You wake up alone and almost wearing nothing on an unknown island… how will you survive? Want to learn more? Then check out our Ark: Survival Evolved review!
ARK: Survival Evolved – Survivor’s Pack Launch Trailer | PS4
The ARK: Survivor’s Pack gives PS4 players a fully up-to-date version of ARK: Survival Evolved that includes all previously released content, plus Scorched Earth ARK’s first Expansion Pack. This version includes exclusive PS4 content including a Bionic Giga skin plus an entire Manicore armor set for all male and female characters, and players will also receive regular game content updates. The game will grow over time until it releases as a final product in Spring 2017. Tame, train, breed, and ride dinosaurs in the most exciting open-world action-adventure survival game ever created! As a man or woman stranded naked, freezing and starving on the shores of a mysterious island called ARK, you must hunt, harvest resources, craft items, grow crops, research technologies, and build shelters to withstand the elements.
Ark: Survival Evolved is a difficult game to describe. At its core, this is a first-person survival game. You wake up nearly naked on an island and have to immediately fend for yourself. Here is the kicker, though. When you die, you are pretty much really dead. You have to create a new character and start again from scratch, making survival even more important.
The first thing I will say is that they don’t make this game great for newcomers. As mentioned earlier, all you have to go by is “alone on an island… and go!” The game has no tutorial on what to do or how to proceed. It’s really daunting overall, as the survival aspects come into play rather quickly. You become hungry a bit into your first gaming session and need to eat something, and fast. I did figure out how to poop, though. Yes, the game’s survival elements including defecating regularly to stay healthy. And if you’re really desperate, sure, you can eat the poop.
If you can somehow survive for long enough, you’ll realize that you’re really not alone on the island. You’ll also need to avoid the dinosaurs. The island is packed with them, and they spell death for your character – especially early on. Avoid the dinosaurs until you are ready to confront them!
After my first 15 deaths or so I took a break from the game to do some learning on my own. The game has been in beta on PC for a while now, so I took to the internet to find some help on getting started with ARK: Survival Evolved.
After spending some time learning the basics and getting some great info from one of the PlayStation communities on ARK, I was ready to dive back into the game. One of the key things is gathering and crafting. This allows you to create weapons, clothes, armor, and shelter. This will drastically change how the game plays and will allow you to breath a bit. And if you can join a settlement or tribe of people it will usually be for the better as it will usually improve your quality of life.
Once you get the crafting pieces down, next comes the games big promise: DINOSAURS! Not only do you get a chance to fight the dinosaurs, but you can also tame them and take them out for a ride. Use them to haul inventory or to protect you while you sleep! The dinosaurs are not the most dangerous creatures in the game, though: the other people playing the game are. Human players are smarter, and you will quickly go to war against them. And since when you stop playing you basically fall asleep, this will leave you vulnerable to attacks. Protecting yourself from other people is really what this game is all about, as there are many cruel players in this game and you need to be prepared for that.
The game also includes the Scorched Earth DLC, putting you on a new map with new and fantastical creatures, including Dragons. It’s an interesting twist on the main game that doesn’t change the gameplay and the basics while, at the same time, putting a deeper spin on the regular objectives.
The game looks great and features a great variety of environments to explore. What’s more impressive is how your character will react to the environments and what you have to do survive. The games sounds are interesting with generally serene ambient sounds from the island while playing. And when there are dinosaurs on the screen, they sound great and make you feel as if there’s this giant thing next to you.
The game so far has eighteen trophies, including a Platinum. The rest are distributed between nine Gold, five Silver, and three Bronze trophies. Most can be obtained pretty easily for things such as taming and riding dinosaurs and maxing out your level as well as that of your dinosaur. A few are rarer to come by as you need to defeat the final bosses of the game which certainly takes some extra time – not to mention that due to the permadeath aspect, you certainly want to be prepared for those fights!
FINAL THOUGHTS:
I liked a lot of the ideas from ARK: Survival Evolved. The game is technically still in Beta, so it’s not quite a finished product, and more updates will be coming to it in the near future as it progresses along. Doing things like taming and riding dinosaurs is awesome, but still one of my big struggling points is how you are dropped into the game without a proper tutorial. The game is vast and this could quickly turn people off, that being said as you get better the game is really rewarding so give it a try. If you purchase the game right now it will be cheaper than if you wait until it is officially “released,” plus you’ll get a ton of extra time to play before the rest of the people jump in!
Disclaimer
This ARK: Survivor’s Pack review is based on a PS4 copy provided by WILDCARD PROPERTIES.
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