Hack-and-slash greatness
Lost Ark is a fantastic, free-to-play MMORPG that features exciting combat, attractive visuals, and a seemingly endless endgame.
Lost Ark is a South Korean-developed, top-down, action-MMORPG that’s packed with addictive combat, stylish visuals, and a tremendous amount of endgame content. This free-to-play PC game has been available in other regions for some time now, and comes to the West with nearly two years worth of polish and content updates. Lost Ark’s cash shop is suspiciously sparse prior to launch, and its controller support could be better, but the Smilegate RPG-developed title is an excellent MMORPG that’s well worth your time (and perhaps your cash).
Lost Ark is an expansive game with many regions to explore, resources to amass, and gear to earn, but combat lies at the heart of it all. Lost Ark doesn’t utilize the traditional MMO roles—Tank, Healer, and DPS—to balance content. Instead, there are several standout classes with support perks, rather than dedicated roles. Dealing damage is every class’ core focus, so while it’s nice to have a healing-capable class in the party, everyone is responsible for knowing how boss mechanics work, attacking the boss, and knowing how to avoid taking damage. Lost Ark’s healing classes can’t babysit as Final Fantasy XIV‘s counterparts do, because they simply aren’t designed to do that.
That said, combat is easily Lost Ark’s greatest strength. Abilities look good, sound sufficiently powerful, and feel great to use. You can’t help but feel like a combat god when you divekick a crowd, and blast fodder monsters into bloody chunks. Every class has a lengthy list of abilities, and you can shortcut eight of these at a time. Each attack ability can be upgraded and modified with effects, such as greater AOE damage, higher single-target damage, or bonus stunning effects.
What’s more, Lost Ark launches with 15 diverse, playable classes. If you’re a sword aficionado, you may gravitate towards the Warrior class, for example. This umbrella class is divided into three subclasses: Berserker, Gunlancer, and Paladin. Berserkers are great sword wielders with highly damaging sword skills, and a potent berserk state that further boosts their strength and resilience. Gunlancers wield a mechanically-enhanced blade and great shield, and possess a defensive stance for deflecting damage, as well as party-protecting abilities. They’re Lost Ark’s Tank class equivalent. Paladins are magic-oriented fighters that have solid melee skills, holy magic, party-buffing skills, and healing.
No two classes are alike, even within the same umbrella class. For example, I chose the Scrapper subclass from within the Martial Artist main class. Scrappers use massive, chunky gauntlets to attack enemy clusters with beefy, impactful skills. Martial Artists can also choose the Soul Fist, a fighting class that combines area-of-effect magic with light strikes and magically enhanced blows. These warriors possess a unique, Dragon Ball-esque look and feel. Better still, the intro lets you playtest each subclass before making a commitment.
Despite its MMORPG label, Lost Ark is dense with solo content. You start with the main story that introduces you to the combat system. A powerful demon ravages the world in search of the Lost Ark, a powerful magical relic that banishes evil. You, the protagonist, have ties to this Ark, and are the only person capable of overcoming the demon’s rampage. The dialogue and voice acting border on cheesy, at times, but that doesn’t matter much: action is the game’s focus. You travel across the world in pursuit of this demon and the Lost Ark, wrecking every malicious foe that gets in your way with arcade-like, beat ‘em up action, while amassing gear and valuables along the way.
As you chip away at the story, you eventually unlock a housing system for obtaining and growing valuable resources for gear upgrades. You also get a ship that lets you sail to islands and far-off continents that are filled with unique environments and associated quests. There are also Tower challenges, progressively difficult tests that grant increasingly better rewards as you ascend the floors.
Of course, there are also numerous dungeons to run, either solo or with other players. I ran through many of them solo, as the story-based mobs aren’t particularly challenging, and the bosses are much more interesting when they focus solely on you. Overall, questing and story-relevant content isn’t difficult. The core story is fairly casual, and serves more as a means of easing you into the endgame content, where the real challenge starts.
If you’re hungry for multiplayer content, Lost Ark has that in spades. You can form a group to tackle the game’s many dungeons, world bosses, and raids once you unlock them. As previously mentioned, dungeons can be tackled solo or in parties of five. Endgame raids are where the truly tough mobs and bosses live. Raids host between eight and 16 people depending on the challenge, and they’re more mechanically complex the the skill-spamming battles you’ll experience during most of the story. Of course, raids reward you with some of the best gear and materials that Lost Ark offers, so they’re well worth running once they become available.
Player-versus-player (PvP) interactions are yet another multiplayer aspect to explore. The game modes include a six-player team deathmatch, six-player free-for-all, and team elimination, a mode that has two teams of three players fight one-on-one until all players on a squad are eliminated.
Lost Ark levels the gear and stats in its PvP modes, so all players are on equal footing when fighting. This makes for a much more fair and balanced combat experience, as your skill and execution dictate the match outcome, rather than your equipment or level. This is better PvP execution than what Blade & Soul implements. That title has several gear-based PvP modes with unique equipment-leveling paths that produce a system that is utterly frustrating to enjoy as a new player; the stat gulf between newbies and veterans is far too significant to overcome. This is especially true in free-to-play MMORPGs, a genre that sees money-spending whales earning gear faster than people who don’t want to open their wallets.
Cosmetic customization is a major aspect of any MMOs. Any longtime MMO player knows that fashion is the true endgame, and Lost Ark certainly does not disappoint on this front. Lost Ark has an undeniable Eastern flair that’s similar to Tera and other Korean MMOs. In addition to a basic character creator, which you can use to customize your hero, there are numerous armor sets to collect, as well as cosmetics to purchase with money if you want to go that route.
Perhaps the biggest factor in determining Lost Ark’s overall success is how Amazon Games handles the cash shop. Beyond mere cosmetic items, free-to-play games tend to be divisive because of their pay-for-convenience or pay-to-win elements. These can be subtle boosts, such as experience-enhancing potions, or significant advantages, such as better gear or upgrades. How a free-to-play game walks the line between convenience and outright advantage can divide or even destroy said game’s community.
Lost Ark’s cash shop includes cosmetics, such as pet, mount, and ship skins, as well as a 30-day subscription (the price is unknown at the time of this writing) that grants various boons, including lower cooldowns on crafting, research, and dispatches, experience boosts, and free teleports. Nothing in this is radically game-breaking, and these are minor conveniences more than anything, however it remains to be seen what else is added to this cash shop in the future. The cash shop’s monetization is another thing we need to wait and see play out to determine the game’s overall health. This will be what ultimately determines whether Lost Ark is worth sticking around for the long term.
Lost Ark isn’t live at the time of this writing, so this review is based on my time in the playtest servers. As a result, the server health, as well as the game’s long-term health, are up in the air. Still, Lost Ark has been immensely popular overseas, so it’s entirely possible that the same success transfers over for this Western release.
Lost Ark isn’t very demanding, which is not all that surprising considering it’s been out in other regions for two years now. To run the game at a minimum, your PC must have an AMD Ryzen 3 or Intel Core i3 CPU, AMD HD6850 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 graphics card, 8GB of RAM, 50GB of storage, and the 64-bit Windows 10 operating system. The recommended specifications ask for an AMD Ryzen 5 or Intel Core i5 CPU, an Nvidia GTX 1050 GPU, and 16GB of RAM. In either case, Lost Ark requires a dedicated internet connection to play, and cannot be played offline.
On a desktop PC with a Ryzen 5 3600 processor, Nvidia RTX 2080, and 16GB of RAM, Lost Ark performed incredibly well at 1440p resolution. With its graphical settings ticked up to max, the game ran at more than 80 frames per second.
As with most Steam games, Lost Ark features Steam Achievements, as well as partial controller support. This partial support is a touch disappointing; you can use a gamepad for all combat and looting functions, but opening and navigating menus, or managing your inventory, is a bit too tedious without a mouse and keyboard.
Lost Ark is an impressively polished action-MMORPG that has the potential for great longevity. The game’s top-down view takes getting used to, but Lost Ark features abundant and engaging solo content, with dungeons, Tower challenges, PvP, and housing to explore. If you want to group up, Lost Ark has excellent content for that, too, in its party-driven dungeons, raids, and endgame. Time will tell whether Lost Ark finds an audience, but it’s a polished, high-quality game that doesn’t cost a cent to play.
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Lost Ark is a fantastic, free-to-play MMORPG that features exciting combat, attractive visuals, and a seemingly endless endgame.
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Gabriel Zamora has dabbled in a little bit of everything over the years, including contracting, construction, professional cooking, and podcasting. Yet, he keeps things geeky with more than a decade’s worth of gaming and electronics-related writing contributions. Gabriel now lends his eclectic insight to PCMag as an Analyst who covers the web hosting, streaming music, mobile apps, and gaming beats.
When Gabriel’s not juggling monitors, he’s hard at work in the kitchen perfecting new recipes, savoring new foods and brews across NYC, and improving his amateur art projects.
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