My top games of the decade. Number Six.

I am bad at this, I am sorry. It totally hasn’t been a month since my last post. Nope, totally not. P.S I put a full stop in the title just for you Sam. Every. Time.

ARK: Survival Evolved

Now, as I am sure I mentioned before in my Jurassic World: Evolution blog post, I have always had a fascination with dinosaurs, as long as I can remember actually. ARK: Survival Evolved has taken this to a whole new level with ingenious mechanics and a very in-depth endgame grind that involves not only exploration but a wide array of creatures to tame in easy ways or sometimes incredibly difficult ways that will test the strongest survivors skills and wits to their limit.

ARK starts you off by spawning you in a variety of locations which the player can choose from, some vastly more difficult than the others. It is a harsh and dangerous world for the player as you not only have to spend the first day collecting resources to make sure you don’t die in the open, you also have to collect food and drink water. The survival aspects are certainly more in-depth than something like Minecraft, but are very easy to understand and master, special clothes are required to survive in different climates and there are even certain types of building materials for hotter climates to help circulate air to keep the player cool.

Something ARK does better than other survival games is it boasts a simple but really enjoyable RPGesque leveling system to increase stats to better prepare the player. Leveling in ARK is something I thoroughly enjoy as not only do you level but the dinosaurs you tame level too allowing for your creatures to have different “builds.” I use the term loosely as there isn’t much you can do with the leveling system, but it is incredibly satisfying when you are widely overleveled and casually exploring the islands one shotting every creature with your level 400 T-Rex.

However, alongside all these enjoyable mechanics, building is a little underwhelming. It is very finicky, often at times infuriating. Often building materials won’t place where you wish them to or one tiny stone can makes it impossible to build. This isn’t to say that there isn’t a skill to building in ARK, some online content creators have amazing build styles and can use the terrain to their advantage and really make a build pop, I on the other hand, cannot. I tend to just build in flat open spaces and build large compounds in which to keep all my creatures and store all my resources, but that is just how I enjoy the game.

The game is visually stunning, has incredible atmospheric environments with an incredible sound design and often at times can be quite terrifying. The visual details on the creatures are impeccable, not one creature can be considered ugly in design unless….they have been designed to be….ugly. Some creatures are covered entirely in feathers which individually move, some are covered in a slimy skin that shimmers in the light of the area you are in. DLCs tend to have some form of reskin creatures but are often done in a unique and interesting way. For example, the Abberation DLC is set entirely underground because the surface world is too dangerous to be populated by man. With this DLC comes creatures from the base game but are given a unique skin to make them glow in the dark which certainly makes them stand out more than their base game counterparts.

Speaking of DLCs, the game receives a lot of large DLCs that give the player an entirely new map to explore, each with their own secrets and creatures to discover. One of my favourites was the Scorched Earth DLC which added Wyverns, a form of Dragon that can only be tamed by stealing fertilized eggs from nests and raising them as your own. Which is quite awful when you think about it, but who cares? Dragons! The DLCs always have a unique end game to them which is what makes them unique, these tend to come in the form of Raid Bosses that require careful planning and usually up to 20 players, to take down humongous titans. One of which is a large Spider known as the Broodmother than summons smaller spiders to overwhelm the players so she can comfortable sit back and shoot venom at you, this however is a base game boss, not a DLC one.

This leads into the ARK “story?” It is very disconnected and requires a lot of reading to understand but the actual premise is so simple that it borders cliche. Aliens are trying to see if Earth is habitable yet by testing survivors in simulated worlds full of dinosaurs called Arks, which by the way are all floating in space. See what I mean? If you want to play ARK for the story, I recommend something else, but each raid boss defeated helps progress the story to some degree.

I just want to say, this game has its bugs and broken mechanics that can sometimes ruin the experience for the player, but don’t let it deter you. It is an awesome game with a wide variety of things to do and once you master them you feel like a badass, riding your Wyvern of Ice across a valley of dinosaurs freezing them all in place. Lastly, if you can, play this game with friends on a private server, the gameplay experience is much more refined in Multiplayer and with friends, I know this as most of my experiences with this game are singleplayer.

Harry.