“Hmm...” I think, staring out at the placid water, serenely beautiful as it stretches out towards the horizon. The sun, so scintillating, glints across the ocean, casting dazzling speckles of light across the breaking waves. A light breeze counteracts the tropical heat, palm fronds and bushes swaying in the wind to my right.

“I could get to like it here”, I say to no one in particular, sweat dripping down my almost naked body.

I’m standing on an island, a small crop of land just metres away from the shore, covered in grass, bushes and gently swaying palm trees. Sea shells and rocks litter the golden sand, while on the not-so-distant shore, steep cliffs rise up from the surf, massive trees above forming a crown.

“Time to get started. Time to make my mark. I will... OH GOODNESS! MY EYES! MY EYES...”

A Pteranodon was no longer hungry...

...Ok, let’s try that again...

I’m on the shore this time, sparse grass behind me littered with broken tree trunks and juvenile palm trees. A flock of Dodos, multi-coloured little critters whose heads bob and sway as they move, drift on past me.

“Oh my”, I think, “how cu... AARGH MY SPLEEN, MY ACHING SPLEEN!”

Surprise Utahraptor attack!



This characterised my first 30 minutes in Ark, a gaggle of “WTFs!” and unabashed, terrified and utterly useless scrambling away from the rending talons of vicious predators. I grew rather accustomed to watching my flailing, boxer-wearing corpse disappear beneath a darkening screen as voraciously vicious carnivores perpetrated unseemly deeds upon it in the dark.

So then, not a good first impression. I took a deep breath, let the game spawn me back into the world at random amongst the different locations, marked from easy to hard, and gave it another go. Armed with the knowledge I’d gained from my previous runs, after an hour more or so of play, I began to get involved in the world and invested in my avatars growth, despite the risk of heat, thirst, constant hunger, and unplanned-for dinosaur attacks. Dare I say it, I began to have fun.

Ark: Survival Evolved falls into the genre of survival/construction games popularised by the likes of Minecraft and Don’t Starve. In Ark , you’re unceremoniously dumped onto a massive island in nothing but your underwear by forces unknown and you have to survive a hostile environment, filled with all forms of prehistoric beasts, intent on killing you as quickly, and as often, as possible.

It’s the ultimate man-versus-nature showdown as you take on the critters roaming the island and the environment itself, aiming to come out tops. Ark starts you off with nothing but your boxers, bare hands, an implant in your arm that lets you access your inventory, and a difficulty curve bordering on sadism. The game comes prepped with a very basic survival guide on the menu screen that is all but useless, while there are no tutorials in the game itself. It’s all on you, and some internet browsing, to figure things out.



It isn’t long though, before you’re punching down trees with your bare hands and gathering stones and picking plants to get the basic survival and construction materials you’ll need. Ark’s RPG levelling system comes in two forms. For every level you go up, you gain a point to put into one of your characters stats and a bunch of points to spend on Engrams, the game's construction blueprints. You’ll start off knowing how to craft a stone axe and stone pickaxe for instance, but everything after that needs to be learned. You start off with what amounts to basic caveman-level of engineering but with time you’ll be learning how to create stone forts and jet packs.

Pay attention to your item descriptions, they’re there for a reason and will help you determine what everything does and what needs to work together. You can’t create shells, for instance, if you don’t have the basic bullet engram, which you can’t create if you haven’t mined the right resources first. Raw resources, then bullet, then shells, and so on.

As you only have a limited amount of engram points to spend, you’ll need to pick and choose exactly what you’d like to learn. Do you unlock a sleeping bag or a bed, a forge or a sloped roof? The same goes for leveling your character's stats. Do you spend points on more health and movement speed, melee damage or inventory weight reduction? Success in Ark relies on planning ahead and to do that, you need to get to know the lay of the land. So you explore, and most likely die through a variety of circumstances. Respawn and try again. After a couple of failed attempts, you’ll have figured out everything you need to know.

Along the way you’ll notice that the game is rather pretty, filled with gorgeous water, glimmering sand and plenty of breathtaking tropical and forested scenery. Ark's Island is huge, vast in fact, and the landscape covers a variety of environments from sparse beaches to the Titanoboa filled swamps, from towering cliffs to extensive cavern systems and deep, deep mineral rich oceans filled with Megalodons and Ichthyosaurs. Piranhas infest the rivers, while gentle Brontosaurus’s plod interminably along as Triceratops avoid getting under foot.

The dinosaurs are easily one of Ark's greatest attractions; they are wonderfully modelled and animated, and have unique behaviours of their own. Some roam the island at will, while others stick to specific areas. They mate and poop, and can be seen to fight amongst themselves as much as the carnivorous ones love fighting you. You can delve into knee high grass only to be attacked by unseen Compsognathus (those tiny pack dinos everyone got to know from the Jurassic Park movies), or climb a rock to spot a Raptor fighting a Dilophosaur.

One of my favourite moments occurred early on when a Raptor decided to attack a Brontosaurus who, with one titanic swish of its tail, sent the offending Raptor flying far out into the ocean. It’s moments like these that make Ark worth exploring, and that’s even before you get further into the island where the largest carnivores of the mighty lizard era dwell, such as the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Dinosaurs, as with everything else, are both a resource and an asset. You can kill them and harvest their bodies for parts or food or, in what is arguably the best part of the game, tame them to ride or send them out foraging for you. That’s right, that T-Rex you’ve been eyeing just over the horizon, can become your very own pet, weaponising him in the process. Good luck, you’re going to need it to get that job done. Taming dinosaurs can be accomplished in one of two ways. You can walk behind certain ones and feed them as they move around or, and this mostly applies to the carnivores, knock them out and keep them in a perpetual state of sleep by using "narcoberrys" and keeping them fed by plopping food into their inventories. Eventually they’ll come around to your side and can be put to whatever use you so deem appropriate.



At its default setting, taming dinosaurs can take forever to accomplish and does become tedious, but it beats the heck out of running around Ark's vast environments even with your sprint speed maxed out. Nor does it hurt having something on your side when you get attacked or are doing the attacking. You may have noticed I said “default” settings in the previous sentence; that’s because Ark gives you a dizzying amount of options to customise the game to your liking.

You can take the game online into PVP or PVE servers, each dedicated to Ark’s different biomes. "The Island" is the game's standard environment, while "The Scorched Earth" is the game's second, desert-themed environment recommended for seriously advanced players, and containing some Engrams specific to it. You can join the dedicated servers or create one of your own. Or you can play the game offline in single-player story mode where you can explore both environments at your own pace to figure out, through discoverable journals, exactly what’s going on.

When starting the game, you’ll be able to change every aspect of your run to your liking from the amount of water you consume to how fast you level up, from how often the dinosaurs poop to how much damage they deal and how long it takes to tame them. Ark puts the power in your hands and this is a good thing. My opening moments in the game took place in the easy sections of the map and weren't easy at all. These options, for many, can be the deciding factor in whether or not to stick with the game. I’m quite certain the developers knew that the game's default settings, how it’s meant to be played, would equate to lost players. For those wanting an even easier ride, the game's console feature is still enabled so you can use cheats if you so desire.

Playing in single-player mode first is recommended before tackling the online side of the game. In PVE, you can join a tribe with whom you share resources and goals, while in PVP you best prepare to have everything you’ve accomplished get wrecked by opportunistic players. It’s telling that you can actually lock the doors to your structures in this game with a password. Bear in mind that, even when you’re offline, the world continues to tick along so it’s quite possible to log back in and find your base destroyed, animals killed and stock looted.

Despite this, Ark is definitely a game better experienced with other players. Those wanting to play with someone else offline can do so in story mode as the game supports local split-screen play. Having two players in their underwear punching Raptors together is a lot more fun than it sounds.

Not everything is hunky-dorey on the Island though. Ark suffers from bugs and the late game resource grind, even with everything set to your favour, can be incredibly tedious.

Foliage pops in and out inconsistently along with texture resolutions. The most noticeable bugs come from the game's combat system and the collision detection can be very spotty during combat with A.I., and when harvesting items. While the dinosaurs are clearly scoring hits on you, your point blank swings are clearly missing at times. The same goes for when you’re trying to mine ore from rocks or wood from tree trunks. Most noticeable are the occasional collision detection and dinosaur A.I. combination bugs. I’ve seen Dodos magically walk through titanic boulders like David Copperfield through the Great Wall, and it’s rather disheartening watching a triceratops get stuck on half a palm tree trunk that only comes to its knees.

Despite these issues and the game's dramatic difficulty, Ark is an incredibly fun game to play through and explore. As with the best survival games in the genre, it has that “just one more time” aspect going for it. And if you can get a mate to join you for local co-op, all the better.