Recent reviews by Timeline15

A very enjoyable iteration of the creature collecting genre. Plays, looks, and feels very much like its obvious inspiration, but with a series of QOL improvements which make it a more enjoyable experience overall. The lack of RNG in combat, the greater ease of managing a squad and swapping out moves, and the reduced amount of unnecessary menus and popups make Temtem much less frustrating to play than Pokemon, despite also being considerably more challenging. The rather meta and snarky dialogue from the player character and NPCs also helps to cut through the slightly unnerving twee feeling that typified the Pokemon world.

I would say though, it probably should have strayed a little further from Pokemon. For every frustrating feature from Pokemon that has been improved on, another has been left unchanged. You still find yourself beset by trainer after unavoidable trainer; there's still a fair bit of backtracking, and you still find your progress constantly halted by unwanted wild encounters unless you use very short-duration items to keep them away. Also, the MMO nature of the game currently contributes nothing other than server strain. There's no content in the early access that justifies this game's status as an MMO rather than a solo/2-player co-op experience.

All in all though, I'm having a thoroughly good time with Temtem. It remains quite buggy at time of writing, but the devs have been incredibly responsive, and are fixing issues at such an incredible rate that I am very optimistic for the future of this game.

Ark is, without exaggeration, the best survival game I have ever played. While much of this genre suffers form being skin deep, I have managed to get hundreds of hours of gameplay out of ARK, and am only now switching onto other maps, which themselves promise to extend my experience further.

Graphically, the game is gorgeous on high settings, though quite a meaty PC is required to run it on those settings. I still only achieve 30fps on a fairly expensive gaming computer, though there are people who get far more. The minimum specs listed on steam are really not enough to run it well.

The fauna in the game are varied, and regular additions are made to them, so even someone motivated solely by collecting the creatures gets regular new content. The development has been some of the most frequent and reliable I've ever seen from an Early Access game.

A large amount of bugs still persist, though none of them game breaking. Overall, I've played for around 500 hours almost uninterrupted. The only issues to affect gameplay are balance issues between some maps/creatures, and even these are frequently reworked.

So, I cannot stress this enough, if you have a powerful enough machine, get this game.