PixARK: Terracrypt An Interesting Expansion.

Going into PixARK: Terracrypt, I was in a slightly unusual position. I had never played PixARK before, so rather than approaching this expansion as a returning player looking to see what had changed, I was experiencing the game and it’s new content for the first time. After spending some time with it, I came away somewhat mixed.

My First Experience With PixARK.

PixARK combines survival, exploration, crafting and a distinctive voxel style world. As someone completely new to the game, there was quite a lot to take in.

The gameplay mechanics themselves felt good. Moving around, interacting with the environment and getting to grips with how the game worked was easy and all of the mechanics seemed to work well enough, and I could see why PixARK has an audience.

However, it never quite clicked with me personally.

That’s not necessarily because there’s anything fundamentally wrong with the game. Sometimes you can play something, recognise what it does well and still realise that it simply isn’t your type of game. That’s where I found myself with PixARK

Going Underground

The biggest part of PixARK Terracrypt that stood out to me was its underground environment.

According to the information supplied with the expansion, PixARK Terracrypt introduces a large underground area featuring 12 new subterranean biomes, and these areas gave the experience a very different atmosphere.

There was a sense of heading deeper into somewhere unfamiliar, and visually the underground environments were probably the part of my time with the game that interested me most.

Because this was my first experience with PixARK, I can’t compare these areas with the base game or tell existing players how this has changes the overall experience. What I can say is that, viewed purely as a newcomer, exploring underground was one of the more interesting parts of my time with it.

Not Every Game Is Going to Click

Ultimately, though, PixARK: Terracrypt wasn’t really for me.

The gameplay worked, the mechanics felt solid enough, and I didn’t have anything that made me think this was a bad game. I simply didn’t find myself wanting to keep returning to it.

If you are already a fan of PixARK, the additional underground environments and new content could provide exactly the sort of reason you need to return. But as somebody coming into PixARK for the first time, it didn’t manage to pull me in enough to make me want to invest heavily in its world.

Final Verdict

PixARK: Terracrypt is difficult for me to review against the original game because I don’t have that previous experience and I don’t think it would be fair to pretend otherwise.

Instead, from a newcomer’s perspective, I found a perfectly competent survival experience with enjoyable mechanics and some interesting underground environments.

There is clearly plenty here for people who already enjoy PixARK, and with Terracrypt expanding the game underground, I can see how it would appeal to established fans. For me personally, though, it simply wasn’t an experience I felt compelled to return to.

It isn’t a bad game, it’s just wasn’t my game…