Just to be clear this review will focus on a single player experience as that's what I know and it's much, much different then what you get playing online.
Ark's a simple game on the surface: you wake up on a beach naked, helpless, and afraid, two months later you're an Iron Man expy riding a T-Rex with mounted plasma cannons.
However, between the start of that basic premise and its conclusion is journey and unfortunately it's not a journey everyone has time for. See Ark is a great game, easily the best survival game I've ever played... if you have time to spend on it. If not you'll likely never scratch more then the surface. Not only does just advancing up the tech tree require reaching ever more difficult levels, but things like taming and breeding dinosaurs can take literal hours, sometimes days of investment, and it's all required to get the full experience.
Even getting past the first map, The Island, takes breeding an army of super pets to overcome four extremely powerful bosses. Once you do this the first time you gain access to a much more challenging map, Scorched Earth, with new creatures. Then you have to do it again, but even harder to access the Aberration map which transforms the game from dinosaur action/survival into Sci-Fi survival horror. Getting to this point can take weeks or months of real life prep-time if done without cheats.
What it comes down to is this: Do you have the time it takes to breed your own personal army of Tyrannosaurs to fight a giant dragon? If not then I wouldn't bother. If you do however? Well, welcome to the Ark, you're going to have a blast.
Great fun, but with a huge time investment
Just to be clear this review will focus on a single player experience as that's what I know and it's much, much different then what you get playing online.
Ark's a simple game on the surface: you wake up on a beach naked, helpless, and afraid, two months later you're an Iron Man expy riding a T-Rex with mounted plasma cannons.
However, between the start of that basic premise and its conclusion is journey and unfortunately it's not a journey everyone has time for. See Ark is a great game, easily the best survival game I've ever played... if you have time to spend on it. If not you'll likely never scratch more then the surface. Not only does just advancing up the tech tree require reaching ever more difficult levels, but things like taming and breeding dinosaurs can take literal hours, sometimes days of investment, and it's all required to get the full experience.
Even getting past the first map, The Island, takes breeding an army of super pets to overcome four extremely powerful bosses. Once you do this the first time you gain access to a much more challenging map, Scorched Earth, with new creatures. Then you have to do it again, but even harder to access the Aberration map which transforms the game from dinosaur action/survival into Sci-Fi survival horror. Getting to this point can take weeks or months of real life prep-time if done without cheats.
What it comes down to is this: Do you have the time it takes to breed your own personal army of Tyrannosaurs to fight a giant dragon? If not then I wouldn't bother. If you do however? Well, welcome to the Ark, you're going to have a blast.