3 years and 6 months after the first review

Still a great game, I mean almost 2k hours played, definitely got my money's worth from it and the expansion packs. Tomorrow is Extinction and I'll be coming back to check it out.

Only problem with the game is the fact they didn't ever create a bigger scale official server. The tons of private servers tend to all have 1 or quite a few things wrong with them. The official servers get boring after you have done it for awhile and they get cluttered up with buildings and tame caps and pillared up on the PVE servers (even with changes this is STILL a major issue). PvP servers still deal with the handful of Big tribes transfering server to server just to wipe people's bases to throw their ePeens around. However, the game itself is actually really damn good. I may just be trying the new map for maybe a hundred hours, but more than likely this will be the end of the game for me. Still have to recommend the game, it has a ton of value, even though there is a lot I personally wish would be done to make it even better.


2015's Review

One of the best quality initial release as an Early Access game.

As the first line states, the game came out looking like it is already through over half of it's beta testing, while a great majority of Early Access games look to be in Alpha testing phases still. On top of that the developers for the game actually do read the forums and are on top of fixes due to the feedback from the players. In the last 48 hrs alone they did over 5 hot fixes for their patch they released due to our (the players) feedback. This makes me, and I'm sure many others, feel like we are taking part in shaping the game.

ARK is a very beautiful game. Even for those who play it on lower settings, it still looks really nice. However, this does cause problems for players who do have low end PCs. If you do have a high end PC, set those settings to Ultra (minus that motion blur option) and just gaze across the land...but not too long or a Carno will come nipping your rear end.

Crafting system is nice and gives the player complete freedom of what type of crafting recipes (engrams) they'd like to learn. You will have to learn pre-requisites for upgraded versions of items. For example: If you want to be able to craft Hide Gloves you will first need to spend your Engram points to learn Cloth Gloves. This basically just prevents anyone from being able to save their points and skip lower tier variations of those items. Now you are limited on how many Engram points you earn, and will need to work with others to cover every necessary type of crafting goods (Armor, Weapons, Buildings, Farming, etc.) In short, this is not a game for a solo player. Unless you are on a server where you can work with others on trading, you will not be able to truly solo in this game at all.

Personally I recommend this game. I'm enjoying it a great deal. But I am aware that some gamers may not like the game for certain reasons.

Reasons you may not want to buy this game:
* If you computer cannot handle the game
* If you are a solo-style gamer
* If you are easily frustrated due to losing some/all of your gear (if you or your dino pack mules die and can't get back to it)