Recent reviews by Rexus Hunter

An okay game in my books. A little annoyed at the game-breaking bug in the elevator at the end. Don't know why or how that exists. Other than that, the game is fine. Graphics and fps are really good considering this game is little over seven years old now. Kind of wish they would make a sequel with less linear gameplay and a lot more types of creature enemies. That is my one complaint: I feel the creature enemy variety is a little lacking. I mean...you can only chuck so many werewolves, firedrakes, minotaurs, griffons, and nari at the player before they say "okay, what else you got?". Granted, the big enemies do mix it up just a little. Releasing the Kraken and spawning a junk golem are about the only true bosses in the game. The rest of them like the alpha werewolves, minotaurs, and griffons feel like nothing but minibosses. And when you get the rocket laucher? Forget it. Even the most stubborn griffon is a one-hit killshot. If I was going to design a sequel to this game, I'd have stuff like vampires, basilisk dragons, harpies, hydras, weretigers, wyverns, and other creatures of mythology in there with all the baddies from this game to mix up the combat. All in all, a good game that I think its good to play through at least a few times. Not the best game ever, but definitely worth playing.

Let me be clear that I enjoy this game very much and I hope to give it as fair a review as possible with everything major considered.

This game is very expansive. The tremendous variety of creatures, resources, building tiers, tools, weapons, items, and other content are enough to keep even a gamer who is used to putting in long stretches of playtime occupied for weeks, if not months. Being an avid prehistoric animal lover, this game in many ways just speaks to me.

So, to the pros, as I said, this game is very long. You will spend many hours in this game, even playing with friends. While there is both PVE and PVP gameplay, I do not recommend playing this game as a PVP experience unless you are playing with buddies who are just in it for fun and you can create backups in order to restore people's stuff after a raid. PVP on official servers or without backups is extremely frustrating and only destroys people's work for the sake of destroying it. People on official PVP are toxic cyberbullies that are to be avoided with extreme prejudice. Playing the game PVE and/or with friends is the best way to go because people are actually helpful and just want to play the game for fun and not sadistic destruction. You can also play singleplayer (which is what I do) where you can do whatever you want and just enjoy yourself. As a survival game, I will say it does get tedious at times. You may very well die several times before you make some actual progress. That being said, there is an entire official wiki dedicated to this game, so if you feel unsure about starting blind, you can always go online and do a little research just so you don't immediately get devoured alive by a dinosaur or some other prehistoric nasty. If you can figure out or you know what you're doing, navigating this game and its hazards becomes second nature. Besides taming creatures, breeding them, gathering resources, crafting things, and leveling the stats of both you and your creatures, there are also gigantic bosses in the game that will require you to fight with your best creatures to take them down. Taking these bosses down rewards you with the highest tier of buildable stuff (Tek) and some of the materials necessary to make them.

For those who enjoy story-based games, there is also a substantial backstory in the game told via collectible Explorer Notes. The wiki has the locations of these notes if you can't find some of them and even has the written text for the notes in case you have trouble reading the in-game notes. That being said, there are subtitles you can toggle in the game for each note that are much more legible. There is no voiceover for them unfortunately, so you will be reading them yourself with no narrator. In fact, there is no actual spoken dialogue in this game, at least thus far. Some may not find that an issue however, but I think it would have been cool if they'd had voice actors for each specific character in the extended story to read their respective notes. There are about four main characters for each official canon map (The Island, Scorched Earth, Aberration, and presumably Extinction when it come out), with Aberration having six secondary characters in addition to the main ones. A few characters in particular do cross over onto the different maps. Be prepared, as the game devs themselves have said and in somewhat Jurassic Park style, not everyone makes it off each Ark alive, so be prepared for characters to die or the story to imply their deaths. I won't give away any spoilers as I believe everyone should read things for themselves, but you will see certain trends regarding different characters. At times, the story is riveting and exciting, at others forboding or even heartbreaking (though not so much as to drive someone to tears, but more like "Wow, that actually just happened.") You will come to feel sorry for some characters, cheer others on, and absolutely despise others still.

I will admit this game has issues. Servers aren't the best as far as playability goes (i.e. lag, crashes, framerate issues, etc.) I also understand that not everybody enjoys a game that will honestly take hundreds of hours to really "complete", so that may be a con for you. The price also may also be somewhat steep for some people, especially factoring in paid DLCs and such, but you can save yourself a little money by purchasing some things like the DLCs in bundles such as with game's season pass. I would not let things like PVP drive you away, because you don't have to play that way. Also, be advised that the devs are notorious for missing release dates on updates and other things, so take every promise they make with a few grains of salt. If they say something will be released on X date at X time, mentally add about 24 hours to perhaps a week or more to that just in case so you're not too disappointed if something fails to drop on time.

All this being said, I think Ark is a very interesting and unique game. Not really unique in the survival aspect necessarily, but unique on most other things. This game came out in Early Access not too long before Jurassic World was theatrically released in 2015, so it kind of has been riding the Jurassic Park comeback hype train ever since, but it has been fully released since late 2017 and is a good game for what you're getting. There are talks of more content, another season pass besides the one already available, and likely even a proper sequel to the game some time after the last story DLC, Extinction, drops in early November, so keep an eye out for that. Definitely recommended and definitely a game you will have a lot of fun with, especially if you like prehistoric creatures or survival games in general.

This game is definitely a five-star achievment for the Jurassic Park franchise. Gameplay mechanics are smooth, being able to control dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures is an amazing feature, and fighting classic dinosaur and human villains provides nostalgia to those people who have faithfully hung on to every moment of the movies. The game stays true to its source with character quotes and famous scenes from the movies done up Lego style. The ability to easily switch characters using the character wheel feature is very convenient. The dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures are very fluid in their movements and the sounds they make.

Overall, this game is great. It really harkens back to the movies we all love so much and I would recommend this title to any Jurassic Park fan or anyone who is a fan of dinosaur-based games in general. You will not be disappointed. The $39.99 that this game costs plus the about $5 in DLC added to that if you opt for it is well worth every penny of Steam wallet credit.

I don't really know what to say anymore. Overall, this game was fun for a little while, but I feel that this game was poorly executed. With my copy of the game at least, every time I've tried to play it, there has been consistent crashes after about 2 to 3 hours of continuous play. Seems to be tied to certain maps, though I'm not absolutely sure. Either way, kind of a game-breaking bug if I'm perfectly honest. There hasn't been an update in several years now. No new content, no new creatures to hunt, no nothing. It makes me feel sad and disappointed that Carnivores has gone out with a sputter instead of a bang. I used to really love these games. Now, they feel like an empty graveyard littered with the corpses of dinosaurs and prehistoric animals that people have shot over and over again. It's disappointing and frustrating. The way I see it, they should have done the Kickstarter campaign long after the whole Stomping Land fiasco and subsequent player rage had quelled down. In my opinion, The Stomping Land, its Kickstarter campaign, its failure, and the scheming of the devs and project lead on that game that sent fans into a angry fit killed this game. Not saying it was the direct cause of this game being released as a lackluster port of the Carnivores HD game for PS3, but I can't help but think it was somehow a factor. Extinct like the dinosaurs it tried to resurrect (pardon the obivous pun). Seriously though, I love games like this that try to bring prehistoric animals to life. To see this game series collapse and fail after having produced a successful PC line, then a line for mobile devices, coming back to PC with this game, it breaks my heart to see it happen. Personally, I wish games like Prehistoric Kingdom and Saurian much better luck. Hopefully, they shall succeed where this game failed. We can only hope. My advice: if you actually care about Carnivores as a series, stay away from this game. You're not missing much, trust me.

Additional Note: Development on the Carnivores Dinosaur Hunter mobile game PC port to Steam continues, but it's extremely slow going since it's such a small team. Don't expect it any time soon. It took them forever to let people know what happened when Tatem was faced with near bankruptcy and they basically had to lay off most of their staff. The release date is no longer anywhere near certain, so I'd bide my time with other games while we wait for any official news regarding the CDH Steam port. I would not get my hopes up. There is barely anyone at Tatem who cares about Carnivores and they clearly couldn't care less whether it succeeds or fails. Maybe someday someone who really cares will come up with a game that has the Carnivores spirit and is enjoyable to play.