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I played Pixark for a while. It’s quite fun to play. I can’t give a very reliable review right now since I’ve only just got to the point of being ready to move out of the noob grasslands at the start of the game. The game mechanics seem to work pretty well, although I noticed that the AI in the tamed dinos is annoyingly poor and they have a lot of trouble following me. This resulted in all of them falling into a cave system at one point and needing to be rescued. I understand that Pixark is based on and very similar to Ark Survival, which I haven’t played before because I didn’t think my PC would be up to it.

I have to say the whole gritty survival thing is a little bit at odds with the plastic and playful graphics style.

I also played a new game called Cardlife by Freejam. This game is at a much earlier stage of development than Pixark, but somehow it seemed more enjoyable and immersive. I actually found it mildly addictive. I think it’s because it’s closer to Minecraft in the way resources are gathered and items such as armor are crafted. It also has quite pretty graphics. It’s based on the idea that the entire world and the entities are made of cardboard which sounds weird but its done very well. The only thing is that the graphics still struggle to render properly and rendering gaps are frequent, where you can see ‘through’the world. It also takes a very long time to load in areas of the world that you haven’t visited for a while. Hopefully these are just teething issues.
A couple of times I was very thankful for these issues when I got lost while mining, and the game also couldn’t figure out where I should be and teleported me to the surface!

Both Cardlife and Pixark seem to allow almost unlimited terrain modification, but use specialized structures for building. Personally I think MC’s approach, where all structures are built from a variety of synthesized or naturally occurring blocks, is superior, even though it forces the player to place the structures on the world grid. It results in a more natural look, more customization is possible, and you don’t get those annoying moments where you are trying to place something but the game won’t let you place it where you want it to go. It’s this balance between ease of use and flexibility that every sandbox game needs to resolve. In the future I hope to see more creativity applied to this area of game design.

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