It’s this narrative flourish more than anything that really distinguishes ARK from its genre brethren. “Defeating all three bosses unlocks an endgame dungeon that reveals a surprising amount of backstory behind the ARKs and their purpose, which came as a pleasant surprise in a game that’s ostensibly just about riding dinosaurs around and smelting ore on first glance. It’s one of those games that can be played solo, but at least on PvP servers, I wouldn’t recommend it. This can cause things to really start to drag when you’re just getting access to some of the most interesting tech - especially if you don’t have a large tribe of other players to help you divide the labor. A Lumbering BeastBut the excitement is dulled as the amount of menial grinding required to reach the higher tiers of technology goes up exponentially, to the point where it could take an entire day of playtime just to stock up on ammunition for certain weapons. By the endgame, it’s possible to have a massive steel fortress full of blast furnaces, complete with electric lighting and gas generators, churning out components for building rocket launchers and SCUBA gear. Thirty hours later, you may preside from a sturdy stone castle from atop which you snipe pterasaurs out of the air with a rifle. Early in the life of a character, you might be taking out dilophosaurs with throwing spears and hoping a triceratops doesn’t come and knock your thatch hut over in the middle of the night.įrom there, there’s a really nice flow of technological progression that makes advancement feel like more than just an increase in stats. From there, the challenge is to stay fed and hydrated while avoiding a huge variety of terrifyingly detailed dinosaurs and other beasts long enough to progress up the tech tree. Some lingering technical issues, bad dino AI, and an extreme amount of grinding to reach endgame are the main factors keeping it from being as sharp in the tooth as it could be.Like many of the survival/crafting games of the genre it partially helped popularize, ARK dumps you on the beaches of a massive, foreboding island with just enough clothing to stay modest and your own two fists. ARK: Survival Evolved has plenty of that to go around across its multiple sprawling maps - which it calls ARKs - which can be explored solo or crowded with up to 100 players. Running up a snowy mountain firing a machine gun at a woolly mammoth from the back of a tyrannosaurus is a fantastic example of the reason many video games exist: living out ridiculous childhood fantasies.
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