VideoGame A flawed game with great potential
edit: I hate this review, so I've completely redone it.
ARK: Survival Evolved is easy to get attracted to based on its very basic premise - Dinosaurs! It is great fun, but I would not recommend this game for everybody. Here's the rundown of the good, the bad, and the basics.
First, the basics! So, ARK is about the player waking up on a mysterious island full of prehistoric creatures and having to survive. It's got sandbox elements, FPS elements, survival elements (duh), and a few RG elements. The game's primeval wildlife can be your allies and enemies. There is multiplayer and singleplayer. In the former, you'll need to be part of a team to survive while the latter will have the player rely heavily on their carefully made choices like what they choose to level up and research, as well as the dinos they tame. The dinos will allow the player to fight back better, amass more resources, travel further, and provide various utilities.
Okay, now that the basics are covered, let's look at the rest . The game's amazing to look at, BUT one will need an extremely high quality computer to get the best out of the graphics. The ever-industrious developers are working on making it more user-friendly, but they're seriously behind schedule (Scheduled for summer of 2016, still in Alpha with half of the content still unfinished). As for gameplay, ARK can get very grindy in taming and resources as those tasks can take hours to complete at times. I would recommend searching for a server with high collection and taming time settings or adjusting them yourself on singleplayer for those with little playtime. Avoid official servers though! They are often dominated by so-called alpha tribes - quasi-dictator groups that make sure they never lose their grip on power through ruthless crushing and raiding. PvE or a personally-adjusted singleplayer is best for beginners. I'd recommend playing with friends too in multiplayer as it enhances the experience greatly. Balance is also a little bit of a mess right now (like this review) as some of the dinos are kinda overpowered (Giganotosaurus, Quetzalcoatlus) in pubs, but the devs are working on it too!
Basically, I would recommend ARK to anybody who loves dinosaurs and prehistoric critters (unless you're one of them "muh feathers, pronated hands, etc."-type paleonerds, then don't get it because you'll hate it with passion) and is also a gamer with plenty of time on their hands. But be warned, it's very difficult to fully get into as the game is very unforgiving and it is still in development stages, so expect a number of issues while playing it. Still, the devs are tireless in their efforts, but it'll be a looong time before ARK is ready for full release (Hey, it's doing better than Day Z and The Stomping Land!).
Sorry for the messy review. I rewrote this in a hurry to get rid of the crappy old one and ran out of characters.
VideoGame 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.