ARK: Survival Evolved (PS4)

The TLDR: This is one of the most immersive, difficult and detailed game I have ever played. I just can’t stop playing it.

The full review:

I’m going to start with my first thought when I was about to buy this game. WHY IS IT SO EXPENSIVE!!!?!!? After some time I answered this question myself.
The game is to date priced like all other AAA titles even though it’s not by any means new at this point. It was in early access for about 2 years and released in late 2017.

There aren’t a whole lot of maps but this is not important given the sheer size of the maps, variation in gameplay and how much time you actually spend per map.

You start off on the beach of an unknown island, naked and confused as to where you are, and why you have some sort of crystal embedded in your wrist.
Soon you start to notice that you are not alone. There are oversized chickens walking around that are almost up to your waist in height. Within a few minutes, you’ll likely run into your first aggressive dinosaur, who will be quite the challenge unless you’ve already managed to build a spear.
To get to that however, you need to start gathering rocks. punching trees (while hurting yourself) to gather some basic resourses to craft some tools.
Soon you start building a little home where you can safely sleep and trust me, the amount of customisation options and different styles of builds is nearly limitless (go search for ‘Amazing bases in ARK’ to understand).

After some time, you’ll start to get more confident in the odd small predator that comes by and tries to steal your food or eat you and will begin to wander further and further away from home. You’ll open the map and realise that even though you spent 10 minutes running in 1 direction, you’ve only wandered about 10% of the map’s length, showing you just how big this world is. But at this point, you’ve run into a new type of predator. This one however, you can’t take out and you end up dieing.
Luckily, this is not the end of the road. You die, it eats you and you can choose to respawn somewhere again and make your way back to your little home. If you find your body (and the predator is gone) you can recover your items.
Like any survival game, creatures are not the only thing to worry about. You have to worry about temperature (too cold or too hot and you start to lose health), hunger, thirst, oxygen (when swimming) and more importantly, depending on the server, sometimes you have to worry about other players attacking you and looting all your stuff.

It’s a brutal game and that’s exactly what’s so beautiful about it. You are a human and you’re on a prehistoric island with nothing but your own hands, skills learned through experience and will to survive.
Even when you have become the top player on the map, making the wrong move, or running into the wrong dinosaur can and will result in your death.
While extremely brutal, this game does however have 1 fantastic mechanic that once utilised, will make your game a whole lot more enjoyable, immersive, deep and survivable. This is the ability to trap and tame almost any of the dinosaur’s found on the island. You can then use these for breeding, harvesting, mobility, pvp or even defence against other dinosaurs. From the first chicken-like Dodo to Triceratops and tonnes of other types of land, air and water dinosaurs which can be smaller or much much bigger than the above mentioned. I’ll let you discover these yourself though.

What makes the game even better is it’s integration with the steam workshop. This allows people to create mods to use which will modify the game in several types of ways to add more content, make things easier, balance changes etc.

There aren’t a lot of negative things I can say about the game.
My first problem in the game was the start screen which could be a bit more user friendly for new players. Such as having the ability to create a new game session with pre-defined settings like “easy-medium-hard-insane” rather than customising each little stat. It’s just overwhelming for a first timer.

The price is also a little steep (or at least feels like it before you invest time into it).

It would also be great if there was somewhat of a tutorial for basic survival to introduce new players to the very basics of survival and features such as stat points and talent points (used to unlock the different crafting designs).

I’m quite lucky to have been introduced by a friend who helped me understand basics at the beginning.

You may notice there are quite a lot of negative reviews and I have to address some of them in my own experience.
1. Those saying you can get killed by other players too easy and lose everything: Yep, it’s not an easy game and it’s made to be brutal like this. Ever played Dark Souls? There are also what’s known as PVE servers where players can’t attack you. It’s a good place to spend you first 100+ hours to learn how the game works, how to build fast and gather enough to survive against basic issues.
2. Dinos too scary: Yep, it’s a hard game and you can’t simple take on most dinosaurs at the beginnin (nor in the end). you have to use traps and lure bigger dinos in before killing/taming.
3. bugs and crashes: like every game with this much content, there’ll be bugs. I haven’t come across any bugs in 150+hours but have unfortuantely crashed a few times. I did reinstall my graphics drivers and did a file integrity check on steam (which found 2 errors) and haven’t crashed since then.
4. Performance: I run this on a GTX 1060 6GB and it plays near maximum settings at 1080p. You have to remember that this is a HUGE game world and you may need to reduce graphics. that’s normal for any multiplayer game.
5. Any review with under 100 hours game time can probably be disregarded completely (in fact even my 150 is quite little compared to the average player who knows what they’re doing)

So we go back to the original question and ask, is this game worth the full AAA Price?
There’s a short answer and a long answer.
The short answer is HELL YES.
The longer answer is, I have 150 hours of play time and I’m not even close to being finished with the first map. I play with some people that have over 2000 hours played. How many other titles can you honestly say have brought you this much game time (at any price point, except titles played in e-sports events).

If you’re still reading this and it sounds somewhat interesting, I’d recommend you go ahead and buy this and add me on steam and I’ll be happy to help out at the start on the server I play on.

Happy surviving!