I first made my review for this game back in November, 2015 when the game was in very early development. I rated it as "Recommended" and this was the original review:

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I have an Albino T-Rex called Fintan. He's baddass.

9.5/10.

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However after following this game's development over the past five years, I feel that now would be a good time to potentially revisit and update my review.

I no longer recommend this game.

To be frank, this game still has many of the optimisation errors that it suffered greatly from upon release. There are still numerous texture glitches, and I feel these issues are getting worse and harder to address with each update.

The Updates are horrendous.
Firstly, this game is a hog to download, install, and update. It's so poor at making updates quick and easy, it genuinely makes me question whether my PC is on it's last legs.
I have a 100MB download speed, and it has taken me well over 11 hours to download and install 12GBs worth of updates to celebrate the Crystal Islands map release and ARK 5th anniversary. Let alone trying to update and manage my remote-host ARK server to accommodate for these updates as well.
I have to put a whole day aside to get through one update, and because of how much of my disc it uses up trying to allocate and calculate space, I cannot play any other game. It makes Chrome look like nothing in terms of RAM usage. I have no idea why it is like this, and frankly, I am too terrified to reinstall the game knowing it could literally take years.

The DLCs are sporadic in quality, are any of them worth paying for?
The developers have certainly dished out some nice DLCs, some of the best being for free. However, their blatant money grabbing DLCs grossly outweigh the positives of the free DLCs. Their models for the DLCs are very varied and strange. Some just being one upfront cost, and others costing an extortionate amount for a season pass that is actually only two DLCs (or more, who knows, it's really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hard to understand).
While Scorched Earth had many moral problems surrounding its release, it's content was certainly a nice example of the dev team's taken on keeping content fresh and imaginative, and the ability to create new wilderness bursting with diversity to explore and conquer. Although, it quickly got boring because it felt very self limited and while the new environment was fun and the challenges were different, I began to miss a lot of the aspects of the base map.
However, DLCs like Aberration and Extinction, while they were very picturesque, left me feeling there was a lot to be desired and both catered towards a much more apocalyptic and space sci-fi target audiences, which made me feel rather uninterested and left out.

Will I continue to play ARK despite my many complaints?
Yes, I do still own the game, and I have been a fan of this genre and many other indie titles. I am also fortunate enough to have enough time and patience to be able to deal with the painfully slow downloading times. As well, I have a good enough PC that the majority of the optimisation issues, my PC can just about churn through without slowing it down too much.

I first made my review for this game back in November, 2015 when the game was in very early development. I rated it as "Recommended" and this was the original review: ///////// I have an Albino T-Rex called Fintan. He's baddass. 9.5/10. ///////// However after following this game's development over the past five years, I feel that now would be a good time to potentially revisit and update my review. I no longer recommend this game. To be frank, this game still has many of the optimisation errors that it suffered greatly from upon release. There are still numerous texture glitches, and I feel these issues are getting worse and harder to address with each update. The Updates are horrendous. Firstly, this game is a hog to download, install, and update. It's so poor at making updates quick and easy, it genuinely makes me question whether my PC is on it's last legs. I have a 100MB download speed, and it has taken me well over 11 hours to download and install 12GBs worth of updates to celebrate the Crystal Islands map release and ARK 5th anniversary. Let alone trying to update and manage my remote-host ARK server to accommodate for these updates as well. I have to put a whole day aside to get through one update, and because of how much of my disc it uses up trying to allocate and calculate space, I cannot play any other game. It makes Chrome look like nothing in terms of RAM usage. I have no idea why it is like this, and frankly, I am too terrified to reinstall the game knowing it could literally take years. The DLCs are sporadic in quality, are any of them worth paying for? The developers have certainly dished out some nice DLCs, some of the best being for free. However, their blatant money grabbing DLCs grossly outweigh the positives of the free DLCs. Their models for the DLCs are very varied and strange. Some just being one upfront cost, and others costing an extortionate amount for a season pass that is actually only two DLCs (or more, who knows, it's really fucking hard to understand). While Scorched Earth had many moral problems surrounding its release, it's content was certainly a nice example of the dev team's taken on keeping content fresh and imaginative, and the ability to create new wilderness bursting with diversity to explore and conquer. Although, it quickly got boring because it felt very self limited and while the new environment was fun and the challenges were different, I began to miss a lot of the aspects of the base map. However, DLCs like Aberration and Extinction, while they were very picturesque, left me feeling there was a lot to be desired and both catered towards a much more apocalyptic and space sci-fi target audiences, which made me feel rather uninterested and left out. Will I continue to play ARK despite my many complaints? Yes, I do still own the game, and I have been a fan of this genre and many other indie titles. I am also fortunate enough to have enough time and patience to be able to deal with the painfully slow downloading times. As well, I have a good enough PC that the majority of the optimisation issues, my PC can just about churn through without slowing it down too much.