Recent reviews by AngryDragon

I've found that outside of building ships and breaking physics, there's really only so much to do in this game. The planet feels really desolate and could really use a rework. There's a very clear strait demarcation line between the biomes that just feels really weird. The one thing that this game does succeed at doing is the fact that it is a true sandbox and that you do have a lot of freedom in what you can do.

Ark Survival has a lot going for it, but it does have it's problems.

Single player is just about unplayable with the default settings and requires a lot of tweaking of the default settings. For one, the so called difficulty setting is a misnomer. Raising the "difficulty" increases the level of the dinos, but that actually makes the game easier since they can carry more weight. Given the distances that you have to travel and the limits on your own carry weight, the carry weight of dinos is rather important. With the default settings, some of dinosaurs would not even be able to carry you with even a small amount of items on you.

It's a beautiful world to explore, but it's also an extremely demanding game graphically. Even the most recent video cards will have a hard time in some areas.

Some areas can feel a bit empty at times. Dinosaurs have a tendency to fall off of cliffs which means that the top of mountains end up rather depopulated. It can also make the areas below those mountains rather dangerous.

The snaps for the building system are rather inconsistent. They could have taken the opportunity to address this with the homestead update, but they did not. Worse yet, they broke S+ as a result, which is a mod used by a very large portion of the community. Most of the bugs which were present in the beta version of that update ended up making it to live and have not yet been fixed.

The hit detection for weapons leaves something to be desired. It's not uncommon to see arrows and darts in the target and yet have the actual shot register as a miss. This can be rather annoying given that when things go wrong, they go down real quick.

This is a common theme for Ark Survival. They produce new content but don't go back to fix the issues with older content. Even considering all of the long standing issues, some of which would take at most a minute or two to fix, Ark Survival is a game that I very much enjoy and would recommend.

You'll really only do one playthrough. After that, you've seen most of the game, so replayability is rather limited. It's also notable that once you get to the end game for your colony, once you've gotten all of the milestones, most of what you'll be doing is managing problems.