ARK: Survival Evolved is an open-world survival game letting the players roam free through beautifully rendered environments where dinosaurs roam. Craft weapons, tame wildlife, form a tribe with likeminded players, and fight for survival on the mysterious land called ARK. Dozens of creatures to find ARK: Survival Evolved features nearly two hundred various creatures roaming the beautiful ARK island.
Ranging from dinosaurs of all sizes to aquatic lifeforms, there are plenty of animals to fill a travel journal of every newcomer to the ARK. Most creatures can be tamed and used as beast of burden or the best mounts imaginable. Tame T-Rexes, mammoths, and many more and be the beastmaster of your tribe.
Assaulting other player bases will never be cooler than a rampage on a titanosaurus. RPG gameplay ARK: Survival Evolved gameplay includes detailed progression based on RPG mechanics. Gather experience by performing various activities and level up.
Each level gives you Engram points to spend on crafting recipes that stay with you forever for easier comeback when you inevitably die. In addition to Engram points, every level up also gives you a chance to increase one of your stats, to be faster, stronger, healthier and craftier. Crafting ARK: Survival Evolved has a robust crafting system allowing you to turn a banishment to a hostile island into a story of success worthy of true survivors.
Craft weapons to eventually wield guns, craft armor for yourself and your mounts. Explore the world to find recipes for powerful items which will vastly improve your odds of surviving. Team up with other survivors to create secure compounds out of rare and hard to craft materials.
Tribes Surviving on your own is not easy, and it isn't safe, either. Team up with other players to form tribes. Tribes can share a base and tamed animals, support other members with their crafting goals, or even protect each other’s avatars, when the players log out of the game.
Establish rules to determine how your Tribe is governed in a robust system provided in-game even before more detailed player agreements. Wage wars against other tribes to claim their bases and resource. Or just to spite them.
Powerful boss creatures When you are at an apex of your power you can bring your tribe along and challenge the mythic bosses. Use hard to get items to summon creatures such as a Dragon, Megapithecus or an arachnid Broodmother. Superbly demading combat will test your skill, equipment and training of your pet dinosaurs.
Can you stand your ground against behemoths of legend?.
ARK Survival Evolved is also available on XBox One.
It'll delight you, it'll make you despair, but ultimately Ark will leave you with a real sense of satisfaction. [Nov 2017, p.76]
Ark’s ambition pulls it in the right direction with more force than its clunkiness tugs it the other way. It’s always more enjoyable to spend time with a game that tries something new and exciting, stumbling along the way, than a game that tries to tick focus group-inspired boxes. If that game also happens to simulate an entire prehistoric ecosystem, and produces bewildering emergent scenarios like clockwork, all the better.
When I’m having a good time in ARK, I’m having a really good time. The problem is that those moments are usually one part to every nine parts menial grinding and crafting - especially at the later tech tiers. Having to repeat so much work after failing an attempt at a boss feels far too punishing, and some really dumb dinosaurs can take a lot of the challenge and sense of danger out of the many primal locations. Even with all of those quirks, however, I’m still hungry to play more after the 60 hours I’ve spent so far.
In its best moments, Ark is the dream game of every Dino fan. But bugs and the grind-based game-mechanics often spoil the fun.
Like so many survival/crafting games, from Minecraft to Subnautica, ARK presupposes a player with a lot of time to dedicate to the experience, a high tolerance for repetition, and a fondness for chaos and the unexpected. With its sci-fi inflected single player campaign, ARK at least offers a solo player the chance to get the gist of the game without the threat of anti-social humans ruining whatever progress has been made. For the past two years, ARK has been helping to shape the genre and now that it's finished, it feels like the genre is due for the next stage of evolution.
ARK is an ambitious project that, at the moment, lacks in optimisation: bugs, glitches and crashes happen too often and affect the gamer experience. The potential is enormous, but the devs should concentrate their work to solve all the issues and to fix what is already done, instead to produce new contents. Beware: the PvP servers are full of awful people, that's why you should buy the game if you are oriented to a PvE experience only.
Ark: Survival Evolved is a game full of rough edges. It's also a game full of some amazing moments over my total playtime. It's the kind of experience that has a lot of boredom and tedium, and a great deal of looking the other way in the face of bugs, but also some clear water cooler moments. There's something very cool buried in here, though I can't tell if that's because of some developer decisions or in spite of them.
December 7, 2018
Ark Survival Evolved creators announce a new massive pirate MMO game called Atlas. Watch video
January 2, 2019
Xbox Game Pass Just Got Life is Strange 2: Episode 1 and ARK: Survival Evolved. Read more
