This is the first time I've actually played a sonic game in almost a decade. I've always sat from the sidelines and just been disappointed about games like Forces. I'm not usually one to play singleplayer games either. With that in mind, I adored my time with this game, I truly enjoyed it and did not want to stop playing. I have a few criticisms but I have confidence that Sega is taking the right steps and will listen to fans to improve future installments!

• Open worlds are very fun and interesting! The first island is more rainy at time, but I love the weather elements. There are really intricate details when it's raining as well! An example is the reflection on some of the platforms when wet, just a wonderful detail.
  
• Frontiers doesn't do-away with the normal level formula. For those who aren't sure on the open world format, no worries, there are PLENTY of cyberspace levels. Some are taken from old games, but I don't mind that at all. It seems like a copy and paste sure, but I appreciate the callbacks and them trying to see what works and what doesn't.
  
• Boss fights, I really don't need to go into this much except to say that the boss fights are amazing. The first island boss I got into the music and was having such a great time. The first boss fight I think its probably the shortest, but that is not a bad thing at all. Each boss fight I thought would be the *best* fight and each time I was proven wrong. These are 100% my favorite parts of the game!
  
• I love the fishing minigame. That's it. Very fun, also very helpful if you get stuck on certain cyberspace levels or just want some relaxing time off from minibosses.
  
• Sonic controls pretty well for the most part, running on the open worlds is really fun! Things like dropdashing and making an infinity symbol with cyloop to get infinite boost for a short time is a great little mechanic. When you max your rings you also get a small boost, but it feels a lot faster.
  
• I really never had an issue with figuring out what to do next, the game gives a lot of map markers and guides to help you get to the next spot but it's never timed. If you want to go off and complete every single island challenge before you get your first emerald - more power to you.
  
• Character interactions and cutscenes were also very enjoyable for me! Amy wasn't annoying (as I usually find her), Knuckles was interesting and had a lot to say about his backstory and how it relates to the game's story. And Tails had a lot going on, but I really enjoyed how all of the characters interacted during cutscenes and it wasn't just Sonic cracking jokes every 30 seconds. Felt like what you did had meaning.

• My most common issue were the pop-ins. As I'm sure MANY people have encountered. I didn't ever come across a pop-in appearing a foot in front of my face luckily, but it is heavily jarring. I really wish they would've added a fade effect in, used switches to make rails/platforms appear instead. Or completely built all of the systems into the landscape. This is absolutely a thing, mainly seen in the tower ruins throughout the game where the rails, wall climbing and much more are built into the towers. I love that, I can't like I love the random floating rails everywhere aesthetic wise.
  
• The camera is a big no for me in some places. I didn't really have an issue with it much until the third island. I know you can adjust some of these settings and if I've being honest was probably me being lazy, but I also think camera getting stuck behind or just snapping to weird places when you get hooked into a rail system is a bit much for me. I don't have very bad motion sickness, but the camera did make my head spin a bit.
  
• This is probably my skill level and me not playing a Sonic game for awhile until Frontiers. But I consistently got stuck on the first Titan encounter on island 3. There is a perfectly timed jump in the sequence and it was a tad frustrating. This goes into some enemies being less intuitive than others. Some enemies the game does a great job of giving you the tools to defeat them right off the get-go (Strider, Spider, Shark, Dogs on the 5th island, etc.) where I think its pretty easy to tell what to do. There are some that are more difficult like the bird on island three that are just annoying to deal with when you have to wait and parry them.
  
• There could be better physics in some of the cyberspace levels, I know there is a mod for this but I hope to see general improvement either with patches or for the next games.
  
• Cyberspace 2-2 - ♥♥♥♥ this level.

Overall I REALLY enjoyed this game, I do wish there was a way to replay boss fights easily (waiting on modders for this) just so I can experience them again quickly. There not a gameplay impact for the soundtrack (physically at least) but it is so damn good I can't get any of it out of my head. The cyberspace levels have a wide range of tracks and each is so much fun to listen to. The open world piano on the first island is just breathtaking. I can't praise the boss fight music enough, its perfect in my eyes.



It was enjoyable through every moment and I can see myself playing it again sometime soon. Hopefully with some mods to make a different experience from the first. I would recommend this game even at the $60 price tag, but understandable if you want to wait for a sale.

This game is glitchy and has some problems, however it is one of the best games to play with friends and random people. I have had so much laughter bewteen the SCPs and the different teams. Its even fun to coax an SCP to spare your life in certain situations.

The main glitch I have had with this game is falling through the floor (only happened once) and a glitch where black paints over the game and you are unable to see anything unless the round restarts or you restart the game.

Other than the glitches this isn't meant to be a serious game most of the time, its fun to play it seriously once in awhile, but the real fun is talking with people over the game.

All right, ARK... this game is very very pretty, it is nice to look at and all the creatures look amazing! Just make sure you have a graphics card from God himself, because I guarentee you won't be running this game on the highest settings on a 980 TI, and I have one. I still run all medium to low settings (High on my textures) and get around 60 fps. So if you do happen to own any Titan, good on you, you can run it at 20 fps on all high settings. At least thats been my experience, but this game is still in early access so I can of course forgive it.

Onto the gameplay itself, this game actually reminds me of Minecraft, and no, not because you build, tame and gather reasources. The community is good, on the unoffcial servers, I cannot say anything positive for the offcial servers, unfortunatley. There are tons of servers to enjoy yourself on! It is really fun to work yourself up the ladder to get bigger and badder dinos and mammals, with my experience though, I usually am the top tier or the Alpha Tribe on the servers I play on within 3 or 5 days. (This has happened on 4 out of the 5 servers I've played on.) The game IS still fun to play after you do reach top tier, I love to enjoy putting all my valuables in my vaults and jumping off of the highest point on a map into the mouth of a Giganotosaurus, quiet entertaining.

The people I have met just playing on ARK are amazing, I have played with some people for up to a year after only meeting on one server. I still play with the people I met a year ago time and time again, everyone is so nice. I wouldn't worry about the "Bad Apples" in the community, just ignore them. The developers keep us up to date most of the time. On thing the Developers have done and has annoyed me has been some of the stats and over the top difficult things to get rid of being Swamp Fever, the Titanosaur (because who is gonna spend 2 hours knocking out one of these beasts, just to have it die in 3 days because it starves itself?) and the Giga, the giga is too OP and while there are ways around it for PVP it is still pretty devestating to even an Alpha Tribe.

Thats really all I have to say about ARK, its a fun, interesting game that you'll get tired of after 800 hours with good friends, but will always come back for more. I see this game being forgotten in the future, but not before it has an amazing success and Wildcard moves on to create an even better game, with better optimization!

Great Potential! I love this game so much! I can't wait for more!

Oh wait, what that you say? The developer abandoned the game and ran off with more than 100,000$ dollars?
EARLY ACCESS REVIEW
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I.want.a.\.Refund..\...

Well f*** you, this game was great, until the developer up and abandoned it, don't buy this game, it's a waste of money.