ARK: Survival Evolved is truly unique game; there's nothing I've seen in the survival genre that explores the same concepts with the same level of detail.
Unfortunately, many of the good aspects of ARK are countered by bad aspects that range from inconvenient to plain infuriating.

🎮ARK can be played with both keyboard/mouse and controller.🎮

ARK is a needs-based survival game, with hunger, thirst and health-affecting conditions such as temperature extremes.
Survival is not taken to such extremes as it is in some other games in the genre; there is no "wellness", "sickness" or "mental state" statistic for example. Debuffs such as temporary (a few seconds) blindness and slow can be applied to the player by certain creatures.

It must be said, however, that ARK is not forgiving. While the game tries to keep newer players in the safer zones, there is no tutorial and danger just might find you, with very little you can do to stop it. Getting killed often as a fresh spawn can be very demoralising, but those who push through will find themselves growing more powerful before long.

The main feature of ARK is the player's ability to tame the various creatures roaming the world. From dodos to direwolves, sharks to giant eagles and spiders to ground-shaking titans, almost everything that lives on the ARK can be tamed, and in many cases, ridden into battle.

Whether your goal is to build an unstoppable army of teeth and claws or just enjoy your time with your loyal animal friends, ARK has got your back. Creatures are brought to life with a proficiency that gives them real personality and character.

Unfortunately, there were some very questionable design decisions made in the creation of certain creatures that have lead to some very cheap-feeling mechanics that don't seem to serve any real purpose other than annoying the player. Creatures stunlocking the player, or stealing and destroying items from their inventory, for example.

Creature A.I. is, unfortunately, a shortfall of ARK. Dinosaurs are dumb. For example:

• If it's a predator, it'll attack almost anything the player owns regardless of how obviously suicidal such an action might be.
  
• Some creatures will only attack if you invade their personal space - but they will walk into you.
  
• Creatures trying to follow you will get stuck on things, and fail to pathfind around them.
  
  These A.I. problems aren't a constant issue, but they happen often enough to get on your nerves sometimes.

No survival game is complete without a robust crafting system, and ARK is no exception.
There are just enough different resource types to keep the player progressing and vary their requirements, but not so many that a new player is overwhelmed.

Tiers of progression are clearly shown in the crafting system as the player unlocks stronger weapons, armour, building materials and useful devices, with each tier requiring harder-to-obtain materials.
Clothing, for example, ranges from simple cloth to glowing suits of sci-fi armour that allow one to breathe underwater and soar through the skies.

Bases in ARK can be built almost anywhere in the world and consist of parts (floor, ceiling, wall, etc.) that snap together. Players can build almost any size or shape of base they want, though the snapping system can be a real headache if one starts to get a little too creative with their base's shape.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2025848178
ARK players will find themselves beset regularly with aggressive dinosaurs and the main line of defense is tamed creatures and craftable weaponry. Early-game options consist of basic melee weapons such as spears and primitive ranged weapons like the bow, with more powerful options such as firearms becoming available as the player progresses.

Even with high-quality equipment, players must still be very wary of powerful predators, and must use their speed and cunning to avoid becoming lunch.

Caves and boss fights are the end-game of ARK's PvE combat aspect.

Bosses are typically powerful mythical creatures with massive health pools and devastating attacks. Boss mechanics are simple; it essentially amounts to shooting the boss a lot until it eventually dies.

Caves are ARK's dungeons. They feature sprawling paths designed to confuse and force the player to explore to find the end goal; the cave's artifact. Caves are themed to their biome and contain corresponding enemies in large amounts and at high levels.

ARK's maps are beautiful and varied, featuring multiple biomes with corresponding creatures and challenges. I've had some of my best times in ARK simply exploring with my friends, walking through the forests, braving the frigid mountains or venturing down swampy rivers on a raft.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2025858744

Basic body type and skin colour can be altered, as well as hair which grows as time passes, and can be dyed and styled.

Dyes can be crafted to colour items and paint freely onto players, creatures and certain objects with a brush.

ARK's story is not told to the player through any cutscene or audio track. Instead, players find snippets of writing around the world. These do make for quite an interesting story when compiled, but said story is not presented to the player by the game.

This game was played with the following PC specs:
Intel i5-4440 3.10 GHz
16GB DDR3 RAM
Geforce GTX 1650 Super 4GB
HDD

ARK is a truly gorgeous game that continually delights with its lighting, scale and detail. Creatures are modelled and textured beautifully, and have adequate animations to portray a real sense of them being living, breathing entities.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2025847500
This visual splendor has a cost. Using the specs listed above, I get an unstable but tolerable 60fps on a mixture of medium/high settings, though my GPU gets very hot. Hotter than while playing Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, The Division 2, or any other modern, demanding game I've played.

Audio design, while not stunning, is high quality and perfectly adequate. Creatures sound believable, ambient audio is pleasant and music contextually appropriate.

ARK has excellent mod support via the Steam Workshop. Gameplay alterations/improvements and content additions make up the bulk and I strongly recommend making use of it.

I started playing ARK in 2016 when it was in early-access. Since then, plenty of content has been added, yet a multitude of early-access problems are still present.

The aforementioned A.I., creatures spawning inside of and moving through solid rock walls in caves, third-person weapon models being ridiculously oversized, dinosaurs constantly getting stuck on each other's wonky collision boxes, the list goes on.

Simply put, playing ARK feels like playing an early-access game.

ARK is a unique, enjoyable game with a thriving playerbase and excellent mod support, but playing it still feels just like it did back in 2016.

The feeling of a good game that isn't finished.

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I have spent many hours on this game. The development team does not support it. They release paid mods without fixing any patches, and in fact causing more fundamental problems with the game every single time.

The Linux version is completely broken. It does not work in Linux. That hasn't stopped Wildcard from (falsely) advertising that this works with Linux. Both the Native Linux client, as well as the Windows version running in Proton, are broken. They will not even load into the game. Immediate crashes, with no fix.

It has been this way for weeks without even an acknowledgement by Wildcard.

Insanely fun survival game with a loads of content to keep you and your friends playing it for months on end. Unfortunately, that doesn't matter. "Quality of life" is a term absent from the brains of the devs, almost as bad as Rust. All they've cared about for the longest time is pumping out DLC for more revenue. Bugs, crashes, poor performance, have all gone unaddressed for years. Ark never really left Early Access.