You awaken almost naked on a beach, yawn, scratch your arm and then get killed and eaten by something you never even saw.

You awaken, again, almost naked on a beach, yawn, scratch your arm but this time expecting death and ready to take flight at the first hint of danger... and there it is... a raptor charging straight at you. Your flight is futile as the faster dino quickly closes the gap aided by your terrible starting stamina statistic, your screen takes on a red hue and you hear the pounding of your characters heart before the blackness closes in and the raptor feasts on your second corpse. You now take this opportunity to rebind the selfie cam button to something easy to press so you can activate it whilst running away and see that dastardly dino chasing you down.

You awaken almost naked on a beach, yawn, scratch your arm and quickly as possible try to gather your bearings as the spawn point has a general area in which you find yourself , which can look very different from one bay to another. Orientated, you go in the opposite direction that the raptor went, using your zoomed out selfie cam to check on your surroundings. Eventually you feel safe (a very foolish notion) and start harvesting materials to makes weapons (another foolish notion at this point) and gain the experience needed to learn engrams that enable you to make structures and equipment. At this point you feel you are making progress. You have amassed a worthy collection of goodies. Cue a returning raptor, a poison spitting dilosaurus (to be fair something you can just about kill with a few spears) or if you are unlucky a carnosaurus.

You awaken almost naked on a beach, yawn, scratch your arm and the frustration has begun to build. The clever among you realise that you will die again, and quite soon, so you decide to spend this fourth life on luring that new killer away from your corpse so that you can collect your goodies with your fifth life. The very smart amongst you will have been boosting MOVEMENT SPEED rather than melee, health or weight. Get it to 130% with which you can out run most dinos... boost stamina afterwards and you can run from the dinos that you have just accidentally ran into whist fleeing (we all forget to use the selfie cam at times!). You will then spend the next bunch of lives leaving storage crates with a few of you ‘precious’ items scattered about the map so you don’t lose them with a corpse and you will build a few thatch shelters that you mistakenly call home.

The game changer is about to occur however... you finally harvest enough dodo’s of their hide to build a bed. Not a onetime use sleeping bag (let us face it, we have died ten or more times by this point and their real use isn’t apparent to you yet) but a permanent spawn point. Gone are the days of trying to get back to / abandoning your last shack. You can now work on upgrading your shack with stone so normal dinos can’t break it down and go on to establish your empire with relative ease (so long as you don’t die within two minutes of your respawn. If this is likely... build 2 beds). If your stone base does get demolished then you didn’t spawn in a location that said it was easy, did you?

No punches are pulled in this game. In fact some are unfortunately well masked behind bugs, glitches and the worst thing of all... the evil griefers who have no life outside of this game and look to ruin your experience in a series of frustrating ways, such as pillaring entire regions of the map, blocking resource spawns, encapsulating your base and luring gigas to chew your base down, to mention the most common. And that is on PvE servers!!!

Official servers are fairly unregulated, if you are lucky, and dominated by large alpha tribes. They acquired that position by starting first or by taking the stuff of the previous alpha tribe that just quit. When regulated it can often be with a heavy hand that purges everything and everyone associated, loosely related to or was somewhere near the thing that was wrong as Devs have a lot to do and don’t have time to investigate the ins and outs of a complaint in detail. Experience and gather rates are painfully slow and totally not enjoyable. The only plus for official servers is the reliability that the server will be there tomorrow when you log back in after a few snatched hours of sleep (most of the time anyway, but the game was in alpha at that point I guess).

Unofficial servers are a minefield of their own. Find one with an active and SANE admin, the correct harvest and tame rates for your needs with the mods you want and this game is pure MAGIC! Until the server shuts down after 8 months of dedicated game play... then it is a tumultuous ocean of primal rage!

I love Ark: Survival Evolved, but hate the griefers and bugs. It is important to recognise that the community aspect can make or break this game. Playing single player is great for the first few days before you realise that it is very lonely by yourself on the ark. If you were fortunate like me and spent over a year and a half working collaboratively with some great people, then there is only one thing that can be done after losing everything that you worked so hard for with a server reset.

You awaken almost naked on a beach, yawn, scratch your arm and then get killed and eaten by something you never even saw. The difference is though that this time you were expecting it!