ARK: Survival Evolved Review

David A. Bumpus ‘18 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer

Roaming around the land, collecting resources, playing with friends, and living with dinosaurs as your friends and enemies. ARK: Survival Evolved was recently released in an early access format to Steam, and the game provides users with the opportunity to play around with their prehistoric counterparts.

ARK adds a whole new level to the survival genre, adding in the feature of taming different kinds of dinosaurs to become your pet and protector. From raptors to the Tyrannosaurus rex, players can spend different amounts of time attempting to tame the creature based on the difficulty and size of the dinosaur, using berries and different healing techniques. Users can then ride their pets around the open-world environment, encountering different animals.

The game looks very reminiscent of the ever-popular game Minecraft, and also the early access survival game Rust, with its need to gather resources, eat to stay healthy, and build weapons and a home to survive. However, ARK adds in new elements to the survival genre, like overheating and freezing, with the need of finding water and creating fire becoming even more important.

The multiplayer aspects of the game combine both PVP and working together. Killing other players for loot is always important in survival games, but players can also team up and tame dinosaurs together to speed up the process and work together to take over the open world.

The game is set to release in full in 2016, with the developers working hard with player feedback to work out bugs and add more features on the PC version. Console versions of the game have been announced, but no release dates have been determined yet.