Recent reviews by RLS

Number 1 thing I say when someone slaps me in the face but I'm mute:

I am personally not hurt by the account linking, but to see the hostile attitude arrowhead has towards its playerbase once again rear its ugly head (mainly through their community managers) I will no longer be supporting this game in any capacity

For the love of god turn off steam cloud sync! I lost way too much time to corrupted saves

Bought the game shortly after it came out, but had plenty of trouble with it (no surprises there). The performance was awful, the bugs were everywhere, and I didn't like the gameplay at all. The on thing that kept me going was the story, which I breezed through, but even that left a bitter taste in my mouth. Now, 2 years later, they've made vast improvements. I have a 3060, which is not a very powerful card, and yet I can run this game at medium settings (which still looks gorgeous) and get an average of 70 fps (range if 55-100 depending on location). Bug are still present, but the only game breaking one I've encountered was probably due to modding (Although I have no idea what actually caused it). The gameplay has it's issues, but does feel much better than I remember from my first playthrough. As for the story, while they've kept it the same, I've found that being able to play the game with higher fps and qol has allowed me to explore the world more, and it's been far more enjoyable. If you've been interested in the game, I do suggest buying it. If you don't like this style of game, or have no idea what it's like, then skip it. It's not the generation defining title we all expected, but it's a pretty good time waster.

I do enjoy this game, but because of its faults, I cannot recommend it to new players. The patience required to sit through Ark for a significant period of time is not worth what you get out of it. Ark is a buggy, poorly optimized mess, and the only way to polish it into a diamond is with hundreds of hours of experience. If you played this on another platform and really want to try mods then go ahead, but if you're completely new to the game I would suggest looking elsewhere.

P.S. if someone says the -d3d10 launch option looks anything like normal Ark, understand that any opinion they have on anything is immediately invalidated, and you should call the police.

Got banned, and for once I actually don't know why. Was kinda fun while it lasted but only play if you want to mess around with friends because it's not fun by yourself

George R.R. Martin can be my deathmaiden

This is just a fallout game. Characters have decent writing, but you barely get to interact with them, as your conversations are limited to story events. I've seen better from Skyrim mods. The game has good graphics, but looks ugly until you heavily tweak the config files and download a reshade preset. NPC behavior is pretty terrible, and feels like they ripped it out of Fallout 4 (dated facial expressions included). I don't find myself immersed in the world, and it was clear Obsidian didn't put as much care into making a realistic environment as they should've. The best way to describe the lack of immersion is that you feel like a God among men. the other characters have rigid movements, generic conversations, and 99% of them don't even have names. Not once did I feel like I was a character living in a dystopian, space-faring world filled with marauders and bureaucrats, I just felt like a guy sitting at his desk with a mouse and keyboard. Compare this to RDR2, which came out a year earlier, and had such incredible atmosphere, animations, NPC behaviour, and environments that you couldn't help but feel like Arthur Morgan. Enough rambling about the poor world-building, maybe you're just looking for good gameplay? Look somewhere else. This game has some of the worst combat mechanics I've seen in recent years. The only thing I can compare it to is Cyberpunk 2077. There's nothing interesting to say about movement, and there are no interesting mechanics to differentiate it. Gunplay is unsatisfying, with no real punch to your weapons. This is a huge issue with rpg shooters, but it's not impossible to work around. Destiny and it's sequel are two games that pulled off the rpg shooter genre and maintained excellent gunplay (But with plenty of shortcomings in other areas). As far as melee weapons go, don't bother. Not only are they boring, with a simple 3 hit combo making up the majority of combat, but they don't offer enough of an advantage to even consider using in such close quarters. The enemies have terrible AI. They can't hear you shoot from the next room, but they're deadly accurate to a point beyond human ability. You can step out of cover somewhere completely new and get shot instantly. Of course, this doesn't result in a particularly difficult experience, as they quickly turn incompetent, meaning that you'll only really die at the beginning of a gunfight, when you get bombarded by quick shots from people who can only see a small part of your body. The game's idea of different difficulties is just a level of bullet sponginess, as the only change between story and hard was that the enemies took far more bullets, and I took far fewer. Supernova has more changes, but I can't speak on whether they improve the game, as I haven't played it and feel no urge to. If you were hoping to stealth your way through the game and not have to deal with combat then you'll be disappointed there too, as it's extremely shallow and no fun at all. The story is exactly what you'd expect. Be presented with two sides of an argument, choose a side, rinse and repeat until you've gotten to the big bad of the game. All of this is, of course, under the pretentious umbrella of "muh I don't like capitalism muh" that goes so great with a side of "developed and produced by successful corporations".

Long story short, come for the story, move on to the characters, have hope for the gameplay, leave disappointed

tOTALLY aCCURAT E baTTLEGROUNDS

This is one of the best games I've ever been blessed to have, And trust me folks, there's a reason I have so many hours. I've decided that there is no good way to truly capture the effects of this game, so instead I'll just have to do whatever I can to express it.

For starters, I should make it clear that one of my favorite games of all time is Rocket League, a highly competitive, fast paced, team-based game very similar to Ball 3D, I played on my school's new team, and have done many tournaments. It shouldn't surprise you that I might find a game like Ball 3D, as they share the same physics-based soccer simulator style. I've playing thousands of hours of Rocket League (I played on console originally, so my hours on Steam aren't impressive) So when I found this game, I, much like many others in the community, thought it was a simple copy. But when I first started the game with my friend, Kevin, who's 45 and has minor autism, he immediately loved it, which is strange, because he's usually extremely sarcastic (hilariously sarcastic) and has a hard time sticking to one game, as none of them could hold his attention very well. So I decided to give it some more time. After a few days, I got hooked. I couldn't stop playing this damn game. Kevin told me that there was something about the game that just felt so right, as though the way the puck you control and the ball you play with dance with each other. I noticed this as well. Once you start getting to the upper threshold of play, you can control the ball better than you can control your own hand. I had a deep understanding of the mechanics of the game, and the chemistry between Kevin and myself turned into utter domination. We started entering tournaments just 5 days into our time with the game, and while we lost our first one, we started practicing, and the won our second, third, fourth, and fifth tournament. I stopped eating, drinking and sleeping. I no longer felt the pain of slouching in my chairs for days. I have a decorative knife in my room that I got in Japan, and I would poke my legs just to feel the sensation, it almost tickled. On day 17 after not leaving my room, I went outside. The first thing I noticed was that everything was blurry, so I took off my glasses, and realized my vision was like that of an eagle's. I could make out the screen of a TV in a house 2 blocks down. I noticed that no one was outside, but I could hear someone talking about a quarantine. This was confusing at first, because I couldn't tell who it was, but then the noise started to get louder, and louder, until it was deafening. I ran inside, grabbed my phone and started playing music. That way I wouldn't have to hear such a loud mess. As I was walking back outside, I looked in the mirror in the foyer, or, I would have if I was level with it. I looked around and everything did seem smaller. I went to the wall where I've marked my height since I was a kid and scratched a new one. I found that I had grown a foot and a half. I was now 7 and a half feet tall. I went back to the mirror, and put it on a higher screw. I looked superhuman. My body was extremely fit, with muscles that would put a DBZ character to shame, and my eyes were a piercing blue. I put on a pair of my dad's shorts, and a form fitting shirt. That way I could at least have intact clothes. When I sat down to think about it, I figured it had to have been the game, it might have been a hypnotic effect, or it could be as simple as my body evolving to handle the pressure this puts on the player to succeed. Every time I played this game it felt like I was getting stronger. When I asked Kevin about it, he said he experienced no physical change, but his senses had been dialed to 11 just like mine, and he said he felt smarter, and more aware of the world around him. I told him to take an IQ test, and when he finished it the website said he needed a better one, one with a higher scale. This website goes up to 200. The test he took cost $20, it had 100 questions, and it was designed for people who could learn new languages in a day, and he went past their limit. Best of all it took him about 5 minutes. He told me to go test my new muscles, so I did some standard physical tests. I ran the 40 yard dash in 1.85 seconds, and I lifted a pickup truck. I finally realized what it was. When we played together, he was always the one setting up plays, and I was the one executing them. My body had evolved to become the excellent strike that I was in the game, and his brain had evolved to become the tactician needed to keep up. As soon as I figured this out, I rushed to review it, and it took two tries. The first time my computer turned off when I pressed "Post review", but the second time, Kevin helped me run it through a network he created that wouldn't allow any incoming signals. Hopefully it gets through, if it does that means it worked. This game is dangerously addictive, and can change your body and brain, but I don't think that's a bad thing. I think this needs to be put out there for all the world to see. The creator of this game must have tried to make the human race into one of superheroes. This game could finally turn humanity into a Tier 1 civilization. But writing this has made me realize, I couldn't have been the first to try and publicize this, so what's been stopping everyone else? If there is someone, or something out there trying to keep this information private, then we must all tread carefully. I've been hearing strange noises since I started writing this review, and I'm sure it's the sound of helicopter rotors. I'm going to run to Kevin's house now, I think it would be best for us if we go off the grid. If any of you out there read this and decide to play this games, I highly suggest taking money, food, a laptop with the game, and something to charge it, and just running somewhere safe. We're going to a place that has been mentioned in the Ball 3D discord a few times called Shangri-La, we think there are others like us who share this same strength, and Kevin says it might be the origin of Ball 3D. Whatever it is, we think it might be the only place safe where we can find others like us. I urge you to come with us on this journey. If Ball 3D is simple a message from Shangri-La, then I can't even imagine what wonders await us there.