Although a shaky and rough start, Lost Ark opens up internationally with fascinating visuals and hours of gameplay to sink your teeth in as you step into the fantasy world of Arkesia.

Lost Ark is a free-to-play massive multiplayer online game made by South Korean company Smilegate, which was initially released in late 2019 to South Korean and Russian servers.

Recently, it has made its way towards the West, where the game has been released internationally for the entirety of Europe and North America. The official release was on Feb. 11, with players also being able to purchase early access for three days earlier.

Available on Steam, the largest video game digital distribution service by Valve, Lost Ark opened up to 532,000 new players as early access began, and sprung to a peak of 1.3 million concurrent players as the game fully came out. This made it the second most played game on Steam, pulling ahead of games like Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2.

However, with a publisher with Amazon Games, it was bound to get messy. Lost Ark suffered the same release with New World, another game that experienced full delays on launch due to the overwhelming amount of people that they didn’t account for.

Fortunately, the launch was not as catastrophic as the previous game, and players were able to experience the game in its entirety soon after.

As a free-to-play game, it has been criticized for it’s pay-to-win play style, where players who spend extra money are able to gain an advantage over their competition. Players are able to spend real life money in order to gather materials unobtainable by other players, giving them a boost over regular players.

When giving his initial review, popular World of Warcraft streamer Asmongold said, “make your own best decision. You can play the game for free whenever you want. You can do that or not. Don’t go beyond your finances.”

With so much content behind its story and grind, one might say it’s a positive towards its future as there’s an endless amount of things to do. But with the amount of stuff you need to complete every day in order to stay on track with other people can also feel like a job.

However, players are not incentivized to spend their whole day playing the game. In fact, you are encouraged to go at your own rate.

Players can enjoy the rich story that has been built, which is easy to follow and has you invested in the characters that are introduced. They are able collect things such as one of 1,200 seeds that are hidden everywhere, or one of the many tokens able to be obtained from each of the islands.

The multiplayer content in the game requires you to gather friends or join a guild, and has you cooperate in order to defeat higher ranked monsters and bosses. Although these bosses might be difficult, it’s satisfying and rewarding to finally be able to finish these tough dungeons.

The visuals of the game runs on Unreal Engine 3 which might seem a little bit outdated, but manages to look realistic and beautiful for its size. Lost Ark also uses a 2.5D isometric camera angle, which it uses the angle to allow for impressive and interactive cinematographic effects that honestly look like a movie.

Overall, if you’re looking for a new game to fill your empty hours, Lost Ark is a good candidate to invest your time into.

For the first week of release, the game receives an 8/10 and may even become better as the gameplay has just scratched the surface.