It's fun, but there are also many drawbacks.
Zombies, the end times, survival – when these old routines come together, you should know that Ark of Doom is not a new game. Even, when you see these labels, you may have guessed its gameplay.
It has to be said that "Doomsday Ark" has a very strong atmosphere of the times, whether it is the setting of the game or the art style, or the game theme, it reveals a pedantic flavor - in the past few decades, zombies have been the immutable enemies in film and television games, and survival maniacs are the most fashionable disposition of the protagonists.
And these clichéd contents have long since lost their momentum in the game world. Therefore, "Ark of Doom" may be difficult to appear pleasing, but its familiar subject matter perception is difficult to make people get bored with it.
The paradoxical state of clichéd but child filter makes the NS version of Doomsday Ark seem quite meaningful—whether you're trying to retrieve childhood memories or to reminisce about classic topics.
As a game dedicated to survival freaks, Doom Ark has many detailed and rigorous settings, such as character values, resource transformations, and functional survival skills. These contents are presented in the form of exploration, management, and combat in the game, which is also the most core gameplay content that runs through the game process.
The game has two characters to choose from, focusing on combat and strategy. The numerical tendencies of the two characters will also intuitively act on the game flow and play in every detail. For example, characters with high survival are less likely to get sick when eating raw food, while characters with high charisma will get more preferential discounts when trading with NPCs.
However, these are the more common survival game content, and it is not strange to see. What's more special is that Ark of Doom also gives the survival game the concept of "time".
This time system, however, is common in some RTS games, requires players to carefully plan their daily itinerary in minutes. Because whether it's researching, building, or cooking distractions, almost all actions in the game will consume time, and once six o'clock has passed, the player will lose the right to go out. And once it reaches six o'clock, if the player has not returned to the camp, they may also ignore the state and die in place.
Such a code of action provides the lowest level of gameplay logic for the game - the daytime player will focus on the stronghold, explore the surrounding area, and collect the survival needs. At night, players will need to return to camp and use the materials at hand to run the stronghold. For example, farming, brewing, maintaining firearms, etc., let the camp form the most basic resource cycle, so that the characters can be self-sufficient.
At the same time, the player also needs to arrange the appropriate time for sleeping or bathing to restore the character's energy and other values.
The numerical content of satiety, health, energy, and mood are closely related to the player's itinerary, which together form a closed loop of gameplay in the game, making every action of the character become strategic. How to survive healthier and maximize the use of time to explore farther areas has also become an advanced problem for survival players.
The underlying gameplay of the process makes the game have an orderly process experience. Players who love farming will definitely like the content of the business end of "Ark of Doom", because it not only has everything, but also the modules are quite perfect, such as a variety of greenhouses, self-generated power systems, and water filter devices to purify water sources, etc. The game provides a rich number of automated and semi-automated equipment, involving energy, equipment and other aspects.
But perfection also means triviality. For example, the water source in the game even requires the player to purify it with a carbon core, and whether it is a bucket or filter element for water, it is a consumable that needs to be replaced regularly. Occasionally, when the player is asleep, there will be zombies at night, and the reinforcement and repair of the fence has naturally become a resident program every night.
From architecture to sewing, from chemistry to mechanics, Ark of Doom offers everything to experience, almost to the point of being the most refined in that category. You never worry that you'll feel stuck with nothing to do.
In addition, the player needs to grow food, cultivate tobacco, and occasionally go to Central Park to put a few traps in the hope of catching some meat.
The trouble is that if the player doesn't go to the harvest in time, the food will spoil on its own.
It can be said that it is these small pieces of content that constitute the interesting and cumbersome business gameplay of "Ark of Doom". It's complex and diverse, allowing players to experiment, but every piece of content also requires endless time to be maintained.
Front-end investment plus after-sales service, each content is such an in and out, the volume of the game is naturally piled up. This is seven points of fun and three points of difficulty for "Ark of Doom", which is strict about the concept of time.
The gameplay content of Ark of Doom is undoubtedly interesting, and you will rarely see such a small piece of modular content, which even goes beyond some games with simulated business as the core mechanism.
However, it is difficult to accept that the developers did not optimize the details of these mechanisms, but compromised on the negative impact of the mechanism.
For example, the shelf life of food is an excellent detail setting, which makes sense to the resource loop in the game, so that players will not be passive when the resources are sufficient. Because food is expired, players must use these things efficiently.
Make the most of it, which is the original intention of the shelf life setting.
However, contrary to the original intention, the shelf life of this setting makes all the items with this attribute in the game unable to be stacked, which greatly increases the difficulty of exploration in the game.
Probably because of the independence of the shelf life, this leads to a potato occupying a backpack bar, and if the player finds several more foods while exploring, the backpack space will immediately be urgent.
And this, just because the developer can't list the shelf life of the items separately, the player must compromise with the developer's compromise on the game mechanics, which is very boring.
This makes the original excellent setting become torturous and unreasonable - even wooden boards and iron blocks can be stacked, but a potato cannot be stacked. The unusual setting makes the game no longer realistic, destroying both the atmosphere of the game and the process experience, so that the player loses the ability to manage the backpack while taking off the play.
The backpack, as the most important resource transit station for survival games, has become no longer practical because of an inexplicable setting, which is undoubtedly a bad experience.
Fortunately, the game has a fairly good guidance mechanism, which to a certain extent makes up for the shortcomings of some games, so that players will not be stuck, and they will not be too much pursued by the developer's compromise of the mechanism, and some details of the difficulty can be reluctantly forgiven.
For example, every important piece of text in the game will be deliberately marked in red, and the player can also consult the historical dialogue at any time, as long as the player is willing, the normal difficulty of the "Ark of Doom" is difficult to level, which is the big difference between it and similar games. Not harshly criticizing the player from the difficulty is also a major feature of "Ark of Doom", plus the zombies in the game are not difficult to deal with, and the overall difficulty of the game is not made more difficult because of the negative impact of the mechanism.
However, overly detailed guidance also represents the lack of game atmosphere creation, when each main line plot in the game uses this red and official content to convey information to the player, the progression of the main line context loses the rendering of the story, which allows you to only view important information, thus ignoring those useless content.
And this useless content, in turn, happens to be an important part of the game's worldview.
Let me give one of the most impressive examples of this – at the beginning of the game, an NPC that provides one-on-one instruction will appear, which is responsible for teaching the player various skills.
But when the NPC is useless after the teaching, the developer's treatment of the NPC is the industry textbook - first the protagonist inexplicably faints, then the zombie suddenly attacks, and the NPC is seriously injured in order to protect the protagonist, and finally dies.
This NPC actually exited the game in the form of death after the player learned the basic skills, which is really a bit... Too instrumental. And after experiencing this incident, the protagonist's first action back to the camp is to continue to follow the tutorial and fall asleep... This makes the NPC's tool attributes more intense, and it is also difficult for players to have a sense of substitution.
The line skills and stage presentation of "Ark of Doom" can only be described as poor, and there are many word errors, which makes the plot worse, and can only be compensated as much as possible with the gameplay content.
Ark of Doom is undoubtedly a mixed bag, and it's a particularly obvious one, it doesn't have the creative levels of its kind, it doesn't have exquisite combat, and everything seems to be in the same way. However, it pays special attention to simulated management, and has made great achievements in this regard, and The Chinese players just happen to be particularly obsessed with farming.
If you don't particularly care about the plot and don't pursue authenticity too much, then the gameplay of Ark of Doom will provide you with a considerable amount of fun. But if you pay special attention to these details, "Ark of Doom" seems extremely stiff, even a little disappointing.
Therefore, "Doom Ark" is a selective game, it is especially suitable for those who try this category for the first time, because excellent guidance and diversified gameplay will make it easy to immerse people in it; It's not very suitable for those old ass who are picky about taste, because these people can easily detect the design intentions of the developers, and write big books about these details, and finally look at each other.