Recent reviews by Kara

Up until today I had been really enjoying this game. Today when the new skins came out I finally spent some money and wanted to buy the new skin. But the skin is ONLY available via loot boxes and in my opinion a rather deceiving and not clear system that basically you can only figure out by spending money. There's no direct way to buy this new skin only loot boxes and the "guaranteed" rolls is only for 1 random thing in the boxes they flagged. I did the math on this which was very easy to get a SINGLE skin it could easily cost you $300+.

That type of loot box mechanic is why i stopped playing other games and its really too bad that an otherwise amazing game is using predatory loot box gambling mechanics.

Then there's the 2 tiers for battle passes which really is $10 for meh and really $25 which is exceedingly high.

Sure they need to make money since it is a F2P game but between the loot boxes and the dual passes and some other "pass thing" that I saw I'll never spend another dime on this game.

I would've gladly paid a reasonable premium for a premium skin but I don't get a crap about the all the other garbage in those boxes. To me a Premium skin would be $15-$25 MAYBE if it was really spectacular $30. But these are Virtual items and sure they take a good amount of development work but really trying to milk players or only cater to finding whales to support your game dooms the game because those types of players as we've seen in countless other games don't actually make the game. You need a large player base for this kind of game to make it work.

So much high hopes for this but gone now.

it needs more cooking time and isn't worth the exceedingly high price for what is basically a DLC to JW1. There's bugs with missions and incorrect text in many places referring to "Herbi ground feeders" that don't exist in this version. 2 Chaos theory missions get stuck early on and won't progress . Sandbox mode requires full completion of the campaign and unlocking of all research items to use, even things as simple as power are not unlocked w/o completion of the main campaign or chaos missions that were more interesting to me but are broken.
Without question this is a cash grab on the Jurassic World name/universe. This game is maybe worth $39.99 not 60 let alone $70.

Pure hot Garbage and straight up waste of money. It was rushed and they charged a premium for us to TEST it and I will never give them money again.

This game needs another 6 months cooking before I will recommend it. Numerous bugs and performance problems. Something that while not totally unexpected from Frontier. The limited beta was a mistake as not enough scenarios were tested. The horrid performance drops especially when it rains also deeply ruin the experience.

Examples:
Panda Scenario the Salt water croc enclosure gets very dirty and npc's can't clean it. I finally found the problem which is very simple but something they should have gotten in testing. one small area of land is unreachable by NPCs but the crocs poop on it and it never gets cleaned up. Being unable to edit the terrain to fix it is a problem solved by placing a pile of rocks there so the crocs can't poop.

Performance is very erratic and seems to be related strongly to the rain. I have a 2080ti and get massive performance hit during rain and no adjustment of settings would change it. Additionally, it rained for 25min IRL time while the game was on x5 speed or about 5 months. That's just stupid especially with the performance issues.

Lastly After 4 hours I finally decided to try a sandbox and chose to sandbox based on the first scenario. However, most if not all of the pre-existing structures cannot be edited or removed in sandbox mode which is in my opinion a huge oversight.

I also had several crashes to desktop all happened during rain.

The above examples are but a few of some of the performance, AI, and and design problems.

Positives:
The animals overall looks Amazing. Hands down to the artwork team.
Huge variety of animals gives it a real feel to a legit zoo game.
The concepts there are really solid. The game is obviously solidly based in Planet Coaster with even same assets for many of the vendors. I think this is a positive.
I expect a large workshop with lots of interesting items and again this is really good.

Frontier has a habit of very slow updates especially bug fixes. Once those issues are resolved I have no doubt this game will be amazing. That said until such time I do not recommend this game.

10/23/2018 Update: I have changed my review to positive. There isn't any one thing that Studio Wildcard has done that changed my opinion but a more overtime positive actions they have done in a variety of areas.

1) Consistent reliable updates improving the performance of the game and the TLC passes on a variety of dinos shows how much they really do care about this game and continue to solidly support it. There will always be some problems but they have made a real effort to improve the quality of the game.

2) Their continued and expanded support of the modding community is the single biggest area that I feel they deserve major propos for. The modding contests and the mod sponsored program are truly stand out and unique among any game developer/publisher. Sure lots of games have mods but ARK/SW has fully embraced it to a degree that I've never seen before or since.

3) The work done on the "Tek" Dinos, Tek Stego, Tek Raptor and even the Tek Quetzal are truly amazing. The Extinction Chronicles event is not just some fluff but the work it took to animate and make the TEK dinos truly beautiful and unique speaks volumes.

That's all I have for now keep up the good work Studio Wildcard. I eagerly look forward to your new projects and future ARK Content.

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10/27/2017 UPDATE: Up until today I had been a steadfast believer of ARK and Studio Wildcard. After what I saw today they will never get another penny out of me. I will also strongly recommend against them.

As many of you I have been eagerly waiting for the Aberration DLC to come out. Back in September I bought the season pass specifically in anticipation of this DLC. I had my doubts they would be able to deliver on time, but I hoped that since they are now Post-release they would have a more accurate schedule. This past weekend was Twitchcon, where they announced that Aberration would be delayed by weeks, likely months. I was saddened but not totally surprised.

What really burned me was the sale they started this weekend. ARK and the season pass are on sale.... Let that sink in. I bought the DLC at full price (minus the partial discount for scorched earth) at $29.99, for Aberration. I wanted to be able to load it and startup a server as many people in my gaming group were also very excited about this DLC. Now the DLC is Delayed and as a SLAP in the face they discount the season pass. Nope, that was it for me.

Is ARK a great game? Yes. Is Studio Wildcard a good developer? Nope. Will I play ARK again? Probably yes, but i'll never buy another thing from SW or will i ever recommend this product or any other product again.

Previous review below which I still stand by at the time it was written

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I've got quite a few hours into this game. There have been times where I have cursed this game, getting my base wiped out by dinos. There has also been really inspiring times, taming my first Rex. The $30 i spent on this game has given me more enjoyment than any other game i have EVER played. I have more playtime in this game than ALL the rest of my steam games combined.

When I saw the release trailer for this DLC and the $20 price tag, I did't even hesitate. My little gaming group all felt the same way and we all immediately bought it. With 1400+ hours the $20 price tag for a huge addon was well worth it.

Looking back a bit I am a bit perturbed that some of the long standing bugs and problems haven't been addressed. That they took a lot of time away from fixing those problems in the base game to design this new DLC.

In the year+ I have been playing ARK they have released TONS of updates, not little updates, but huge content additions, features, optimizations etc. They did seem to get side tracked with SOTF and that has been something that bothered me. However, that said the game is still hands down, one of the best games out there.

I feel that the people complaining about a $20 dlc for an early access game are just being a bit greedy with what they want for $30 or less if you got it on sale. Cmon people $30. Spending that $20 I felt was supporting a great development team doing an outstanding job, most of the time.

The Physical Melee combat in this game is absoletly AMAZINGBALLZ. It is massively Visceral. You get very immersed and feel every hit, punch, kick, stab, swing. +1