Game:

Ark: Survival Evolved (2017)

Category:

Review

Duration: 18:15

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Waking up in Ark: Survival Evolved is a bit of a jolt. Lost and naked, new players open their eyes on the shore of an island teeming with dinosaurs and a wild, hostile ecosystem. Ark is an open world in the truest sense: there's nowhere I need to go, nowhere I'm supposed to be. But I can't just starve to death on that beach, so I set off.More than two years after it emerged as (yet another) open-world survival hit, Ark has finally launched. We're still learning how customer-funded, Early Access development affects games, but for Ark the flush of money and attention seems to have led to an unbalanced game with too many extraneous features and unrefined, unfocused fundamentals.In the jungle, I tear a branch off a tree, tie it to a rock, and then I have a stone axe. Basic tools help me get more trees and rocks, bootstrapping my way up through the history of human-made technology. Unlike many other survival games, Ark's exploration of technology goes all the way: that stone axe eventually leads to rocket propelled grenades, industrial forges, and forcefields.Whether I'm wearing a hat made out of grass or steel, my goals in Ark are essentially unlimited. Like many of the best PC games, Ark asks me to set goals for myself and be the author of my own stories. I can climb the biggest mountains, I can become a big game hunter, or I can tame my very own pterodactyl and take to the skies.I decided I wanted a nice little house on a cliff overlooking a waterfall, so I set up camp, built storage containers, and started stripping the hills of wood and stone. I laid foundations and raised walls until, hours later, I stepped back and admired my little slice of the world. Feeling a sense of agency in the world sent me into Ark with the same obsessive abandon that drew me to games like Minecraft or The Long Dark.But the ugly side of this freedom is Ark's environment itself. It is incredibly stingy with resources, and it takes a lot of time out in the open, where death lurks around every corner, to farm up enough material to do anything. More than upgrading tech and building homes and riding dinosaurs, this is the angry core of Ark: everything takes resources; gathering resources takes time; at any moment, death will destroy everything.It took me a long time, maybe around 30 hours, before I had enough resources to make backups of my most essential items. In those first 30 hours, there were a few times where I lost absolutely everything. Once, I was out hunting with a tamed raptor when a wild, high-level carnivore killed us both, then camped out, chewing on our corpses. I spawned at my home nearby, with no weapons or tools and only a few minutes before my body disappeared and all of my best gear was gone forever. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get past that raptor. Finally I saw my first corpse fade away and I died again, respawning naked at my base. My pet raptor was dead and I was without so much as a sharpened stick to my name.Feeling real fear in a game—fear
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Source: http://www.pcgamer.com/ark-survival-evolved-review/

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