PixARK is the latest game from developer Snail Games USA who is mainly known in the States for ARK Park, which was the result of a previous partnership with Studio Wildcard, the developer of ARK: Survival Evolved. PixARK takes the concept of ARK and mixes it up with Minecraft.

Essentially, you can build a new world out of the voxels of the procedurally generated world you spawn in while maintaining the survival aspects that makes ARK so popular.

You can explore all the different biomes.

When the game starts, you chose a spawning point on the world map. You float to Earth with little direction of what to do. Much like the other survival games that have come out over the past couple of years, you must gather resources for tools. Once you have these tools, you can then harvest resources that will give you the components you need to craft shelter and clothing. Your end goal being to build shelter that can withstand attacks from enemy creatures and players.

Endless Opportunities

The game essentially offers endless replayability. The world you inhabit is procedurally generated. This means that you will never know where the resources you need will be without exploring. While you are out in the world, you will come across quest-giving robots, and the quests they give are also procedurally generated.

You start off needing to accomplish mundane tasks like collecting X number of a resource. The nice thing about these missions is that they often require a specific tool to complete. This helps ensure that you are constantly leveling up and upgrading your crafting tree. It’s nice to have something that drives you toward an end purpose, even if its small fetch quests.

Dino Crew ROLL OUT!!!

The way you interact with the world is very similar to Minecraft. You walk up to a voxel and hit it a couple of times with your pick axe. The voxel then disappears from the world and is in your inventory. You can then place that voxel anywhere to build a new world.

When you craft something like a foundation for a shelter, it shows up as a voxel that you can then place in the world. The process is essentially the same, but the shelter you craft has more meaning in the world. If you want to be safe when you log out, or for the items that you are storing to be safe, you have to build locks or traps to keep people out. Due to this, I never used any of the voxels that I gathered other than to get out of an area I was stuck in.

Can UI Designs Ruin a Game?

Once you start to build, you come across the main issue I had with this game. The menus are not designed well for controllers. I played the game on an Xbox One and the process to navigate to the different stats on the character sheet is tiresome. The same goes for just about all the menus in the game.

It’s easy to see that this game was meant to be played with a keyboard and mouse. That’s not to say it’s all bad. There are some smart decisions with trying to map as much as possible to the number of buttons that are on the controller, but it just doesn’t go far enough.

Industry and technology mixes with dinos.

I think this game is an easy recommendation to people who are tired of playing Minecraft and are looking for some variety. There isn’t much in the voxel-based building genre. The ability to tame fantastic creatures and ride them around the world makes this game stand out. Playing with friends can be a blast and the ever-present danger of open-world PVP can really raise the stakes (there are also creative servers to play in without the PVP).

Many of the issues I have with the game can easily be subverted if you are playing with a keyboard and mouse. It just comes down to how patient you are with the poor UI design.