Lost Ark review: Amazon’s new MMO is worth the long haul

digitaltrends.com:

There’s no question of whether or not Lost Ark is a well-made game. It’s had years of content patches and updates to refine it to be the best that it can be. Lost Ark was originally released in 2018 and it won six awards at the Korean Game Awards in 2019. Russian and Japanese servers opened up in 2020, and now it has come to North America and Europe, with a few exceptions.

Clearly, it is doing something right, and answering the question of “is it a good game or is it a bad game?” doesn’t do Lost Ark justice. It already has a community, culture, and history surrounding it. This is not a game that has been discovered; we are just now being invited to a global phenomenon.

Lost Ark’s take on the MMO genre may be unfamiliar and frustrating to many in the North America/EU regions, but can still be worth the investment — if you play by its rules.

Lost Ark is a massively multiplayer online RPG that takes a lot of cues from ARPGs like Diablo 3 and Torchlight. The isometric view and hordes of enemies on-screen could make you think that it is just another looter game. However, check your inventory after facing a massive wave of enemies and you’ll find that it will still be mostly empty. Lost Ark takes the frenetic and savage combat from ARPGs and tempers it with the pace and progression of an MMO. After completing the main questline in each area of the game, I would probably only replace two or three of my items. Obsessing over minute stat changes in gear is not the main focus, not yet at least.

Lost Ark can be broken up into two vague sections: The leveling and the endgame. Once I created my character, I was thrown in and introduced to the three classic Ms of RPGs: Magic, Monsters, and MacGuffins. Players spend their time using X