Lost Ark is a free-to-play massively multiplayer online role-playing game developed by Smilegate RPG and published by Amazon Games. It was first released in South Korea in 2019 and came to North America and Europe in February 2022. Lost Ark has become hugely popular, garnering over 4.8 million players in its first month in the West. But is the game as good as its popularity suggests? Let’s take a deep dive into Lost Ark and find out.
Gameplay
Lost Ark is an isometric ARPG similar to games like Diablo and Path of Exile. You control a character from a top-down perspective, battling hordes of enemies, gathering loot, and progressing through the story. The combat is fast-paced and impactful, with skills and combos that make fighting mobs of enemies feel exhilarating.
The controls are smooth and responsive, allowing you to dodge enemy attacks with precise timing. The gameplay loop of slaying enemies, obtaining better gear, and tackling harder challenges is as addictive as it is in any great ARPG. Lost Ark executes the core ARPG experience exceptionally well.
Classes
Lost Ark has 15 unique classes, each with distinctive playstyles. You can play as a gunslinger dual-wielding pistols, a martial artist mastering combos, a sorceress wielding elemental magic, and more.
Each class has several advanced classes to choose from at higher levels, further expanding your gameplay options. With so many classes to experiment with, there’s a playstyle in Lost Ark for everyone.
Combat
The highlight of Lost Ark is undoubtedly its visceral, impactful combat. Smacking hordes of monsters with your skills simply feels great. The animations, sound effects, and skills combine to deliver some of the most satisfying ARPG combat out there.
Chaining together combos feels fluid, and timing your dodges and counters against hard-hitting boss attacks provides tense, white-knuckle moments. Few ARPGs can match the tactile feedback and visual splendor of Lost Ark’s combat.
Endgame
Reaching the endgame in Lost Ark opens up new challenges and activities. You can test your skills in Cube and Boss Raid dungeons, which require coordination with other players to take down epic bosses.
The Legion Raids are the pinnacle of PvE content, throwing almost MMO-style raid mechanics at you for intense cooperative battles. You can also engage in competitive PvP, climb the ranks in ranked arenas and duels, and battle it out in large-scale team battles.
The endgame offers varied content for both casual players and hardcore grinders seeking the most optimized gear. There are daily and weekly tasks providing rewards for those playing in short bursts. And for the deeply committed, honing your gear to higher levels requires significant time investment.
Isometric View
Lost Ark utilizes an isometric viewpoint rather than the direct top-down view of games like Diablo. This gives environments and characters more depth and personality compared to a fully top-down view.
Seeing these detailed worlds from an isometric angle makes exploring the environments more immersive. It brings out nuances in the art design, from sprawling vistas to intimately designed dungeons.
The isometric perspective does mean ranged classes lose a bit of targeting precision compared to top-down games. But clever use of telegraphed areas on the ground mitigates this issue, ensuring you can still aim ranged skills effectively. Overall, the isometric view is an advantage that enhances immersion in Lost Ark’s world.
Story
Lost Ark’s story sees you playing as the Ark, a being of light destined to push back the forces of Petranhea, a dark and destructive entity. It’s a classic good versus evil fantasy plot dealing with themes of destiny and sacrifice.
The writing and localization are superb, with some genuinely funny and heartfelt moments sprinkled throughout. Excellent voice acting brings the characters to life.
However, the overarching story is quite predictable fantasy fare. You won’t find the narrative nuance or innovation of some other story-driven RPGs. For an MMO-style game, though, Lost Ark’s story is engaging and benefits from the strong writing and voice acting.
Main Quest
The main story quests propel you through the continents of Arkesia on a journey to combat Petranhea. These quests are well-paced, interspersing story cutscenes and dungeons among the objectives to maintain interest.
Some MMO-style filler like collect/kill quests do pad the experience at times. But story cutscenes are voiced and offer valuable narrative chunks between these filler objectives. If you stick primarily to the main quests, the story experience is solid.
Side Quests
The side quests shine in offering short self-contained narrative arcs detached from the main story. These vignettes provide welcome flavor and worldbuilding between main story beats.
Some of the better side quest chains approach single-player RPG quality in their storytelling, with fun characters and well-realized mini-arcs. They provide nice bites of story between diving into the game’s combat and progression.
Worldbuilding
Lost Ark builds out its world steadily through the main quests and side content. The different continents have unique visual flavor, from the bright beaches of Tortoyk to the ominous purple skies of Anikka.
Small touches also contribute to the worldbuilding, like the poems scattered throughout the world expanding on lore and history. NPCs have dialogue and schedules that make towns feel alive. Item descriptions fill in bits of history and backstory as well.
By the time you’ve played through all the continents, you develop a strong sense of the world and conflicts shaping Arkesia. For an online ARPG, Lost Ark does worldbuilding substantially better than most of its peers.
Graphics
With detailed environments and flashy effects, Lost Ark leverages its isometric perspective to create some gorgeous vistas. Sweeping mountain peaks, glittering coastal cities, and foreboding demonic landscapes are rendered with precision and artistry.
Spell effects light up the screen during hectic battles, with fireballs, lightning storms, and other colorful explosions creating visual chaos.
The animations bring combat abilities to life with vivid flair.
This excellent art direction combines with strong technical graphics to make Lost Ark one of the best looking isometric ARPGs out there. It’ll push even solid gaming PCs to the limit, but scales reasonably well to accommodate lower specs too.
Environments
Each continent has uniquely crafted environments reflecting that area’s lore and inhabitants. There’s a wonderful sense of discovery wandering through new zones and taking in their regional flair.
Snowy cliffs, windswept plateaus, sprouting mushroom colonies – the biomes are diverse and full of lovely vistas. Plenty of hidden nooks and crannies hold secrets for curious explorers as well. The developers clearly devoted painstaking effort into constructing each zone.
The cities also brim with meticulous detail, from the cluttered back alleys of Vern Castle to the opulent fountains of Luterra’s royal palace. Getting lost wandering Lost Ark’s cities while appreciating the architecture is time well spent.
Characters
Your character can be intricately customized from hair, makeup, and accessories to deliver your ideal look. The character creator rivals dedicated RPGs in options and flexibility.
In cutscenes, characters are expressively animated with gestures and facial movements that enhance the storytelling. From subtle eye movements in serious moments to outrageous reactions in humorous ones, characters feel alive thanks to these animations.
The audio design bolsters this further with emotive voice acting. Creating a detailed character you enjoy watching on screen is extremely easy.
Spell Effects
Battles unleash relentless waves of spell effects that fill the screen with magic and destruction. Every class has splashy ability animations with screen-shaking impacts.
Taking on hordes of enemies results in an almost overwhelming sensory experience of cascading explosions, shimmering magical whirlwinds, and more. Few games can match the amount of visual pizzazz Lost Ark displays during hectic fights.
This emphasis on flashy combat visuals means battles look thrilling even after hundreds of hours of playtime. The graphics truly enhance and amplify the satisfying combat.
Progression
Lost Ark showers you with progression at a steady pace, constantly rewarding you with new gear and skills. Small upgrades sprinkle the early hours before significantly expanding in the endgame.
The multiple progression avenues like item honing, tripods, and collectibles offer short and long-term goals without feeling totally overwhelming. You can play at your preferred pace but always have the next upgrade to look forward to.
Leveling
Early levels come quickly, providing a constant stream of new skills and attributes to modify your playstyle frequently. The pace slows a bit in the later levels, but taking on new, harder challenges in new areas keeps progression engaging.
Periodic rewards like mount selection chests and high-level gear sets provide fun milestones through the leveling process as well. Leveling your first character is a delight, though repeating the journey on alts can become tedious.
Gear
Your equipment determines your overall power, or item level. Obtaining new gear with higher item levels happens frequently while playing through the main story. This provides a satisfying drip-feed of small upgrades to gradually strengthen your character.
In the endgame, improving your gear revolves around honing, increasing an item’s item level by using upgrade materials. It’s a randomized process requiring significant amounts of resources for each attempt. The randomness can lead to frustration but also exhilaration when an upgrade hits.
It’s a time and resource-intensive process, but slowly increasing your item level provides measurable character growth at endgame. Getting all your gear to the cap takes serious dedication, providing long-term aspirational gear goals.
Collectibles
Lost Ark has tons of collectibles to discover through gameplay – mokoko seeds, island tokens, giants hearts, and more. Finding these collectibles gives roster-wide stat bonuses and other rewards.
These provide enjoyable low-pressure goals to complement the longer-term gear grinding. Making incremental progress on collectibles gives a regular sense of growth perfect for shorter play sessions.
They also encourage thoroughly exploring every corner of the world. It taps into the primal video game instinct of yearning to pick up every shiny object you see!
Social Systems
Lost Ark excels at solo play but also offers co-op mechanics for playing with friends and other players. Partying up is seamless and cross-server play opens up group possibilities.
Casual social systems like emotes and player housing allow for laid-back socializing as well. The community is generally helpful and friendly in-game.
Partying
Playing co-op is as simple as sending a party invite then completing quests and battles together. Quest progress, loot, and other rewards are shared, allowing easy cooperation.
Quick Party Finder matchmaking lets you party up without needing to know people already. This enables casually playing with others for any content.
Later challenges like Cube and Legion Raids demand tight coordination between party members, leading to great camaraderie when you emerge victorious together. Partying up takes the gameplay to another level.
Guilds
Joining an active guild opens up endgame possibilities like conquering difficult raids, group PvP, and just hanging out with new friends. Guildmates can become trusted allies in late-game challenges.
The Guild vs Guild battles provide competitive, organized PvP unavailable solo. Communicating to coordinate attacks with your guildmates is rewarding. Even casually social guilds help make the overall experience more enjoyable via companionship.
Player Housing
Your stronghold is a customizable player housing instance where you can invite friends to socialize. With furniture crafting and placement, you can let your creativity run wild designing your perfect sanctuary.
It’s a great spot to chill out solo or host friends for mini-dance parties. Housing items like musical instruments allow for virtual jam sessions with your crew! The stronghold is a welcoming social space separate from the pressures of combat and gear progression.
Monetization
Lost Ark utilizes a free-to-play model with an in-game store selling cosmetics, pets, mounts, and more. The controversial addition of loot boxes sparked pay-to-win concerns, but overall the monetization remains reasonable.
Nothing sold provides direct power increases. At most, store items offer some convenience and faster progression. But skill matters far more than wallet size for success.
Some may still dislike the monetization’s presence at all, but free-to-play RPGs need revenue. Lost Ark finds an ethical balance between profit and fair playability.
Convenience
Booster items like character level boosts and item enhancement materials provide faster progression for paying players. But these don’t offer power unobtainable through regular play.
Many quality-of-life shop additions like pet inventory expansions and character slots could have been bundled into an expansion model instead. These do incentivize spending for convenience.
But the game never gatekeeps essential enjoyment behind purchases. You can play 100% free and not miss out on meaningful content.
Cosmetics
The wide range of cosmetic options like outfits, mounts, accessories, and customization items feeds collectors’ desires without affecting gameplay.
While the prices seem high compared to full game purchases, optional cosmetics are conscientious and harmless revenue streams.
As you’d expect from a Korean MMO, the cosmetics library is absurdly large. The sheer amount caters to all fashion tastes.
Loot Boxes
Lost Ark’s most controversial monetization aspect is the addition of random loot boxes containing exclusive cosmetics unavailable elsewhere.
The secrecy of drop rates and possibility of obtaining extremely rare items worries some players. But loot boxes purely offer cosmetic changes without gameplay relevance.
They appeal to inveterate collectors with disposable income rather than pressure normal players. While unnecessary, their inclusion doesn’t radically undermine the game’s fair free-to-play balance.
Conclusion
Lost Ark delivers a best-in-class core ARPG experience with immensely satisfying combat, gorgeous visual presentation, and mountains of content. Reasonable monetization and strong social systems enhance the experience without compensation.
The unoriginal story and repetitive leveling process for alts do hold it back from being flawless. But in the key areas that matter for an online ARPG, Lost Ark shines brilliantly.
For fans of hack-and-slash loot gameplay looking for their next long-term obsession, it earns an enthusiastic recommendation. Lost Ark is far and away the most polished, feature-rich free-to-play ARPG available.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| – Visceral, impactful combat | – Generic story |
| – Tons of classes and customization | – Repetitive questing on alts |
| – Beautiful graphics and art design | – Aggressive monetization |
| – Great progression and gearing | – Lots of convoluted systems |
| – Fun social systems and large playerbase | – Endgame honing is grindy |