Recent reviews by Rimezin

The last Black Friday sale of $5 or $6 bucks was well-worth it. Nowadays there's a ton of freely available mods, too, to keep the game fresh and interesting...

... shame they don't support Steam Workshop, would make things so much easier.

Highly addicting and fun to play for hours. Perfect for someone who likes to organize and problem solve.

ARK: Survival Evolved is one of those games you have a love/hate relationship with. There are many great things about the game, and there are also some downfalls. But for those who are TLDR: I give it about a 3/5 stars.

First, let me just put emphasis on my primary complaint. The fact that you are able to die while you are offline is just completely ridiculous. I'm talking online here, not local, and it completely drives me insane when I spend hours of time playing the game, building a little hut, gathering resources, and then log back on later to find that it was all a waste of time since some high-level troll decided to go around and kill a bunch of low-level players. Seriously, that is REALLY annoying, especially when you just start the game. I can understand having it so other people could destroy your stuff and steal your dinosaurs and such while you're away, but killing you and completely removing your inventory, and if you're not lucky enough to be at a level where you can build a bed to just easily respawn at, completely get lost and lose your place? Heck no, that's just cruel. This is the one thing that made me want to quit this game SEVERAL times, had it not been for other redeeming qualities. The trouble for Wild Card is that there are people out there unlike me, who don't see those redeeming qualities, and therefore have joined what I would only guess as hundreds of players who stop playing the game due to this totally unfair mechanic. Seriously, this needs to be removed.

On a bright note, it has amazing graphics. If you're lucky enough to be able to run this game at high quality settings and still be able to pull out a smooth fps, then do it. It's bloody gorgeous. Hopefully, after players are done cussing and screaming at their screens when they die, they can stop and appreciate this game's glorious graphics.

That being said, those graphics do absolutely nothing for you when you spawn after dying (again) into total pitch-black darkness. Yeah, sometimes you spawn in the middle of the night time, and it's almost impossible to get started until morning, that is, if you can somehow prevent yourself from being eaten or starving until morning. This mechanic also needs to be improved in some way, although I'm not sure how. Maybe have players spawn at or near one of those enormous glowing obelisks if it's night time. I appreciate the realism in basically starting players with nothing, but in total darkness it's a bit ridiculous.

Another thing that bothers me about this game are some of the temperature mechanics. Sometimes they don't seem to work right, which could be a bug issue, but sometimes it just seems a little unreasonable as to how you can regulate your temperature. For example, sometimes the only way to cool off is to jump in a lake full of phiranas. That makes sense. There should be some development in the way a giant forest canopy blocks out the blazing sun, and thus reducing the heat. What I don't get is how I can go from overheating in an open field and walk into a rain forest and still be overheating. And then you get the added joy of dying and losing all your stuff again, and randomly placing yourself around the map if you don't have a bed.

My final gripe is controller-optimization. You can play with a controller pretty well in this game, but there are some things, like scrolling through inventory menus, clicking on buttons, etc. that could easily be adapted to have better controller support. Let me just point out that awkwardly using a thumbstick to shuffle around a mouse pointer in a desperate attempt to eat some berries so you don't die is probably the most challenging part of this game. And really, it shouldn't be that challenging. Seriously, put in some D-pad support for the menus.

Now, I'm reviewing this during it's Early Access, on 10/6/15, so there are some bugs still present, and I totally accept that it's only a reality of playing an Early Access game. But at the same time, there are some fundamental mechanic issues in this game I just can't get past. Since it's early access, I'm recommending this game, but if these critical issues don't get addressed by the time it's finished, I can't honestly say that I would recommend this game.