it that I’m still planning to keep playing the damn game despite everything I’ve said above. After all, I already spent my $40, I plan to get what I can out of it.
I think a perfect summary of Weird West can be encapsulated in the following story. There are some very minor spoilers here, so if what you’ve read so far has convinced you that you want to play the game and go in cold, now would be a good time to stop.
The story of the first character you play as revolves around finding your kidnapped husband, ideally before he gets eaten by a flesh eating shapeshifter called a Siren, who hired said kidnappers.
At one point on this journey, the person I needed to shake down for information was a wealthy tobacco merchant/farmer, with a luxurious estate. After having the guards let me onto the estate, I talked with the merchant, and agreed to get him the deed to a farm whose owner wouldn’t sell. Having zero intention of getting and handing over the deed, I instead used my new found access to his property to case the joint, with the intention of doing a robbery later.
While walking around, one of the hired guns patrolling the facility asked me to deliver a letter for him. A love letter in fact, asking this other gunman to quit their jobs here, and run away together. I was more then happy to oblige, mostly out of the hope that if they did do this, there would be two less experienced marksmen present when I would be trying to break in several days later.
However, the second gunman couldn’t read, and so he asked me to meet him at a saloon in a town nearby to discuss it.
You see, it turns out that the nearby patrons are a wee bit homophobic, and by wee bit, I mean that the bar was about to devolve into a gunfight. (In retrospect, I don’t actually know how they knew the illiterate gunslinger was gay, it was never mentioned in any sense.)
I was then presented with 3 options on a menu. 1. Buy the homophobes a round to defuse the situation. 2. Challenge them to a fistfight. 3. Guns blazing.
As I didn’t have money to get everyone piss drunk, I instead opted for a fistfight, hoping that I would be able to just crack a few heads, and make an exit without committing a murder. Immediately after I did this, the game went into the aforementioned combat, and I realized two things. 1. I didn’t know how to actually equip fists. 2. Just because I intended to follow the spirit of fist a cuffs and knock these knuckleheads about didn’t mean that my posse did.
My companions instead pulled an Always Sunny, just started blasting, and several seconds later, the bar had turned into a gun fight.
Reload Save.
This time, instead of proceeding to the local Saloon, I went to the nearby General Store, pawned a bunch of shit, and then entered the Saloon. I was able to buy the assholes off to not start shit, and actually talk to the dude I was supposed to deliver this letter to. Except instead of asking me about the letter, he went into a dialogue tree as if he was still guarding the mansion, asking if I had the deed to be delivered.
Reload Save.
Sell shit. Buy liquor. Talk to gunman. This time, his dialogue options were related to the amorous letter, which I finally delivered, and read to him, as he wasn’t able to read. He was actually happy about the prospect, and decided to wait for his admirer/lover. They got a happy ending, and I had two less guards to worry on my breaking and entering.
I think this snippet does a good job of illustrating the experience of Weird West. It has incredibly strong writing and decently subtle worldbuilding, but its combat is a unfun jank fest, and it’s often buggy. The game claims to be an immersive sim, but once things escalate, there’s often no option other than violence to resolve things. That’s not a ” immersive sim,” that’s just a combat system with physics involved.
I’m going to play more Weird West. I find the story compelling, and I am curious about how it resolves. But that’s in spite of the game’s janky combat and bugs. Honestly, it’s fairly likely that at some point something will break badly enough, and I’ll just quit playing, and read the ending off a wiki somewhere. As such, I don’t currently recommend it.
If you still wanna play it, it’s $40 on all platforms. Console has it on PlayStation 4, and Xbox. For PC, it’s on Steam, Epic, and it looks like it will be on Gamepass in a month or two. For my money, I’d wait for that.
I like Satisfactory. There are a lot of other things I could say about it, but I spent days playing shapez.io, and Satisfactory is Shapez.io in 3D. That is to say, it’s a game about automation and factory construction, and the optimization of those systems.
The story of Satisfactory is that you are [EMPLOYEE#7190] for some gigantic space megacorporation called Ficsit, pronounced Fix-It, and you’ve been dumped onto some lush untouched wilderness to turn it into a giant factory. The reality is that it doesn’t matter that there’s a story, because there might as well not be one.
In any case, after being dropped down onto a planet, there’s an opening segment that amounts to a tutorial. After being introduced to the ability to construct buildings and craft parts, the player is free to do things at their own pace. There’s no real time pressure to get anything done. There is some hostile enemy wildlife, but even those are pretty non-threatening. Let’s talk about those for a minute, because Satisfactory is a game about building things, specifically giant factories, and everything that doesn’t contribute to that feels fairly vestigial and pointless.
Sure, there’s some hostile wildlife, and trees, and rocks, and whatnot, but they only matter to the extent that they get in the way of building. The AI for this wildlife is laughably stupid. The primary enemy, a sort of dog/armadillo thing, has constantly gotten stuck on loops trying to charge me, and then running in endless circles. It’s ineffectual enough to be forgettable, and annoying on the few instances when they actually do manage to connect a hit. The weird murder bumblebees are frustrating, but mostly pointless. Combat is just not very good.
Exploration is a somewhat similar boat. You can select from 4 different worlds to spawn into when you start the game, but they’re all fixed, not random. There are a few things that you can pick up as you venture around the world, and some crashed ships to find, but even those crashed ships are only interesting because they can give you access to hard drives, which give you research. Research lets you pick between various sidegrades/unlockable recipes.
Research is the game’s primary internal motivation. Most additional buildings, structures and tools are unlocked by research. The game itself consists of tiers, and completing the previous tier’s mission unlocks the next two tiers or so, and those tier’s associated missions. All of these missions involve feeding resources into something, usually your space elevator or remote dispatch drone.
Research serves a sort of tutorial gate, forcing the player to get familiar with what they currently have unlocked before they get access to more complex buildings. Let’s look at how the game handles electricity as an example.
Almost every building in the game requires electricity to actually do anything, from auto-miners to assemblers, to constructors. At the start of the game, after building the HUB, it comes equipped with two biomass burners. These can be powered by stuffing them full of leaves, and wiring them up to whatever needs power. Additional power requires building more biomass burners, which will also need to be kept supplied.
When you get far enough along the tech tree though, coal becomes available. Coal-powered generators can be set up to have coal routed directly into them with conveyors, so manual refills are no longer necessary, but in addition to coal, they also need water. This means pipes, and potentially, pumps or a pump system to make sure that water is getting where it needs to be fast enough.
Getting the most out of your power setup with coal can be a bit more involved than biomass burners. It requires at least 3 building types, a miner to dig up the coal, a coal burner, and a pump to supply the water. You might find after building your first set of generators that you need more power, and end up setting up a few more, only to realize that you’ve underestimated the amount of coal to keep things stable. Or maybe you redesign things, and forget to connect your pumps to the rest of the grid, causing a network wide outage, and forcing you to restart the coal plants semi-manually with an attached biomass burner. Maybe you’re burning too little coal, so you set up more burners, only to realize you’re now behind on water.
At its heart, Satisfactory is a game about optimizing systems. Optimize your inputs and outputs, remove bottlenecks, and try to make sure you have enough power throughout it all. While the exploration and combat feels rather week, the building gameplay is incredibly enjoyable. The game is still technically in Early Access, with a fair amount of “WIP” content, but nothing to make me hate it. You can find a link to the game’s site here, and I heavily encourage you to check it out.
P.S. When I started Gametrodon, I did so with the intention of not wanting the site to turn into the game equivalent of those baking websites that open with 3 paragraphs about how this recipe was the last surviving thing they have from their great grandmother, who got it from a mysterious shop next door that disappeared the day after they purchased it. But Satisfactory really makes me want to do one of those writeups, because it has a lot of things you could write about related to the game that aren’t really related to the game.
You could cover the fact that the game had timed Epic Store exclusivity when it first came out about 5 years, still requires some sort of weird ghostly cross-play solution to play online, and that switching that behavior requires you to contact customer support for some reason. You could point out how it’s kind of weird for a game to still be in “Early Access” after 5 years of development and patches, and the weird things that exist in the game because of that, such as the creepy fucking alien artifacts that will speak to you, and make scary noises, but have been a work in progress for over 3 years. Or maybe you could cover the sort of weird tone the game takes around construction and its theming. “Here’s a perfectly vibrant planet, full of unfucked nature, get down there in the space suit you’re renting from us [VALUED EMPLOYEE#3719] and fuck it up.” I’m not sure that the lyrics “Paved Paradise, Put up a Parking Spot” was supposed to be a How To guide. It’s vaguely uncomfortable, much like any worker placement board game where you realize that the “workers” you’re placing, based on the game’s setting and historical context, would have all been enslaved Africans. Not uncomfortable enough to make you stop playing immediately, but it does make you pause the next time you’re about to pull it out at family game night.
In short, there’s a lot of interesting hot takes you could make about Satisfactory. Fortunately the preceding paragraph of extended one-liners has gotten my desire to be Yahtzee Crosshaw off my chest. I don’t need fame and fortune from writing snarky hot takes about video games.
So, for folks who’ve played Yu-Gi-Oh before, and are wondering if they should play Master Duel, here’s my opinion in brief: Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel can be fun, but only to the extent that you play against other people with decks that function at a similar power level. I can’t speak to higher level decks, because I never made one. I spent a non-zero amount of time being thrashed by players who did make high level decks.
A big critical note: Master Duel is ALMOST ENTIRELY PvP. There are some small PvE sections of the game, but they effectively function as tutorials.
As far as being a digital implementation of the physical game, it seems to do a solid job. I have some problems with how it handles certain mechanics, and there’s also very little flare compared to something like Hearthstone, or Legends of Runeterra. When an opponent searches for a card from their deck and adds it to their hand, the game only shows you the card for a brief moment, instead of keeping it revealed. I hate this, as the game has something like 5000+ cards, and I have no idea what a large number of them do.
Finally, its in-game monetization is fucking awful. I don’t give a shit about some “f2p btw top ranked” motherfucker. The only difference between this game and a crackhead with a knife coming at you in an alley is that the second one is being more transparent in their desire to obtain everything in your wallet.
I’m going to be honest. I don’t have much more to say on Yu-Gi-Oh that provides value in the form of a review. Modern Yu-Gi-Oh is an incredibly alien beast to me. Opening turns can go through what feels like half a player’s deck, only to have any advantage gained be destroyed by one or two cards. First turn kills from the second player are common. The game’s balance seems to rely on handtraps, cards that you discard from your hand to negate your opponent’s effects, and quickly recognizing your opponent’s deck archetype. Knowing their combos and how to interrupt them is just a critical skill as knowing how to play your own deck.
I played 40 hours of Master Duel, and this review is the best I can offer. I know that I enjoyed playing against my friends who also installed it. I know I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone as a “single player” game, which it effectively is in many ways. I don’t like it as much as Duel Links, which had a lot of PvE content. I enjoy some forms of competition in card games, but I don’t enjoy grinding ladder, and that’s primarily what Master Duel seemed to offer.
But hey, it was free*. If you still want to play it, you can grab it here.
*Free to get your ass repeatedly handed to you by Eldlich the Golden Lord, seriously, fuck that card, and that deck.
The mechanical gameplay of an ARPG, and the…. well, everything else of a F2P MMO.
Author’s Note: It turns out writing a review of an entire fucking MMO is hard. As such, this article is an overview of my feelings on Lost Ark.And while I planned on writing more about the game, after about 360 hours of playtime, I never got around to it, and now it’s almost 2023. So take this writeup as you will: a non-MMO players feelings on the game about 2 weeks post-release.
Lost Ark is a MMO-ARPG that was first released in Korea in 2018, and got published worldwide by Amazon about 2 weeks ago. I’ve had a lot of fun playing it so far, but I don’t like how it handles its in game cash store. Ignoring its grindy mechanics, there’s what amounts maybe 20 hour opening campaign that was quite fun to play through, and if you like ARPGs, but not MMOs, it may be worth downloading just to play through that.
Okay, that covers all the big points I’d like to make about the game, as per the Gametrodon editorial policy of not making you read 15 paragraphs to figure out if you’d like the game. Now it’s time for those 15 paragraphs, starting with a bit of context on the sorts of games I like. It’s relevant, I promise.
I dislike MMOs about the same amount that I do enjoy ARPGs. I have tried WoW multiple times and bounced off. I did the free trial of MMO Final Fantasy, and had pretty much the same results.
For ARPGs, though, Path of Exile is my second most played game EVER after Dota 2, and I’ve been playing Dota 2 for over 11 years at this point. Steam says I have 1600-ish hours in PoE, and all of that time was before I switched over to using the game’s standalone launcher.
Anyway, the point is:
1. Oh god I’m old, and I’m going to die
2. Lost Ark is theoretically a MMO-ARPG. This means it’s a combo of two genres, one of which I love, and the other I… well. Hate is the wrong word. Hate implies some sort of emotion. And I simply don’t care about MMOs.
Anyway, if you’re wondering how I feel about Lost Ark, all you really need to know is that instead of writing this article, I’ve just been playing the game non-stop. I sat down yesterday to write this, told myself I’d log in to get some screenshots, and then played for something like 5 hours.
The only reason I’m not playing right now is that I know that if I so much as boot the game up, the probability of this article being finished today drops to zero.
This is not to say that Lost Ark is perfect. I’ve logged 113 146 hours in it so far, and I have some issues with the game. But I’m also not planning on stopping playing anytime soon. In addition, there are so many systems involved in Lost Ark that I can’t cover them all. So instead I’m going to try to give an overview of the game’s portions, and enough info to let you decide if you think you’d have fun with it.
A lot of other folks I’ve seen playing the game have divided the game into early game and post game sections. I don’t hate this categorization, but I’m going to break the content down a little differently.
There is a solid early game campaign that is fairly linear, and has zero freemium bullshit. It’s not too different than playing through the story portion of Path of Exile, or the Diablo campaign. At the same time, it’s also sort of a tutorial for later content.
Generally speaking, I liked these portions of the game. The story is a solid B, the design of many of the actual areas is impressive, the dungeons are fun spectacles, and it’s just a solid ARPG. I want to make a quick special shout out to one specific feature here though, and that’s questing. See, Lost Ark looked at every other game that has you go out, collect eyeballs, and then return to Fred the Eyeball Eater and went “What if we just made it so that after you finish the quest, the person you turn into was in the direction you needed to go next as part of the main story instead of forcing you to trudge back into town with the eyeball sack” and it makes things flow a lot smoother. There’s almost no back tracking required for quests as part of the story progression.
I also really like how Lost Ark’s skill system works. You start with a large set of your abilities unlocked, and you can respec your combat abilities for free. This makes quickly switching things up feel fairly painless, and not the slog that it can be in something like PoE. I will also say that while playing through this first portion of the game, while I took a few deaths, there was nothing challenging enough to make me want to switch up my build. My main was an artillerist, a rocket launcher-toting DPS class, and it wasn’t until end game and raids that I actually read though what my abilities did.
The other part of Lost Ark though is the “end game” content, and this is where the Freemium and MMO genres rear their (ugly) heads. At certain points in the story, you’ll be blocked from progressing to the next part of story content until you reach a high enough item level. The way this works is incredibly simple: you stick your item into a gear upgrader, feed it magic shards until it’s full, and then spend more resources to try to upgrade it.
You can also just move your upgrade level to another piece of gear via gear transfer, though this does destroy the gear used as an input.
You’ll note that I said “Try,” because in Lost Ark, you only have a chance to upgrade your gear. If it fails, you’ll need to gather materials to try to perform the upgrade again.
Author’s Note: Apparently this a common mechanic in some Korean live service games. At least in Lost Ark, you only lose the materials invested in the failed attempt, instead of apparently destroying or downgrading your item?
So how will you get these materials? Well, by engaging in either the end game content, or exploring the world. Let’s start by talking about end game content. There’s a bunch of it, and it includes the following:
Chaos Dungeons – AKA “murder massive packs of enemies with your friends.”
Guardian Raids – ARPG Monster Hunter where your teammates are new to the idea of “not dying.”
Abyssal Dungeons – MMO-style raids, where you’ll learn that no one knows the raid mechanics, including you.
There are also several other modes, including PVP, Platinum Field, and Cube Dungeons.
While you can run end game content almost as many times as you want, you can only really get rewards from a given number of runs per a day. If you want more gear and equipment, you’ll have to find somewhere else to earn rewards (most likely something in the game’s islands and other content systems). You could also buy gear off the game’s in-game market, or from one of the gold farming sites you’ll see advertised by the bots spamming many of the chat channels day and night. But, most likely you’ll get them from islands.
Prepare to spend a non-zero portion of your time waiting around for Islands to pop, and not even be made about it, because TOOKI TIME.
Islands are one of the biggest portions of Lost Ark’s content. After a given point in the story, you get a boat, and can sail around, stopping on various islands. Islands tend to have their own stories and mechanics which can range from being mostly self-contained, to sending you on sprawling quests across the rest of the entire world, to just being permanent PVP murder holes.
Okay, so now that we’ve talked about everything I like about the game, let’s talk about the monetization.
Lost Ark is not the greediest or unfairest game I’ve ever seen in terms of monetization. With that said, it is 100% a “Pay for Convenience” sort of game. The game has a membership system at $10 a month that provides a variety of conveniences, and makes it so you don’t have to pay a fee to use the game’s intercontinental teleports. In addition to that, the game’s premium currency Crystals can be used to purchase gold somewhat like how WoW’s membership tokens work. Crystals can also be used to accelerate research cooldowns at your base, instantly finish daily quests, and reset the timer on stored warp points called “Bifrosts.” In simplest terms, there is no cash shop selling godly weapons, but you absolutely can spend real money to purchase materials to upgrade your gear.
Overall though, I’ve found Lost Ark fun. There are a variety of systems and collectibles I haven’t really touched on in this article, including the world bosses and timer events, the Stronghold mechanics, and skills and how the passive abilities called engravings work. But the end result is fun game, even if it has some weirdness, like the gender locked classes, and Pay 2 Progress Faster mechanics.
