Ark: Survival Evolved (2017)

I got this for free on the Epic store, otherwise I never would have played it. And the only reason I even installed it was for a tinder date. She had the steam version so it was a bit of sending screenshots of server lists back and forth until we found an unofficial crossplay one. We played for a few hours, long enough to get hide armor, a bow and a small house. After that I figured I might as well play through the game while it was installed. No way in hell would I touch the official servers, not with other players being able to ruin my experience. I don't want to play multiplayer anyway, even a pure PvE. So I started single player. I started off at the default location in the south central peninsula. I decided to gather as much as I could and store it all in boxes until I was high enough to build a wood house. Because at that time I did not realize the axe and pick had different resouce gathering specializations and I thought wood was easier to get than thatch. I built a small 4 foundation wood house with a trap door leading to the roof. I put storage boxes down as a way to get to the roof, then built spike walls around the outside with a tiny courtyard at the entrance. I put a cookpot there not realizing it could not roast meat; that was a huge waste of stone. Then I put a camp fire there for cooking. I skipped cloth armor and wanted to go straight for hide, so I made a bow and started hunting in the nude. The bow has shit range. At least it is better than spears. I decided to lure a nearby Triceratops to test out the spike walls. I punched it in the face until it impaled itself to death. Off in the distance was a Spinosaurus wrecking everything. Hmm I wonder what the spikes will do to that. I died but got it almost all the way back to base. It didn't last long vs the spikes. I built a forge and started making metal gear. It took a while but I eventually had metal axe, pick, sword, shield, crossbow and armor. I then started exploring further than the starting peninsula. Got to a cliff with jungle above and that was a sweet location for a base with the cliff protecting 1 side. Made a simple 1 tile wood shack with a line of spikes. Another spino was nearby and I got it killed on the spikes. I had planned to create a network of bases for fast travel, but fast travel drops items? Wtf! I can see how that would be needed for multiplayer but it is unacceptable for singleplayer. Then I pushed north into the jungle and found the swamp. Killed some titan boas and got leeched. How do I get rid of a leech the size of my arm? How is it even attached to me through metal armor? Can I attack it? Burn it with torch? No? Wtf. Had to go online to find out I had to build a campfire and jump in it. Stupid. Then I got jumped by a giant crocodile sarco and barely survived with a tiny bit of health. Took a couple seconds to marvel at how I was still alive, then got killed by piranha. What the hell, the water was only like ankle deep.

I was not able to find my corpse and that really pissed me off. All that metal gear, gone. Fuck! So I did things. First I turned on the map location; why was that not the default option? As if having a map that does not show where you are is somehow better and more immersive. Second I maxed out the decay timer. I should have hours to get back to my corpse, especially with what this game expects of you. Third, I looked up console commands because I was sick of this lack of sensible fast travel. Cheat fly works. Even with that I was not able to find my corpse. So I zipped around gathering metal again to rebuild my stuff and decided to start exploring east along the coast. I would cheat fly to get back and forth from my bases and built more bases at regular intervals. By this time I had discovered creative mode and used it for infinite weight as needed. I did not want to play with god mode or make stuff out of thin air.... yet. I made a longneck rifle and bullets. Oh my god making gunpowder and bullets was tedious. Oh wait I don't have to stand here and wait for it to craft. Well that is not quite as bad. At this point my main weapon was the crossbow because of simple reusable ammo. Sword and shield for melee and I carried a few wood spike walls to plop down on the fly. The Therizinasaurs killed me a few times. They did not look that dangerous, but no they required spike walls and a gunshot to lure them, then crossbow to the face. I killed my 1st T Rex in the same way; put down a small triangle of spikes and shot it a few times to lure it over. The bastard just reached his head over the spikes to bite me and broke my shield. Then I hacked at his face with sword and it died. I found a metal rich mountain top and used creative mode to take everything. I swam to the island in the SE corner and had a few shark fights. Maybe it was a bad idea to swim that far with all my armor and weapons. Then I went north to carnivore island.

At this point I was getting bored. It was going to take forever to explore the entire map and I wanted better gear. I had a fabricator but needed polymer to make end game stuff. How do I get polymer? Oh it is made from obsidian. And how do I get that? Probably further inland, so I better start exploring towards the center. At this point I noticed the crafting menu included items that could only be made in the smithy and fabricator, because I had creative mode on. Oh so I don't need to do all that bullshit to make ammo, I can just make infinite bullets whenever I want? Great. So I made myself a full set of riot gear, pistol, pump shotgun, assault rifle, sniper, rpg and tek weapons. I zipped around the entire island in creative mode slaughtering everything with my infinite ammo weapons. It was ok. I was not impressed by how many shots it took to kill things. The only guns that did reasonable damage were the pump shotgun and rpg. I had found the end game place in the volcano and the boss summons, but I needed artifacts. Go online to find out what that was about; oh I see there are dungeons. It was a huge pain to find them. I had to use coordinates from online and the GPS tool. Then slapped down a wood foundation with bed for respawn and set up my plan. Full riot armor, sword, pump shotgun with light, assault rifle with holo scope, sniper rifle, grenades, crossbow, 4 wood spike walls and optional night vision goggles. A bit of meat and a canteen but I will be liberally using creative mode to eliminate survival meters, heal as needed, and craft whatever I need. Otherwise I am going to try to play legit and see how well I can do; play it more like Skyrim or a FPS with quick saves. It was fun, and the easy caves were not too difficult. I tried to imagine I was playing legit and wanted to preserve valuable bullets, so I used the crossbow as much as possible, only using the guns if the crossbow could not manage it. I did have trouble with the underwater bits with the sarcos and piranhas, but most encounters could be won with crossbow kiting. I did have to wear fur pretty often and I started using scuba gear and harpoon gun for underwater. For the lava cave I used hazmat suit to protect from the heat and started using the guns much more; open with the sniper from prone and kill 1 maybe 2 enemies, then fire a full clip of assault rifle, then all 6 shotgun blasts, then finish whatever was left alive with sword and shield. The ice cave was tough and I started using metal spikes to deal with the enemies; lots of sniping and shotgun to the face from safe behind the spikes. The enemies were ridiculously high level and took a lot of time to kill. I would have died a lot here if not for creative mode. Not just from the tough enemies but the cold. My fur was not enough to stay warm. I did make some standing torches burning with angler gel, but I don't think that was enough to avoid freezing. The guide says you need higher than grey quality fur to avoid freezing, but I have better things to do. Then I did the underwater caves. The easy one was not too bad. The harder cave caused me to die several times despite cheating. You know it is bad when you die faster than you can pause the game and turn on creative. The electric eels were the main cause of this. The sharks were many but not really a threat given how slow they move. The dunkle fish most likely would have killed me without creative mode, as I just swam around in circles shooting them and they were huge harpoon sponges. It really annoyed me how there seemed to be no way to rest to recover stamina while under water. I ended up making some shark cages to deal with the enemies here, especially the massive mosasaur and kraken. I made metal structures with doorways and windows to shoot from safety. It was not perfect because enemy attacks could clip through the walls to still hit sometimes. Even the 3x3 foundation 2 story cage I made was not big enough to be perfectly safe. The last cave I did was the swamp. I made a hazmat suit but it did not protect from the poison gas, so I had to use gas masks. Many mask because they broke at the drop of a hat. The swarms of enemies here were incredibly annoying. I made a flamethrower like the guide said, but I also had element and made excellent use of the tek rifle. Those sweet area plasma blasts and knockback.

I did kill a titanosaur out in the world and it took forever. I tried out different things to see how it would even be possible to kill without cheating. I used creative and fly the entire time and it took over a dozen cruise missiles, 100 shotgun blasts to the face, several swords and over a dozen rpgs. I think the rpgs did the best overall damage over time. It easily wrecked a tek structure and could catch me on foot so I can only see legit fighting it while mounted or luring it to a cliff or ocean. I did build a high tek tower on carnivore island, which was just walls enclosing a spiral staircase with a ceiling to shoot from at the top. I did not try out metal or stone structures on land. I killed an alpha rex from that tower followed by shooting from the water with crossbow and scuba. I got killed by alpha raptors multiple times due to severely underestimating how powerful they were. Wood spikes and structures were questionable as I am not sure if they would last long enough to kill it. Metal spikes were enough. The bigger predators would need a large enough structure to be out of range of their attacks. I finally tried out taming, and got a Triceratops near the starting area. Interesting but difficult to control using the fly cheat. Tried a pteranadon but could not shoot from it. Then got a T Rex and Quetzal, both of which were fun but I was disappointed that I could not drive and shoot at the same time. Then I beat the 3 bosses on alpha mode. They are obviously raid bosses designed for a large group of players. I have my doubts that the alpha modes are even possible to defeat solo, but if so it would take an army of tames loaded down with plenty of supplies, and I don't have time for that. I did find the summon creature console command, and used that to get all the trophies I needed. I also tried summoning multiple Gigantosaurus and forcetaming but they died in seconds. The boss fights were very boring flying around in creative mode blasting them in the face with the shotgun and revolver. By the time I was ready for the final dungeon I had a full set of tek armor, tek sword and shield, green pump shotgun with plans, purple revolver, and ascended longneck rifle with plans. I ditched the sniper rifle and barely used the grey assault rifle. I had also fiddled around with the settings to max out player damage, max out loot quality and difficulty, and make nighttime as short as possible. I made it through the final dungeon without much trouble. I was able to lure most enemies into lava, snipe them from perches accessible to tek climbing, or ar least shotgun and sword them. I did not bother with tames. Then the final boss was the most boring cheatfest. I was going to play the free dlc maps but did not have enough space to install all at once. The epic store would not let me cancel and install them individually so I deleted the entire game. It was for the best since I have plenty of better games to play.

While the concept of the game is cool, the actual moment to moment gameplay is ridiculously tedious. I play games to do things that I can't do in real life, like blasting dinosaur heads off with guns. NOT crap like chop down trees, mine rocks, build structures and manage hunger/thirst/temperature. I would much rather play something like Turok, Dino Crisis or the Command and Conquer dino levels. It is like this game requires another person or 2 to be your servants to take care of the mind numbing tedium, so you can be prepared to play the fun bits. I hated how easily grey equipment breaks and how much I got knocked around in melee combat. The enemies were mostly well designed with a lot of interesting behaviors and abilities, but some creatures seemed overpowered and some abilities unrealistic. I also found it weird that the different species were not killing each other in the dungeons. On one hand, it says something very bad about the game that I could only tolerate it with excessive cheating. On the other, I appreciate the swath of customization options and ease of cheating. The climax of the game was definitely the parts immediately before and after the final boss, but the rest of the game is not compelling enough to put up with the gameplay. The explorer notes are a poor excuse for a story and the world is large and samey. Sure there were some scenic locations, but most of the map was generic filler meant for many players. This is a tough game to rate due to the wide variety of options on how to play, but it is ultimately too tedious and niche for most people.

6.0/10