PixARK - You got Minecraft in my ARK

[It's HK-47]

I've put in a borderline-embarassing amount of time into both ARK and Minecraft by this point, even if I stopped playing the latter quite a few years back now, so when I'd heard that a studio was getting together to make a game that was supposed to be a mash-up between ARK and Minecraft, I was more than a little interested in seeing the end result, even if I wasn't particularly hopeful that it was going to amount to much more than a curiousity, as those "mash-up" games tend to do.

I've been surprised by not only how well it's turned out even at such an early stage, but by just how serious they were when they used those two games to describe it. I was not aware at the time that the studio producing PixARK was the parent company of Studio Wildcard after they bought them out in 2015, so when I loaded in and saw all of these engrams and icons and dinosaurs that I immediately recognized, I was ready to call this thing a "lawsuit waiting to happen" until I went back to do a little more research.

Unlike ARK, though, all of the more RPG-aligned elements such as the dungeons and the monsters and the unusual biomes go a lot further to making it more than a "Survive long enough to get 5 steaks and you're golden", and the frustration of having to farm for supplies is significantly lessened by the fact that your weight limit is drastically higher than it was in ARK.

If you were ever keen on playing ARK but didn't have the PC to handle it, or if you're just interested in seeing a Minecraft game that's been jammed full of dinosaur taming and more dungeons and more bosses, it's definitely an interesting take on the formula(s). I really, genuinely hope that they plan on opening this up to the modding community the same way that they did for ARK, too, because while there's already a decently impressive base game mulling around in here, there's nothing like a healthy set of mods to push a game's longevity far beyond its original intention.

If you liked ARK, Minecraft or even Portal Knights, I'd go take a look at this one and do a little research on it. It definitely needs a little more ironing-out here and there, especially with these clusterfucks they call the crafting and inventory menus, but I've been pleasantly surprised by it so far, and it's only just touched down.

 

[Quijibo69]

ARK game are bad and they should feel bad.

 

[WellManicuredMan]

Looks rather interesting imho.

I'm not going to buy an early access game, but i'll definitely keep an eye on this one.