Welcome back to the next dive into Ark: Survival Evolved. In this episode we will dive right into the core gameplay of Ark. Though still only in early release, there is a lot of game here.
At it’s core, Ark is has the pretty familiar basics of any survival game. Land on a seemingly deserted island and quickly find food and shelter to survive. Early gameplay is fairly cookie cutter in it’s mannerisms, though Ark does add a few new ideas here. Your first day however will still involve punching the heck out of a load of trees to collect wood and thatch. You’ll also find other resources scattered around like stone and berries. Stone acts like any other game’s stone, but berries add a somewhat unique add as many of them have special affects and become extremely useful in later gameplay. Narco berries for instance can help keep fallen enemies asleep, or yourself if you accidentally eat them.
You’ll have to juggle a variety of deadly statuses early on in the game. The usual things like hunger, and dehydration are here, as well as managing the heat and cold temperatures. All of these affects can lead to your untimely death, and that’s not to mention the very aggressive enemy A.I. Death can come from any angle when you step across the path of both small and large carnivorous dinosaurs. Though you can try to fight them, early on it’s always better to run. Even the small Dilo’s can quickly take you down with their blinding poison attack. Luckily the one way you can’t die is by getting stepped on by a Brontosaurus. With the world’s full day night cycle, and weather dynamics, death can be around any corner and you won’t see it coming.
To avoid early death it’s important to take advantage of the robust crafting system and also level up your character. Experience is handled uniquely as it is dolled out in small amounts as you survive. You can also gain experience by performing any actions in the world. Gathering materials, crafting items, or of course defeating creatures all help you advance your level.
As your level advances it opens up points to be spent on both your personal stats as well as crafting engrams for which a new variety open up with every major advancement in level. You can of course build shelters, equipment, clothing, as well as weapons and consumables to help you in your quest to survive.
Crafting opens up the next big phase of the game, capturing and taming your own dinosaurs and animals. Every creature in the game can be tamed to be your personal conveyer of goods, extra combatant and most can be ridden if you have the right materials to build their saddle. This is where the pace of the game stiffens right up though. Capturing dinosaurs can be a massive endeavor, no pun intended. Though the smaller animals and dinosaurs tame fairly quickly, larger beasts can take hours to tame. After carefully knocking the creature out, you must keep them under with narcotics and the before mentioned narco berries, all the while managing their health and keeping them well fed. Larger creatures like mammoths and stegosaurus can take days of in-game time to tame. Though this makes each tame animal rewarding, the balance for more casual gamers is lost unless they can find a group that is willing to help in taming creatures for them.
Crafting also becomes tedious at higher levels. Rather than adding more complex, or higher level materials to combine to create more powerful items, the game instead chooses to have you collect hundreds, upon hundreds of basic materials instead. though this again adds accomplishment to each task, finding 240 hide to make a mammoth saddle felt very unrealistic, and entirely redundant.
After you are done collecting trophies. You can also start collecting tributes, to summon creatures to be defeated for unique items at Ark locations throughout the island landscape. So far this seems to be the available end game for you to build up for and start farming high end equipment and weapons.
With this game still in early access, I am impressed by the amount of content here. Though the most fun parts of the game lack some balancing, if you can find a good team of players to play along this is lessened. Low level players can still be useful by gathering mats and help building bases, regardless of whether they have the time to invest in taming high level creatures to their sides. Hopefully as the game develops this balance will improve and offer more for each type of player to enjoy in game. Till then I’m going to keep crafting hide pants.
Thanks for reading, and as always, make sure to comment and like below. Let me know what you think of Ark: Survival Evolved.
Check out part #1 of this two part review here!
MicBeMac Games 