Recent reviews by Dan

fun

I have a good 130+ hours in this game, so I have had plenty of time to experience all or most of what it has to offer.

I enjoy ARK and will continue playing it in the future, but there are some big red flags about it.

1) Resources:
Gathering resources is SO slow, and SO grindy. it will take 100+ hours to finally get metal structures, which are still impossibly expensive. Let me put this into perspective:
The key components to a metal wall are Cementing Paste (glue) and metal. first, metal must be smelted into a metal ingot, which takes 2 metal each. Cementing paste takes 8 stone and 4 chitin (chitin is gotten from scorpions, bugs, etc, each creature dropping around 6-8)
so 1 metal wall will take 25 metal ingots (50 raw metal) and 15 cementing paste (120 stone, 60 chitin) for 1 metal wall.
Gathering resources is nearly impossible to do quickly without a large tribe of at least 4, and takes away from the fun of the game

2) Server domination:
Bigger tribes will kill you for the fun of it. it is impossible to compete against the richer players. Your dinos will die, your stuff will be stolen. if you enjoy starting from scratch every day, this game is for you.

3) Taming:

What the ♥♥♥♥. 14 hours to tame a rex? taming is impossibly long and expensive. Each tame requires tons of drugs and meat, which are hard to get if you havent tamed anything, which is hard to do without drugs and meat, which is hard to get if you havent tamed anything... etc. Taming is long and boring, and requires you to sit around your sleeping animal for however many hours it will take. ALSO, while the animal is sleping, any player/other animal can kill it, even if its 6 hours into the tame. All that work, drugs and meat for nothing.

4) Bugs:

SO MANY BUGS
Trees will flatten down to the ground and spring back up
20 brontos will spawn inside eachother
entering a cave will cause the graphics settings to be automatically and irreverasbly turned to super low
you can hit dinos through walls
animals will spawn inside rocks

5) graphics/fps

Its sad when 18 FPS is good. on the lowest settings. Unless you have a custom gaming computer, you cant have a beautiful game (as seen in the ads). Needing a Titan X for the max settings? what a joke.

Caves are laggy, entering and exiting the water is laggy, dinos are laggy, the entire game is laggy.
Dont look at the island, it will try to render the entire thing and allow you an amazing 5 frames per second.

6) Dinos

Dino AI is so strange.
tamed birds will orbit you at the speed of light, and you cant stop them. they get in your way and trap you so you cant move.

If you disconnect/loose connection on a bird, you will fall off but the bird will sit down in the air and not come down. Say goodbye to your 8 hour tamed bird.

There is no controll of the animals spawned. One time you could see 20 brontos sitting inside eachother, or 10 T rexs in a pack attacking everything, or 200 dillos (dog sized dinos) attacking everything in packs. There is no limit to how many of what type of dino can spawn in a certain location.

I could go on and on but i think you get the point.

TL;DR: Needs Polishing. Wait till full release. game is too buggy, low fps, grindy, lots of waiting around, and no chance against rich tribes

yes