ARK: Survival Evolved Critic Reviews

It'll delight you, it'll make you despair, but ultimately Ark will leave you with a real sense of satisfaction.

Ark’s ambition pulls it in the right direction with more force than its clunkiness tugs it the other way. It’s always more enjoyable to spend time with a game that tries something new and exciting, stumbling along the way, than a game that tries to tick focus group-inspired boxes. If that game also happens to simulate an entire prehistoric ecosystem, and produces bewildering emergent scenarios like clockwork, all the better.

Ark is near masterful in its ability to keep you caught up in a sense of discovery. There always seems to be more.

ARK: Survival Evolved should be the first triple A survival game, but It is not completely true.

When I’m having a good time in ARK, I’m having a really good time. The problem is that those moments are usually one part to every nine parts menial grinding and crafting - especially at the later tech tiers. Having to repeat so much work after failing an attempt at a boss feels far too punishing, and some really dumb dinosaurs can take a lot of the challenge and sense of danger out of the many primal locations. Even with all of those quirks, however, I’m still hungry to play more after the 60 hours I’ve spent so far.

ARK is a good survival game with a great setting. It's one of those titles where you can spend hours trying to survive, while building a house and taming a dinosaur, and even though it still feels a little bit like in early access, if you like the concept you'll probably enjoy it.

Pretty good. It's definitely not a clean product, free of bugs and performance problems, but it's definitely a complete and complex title, full of content and possibilities.

A bloated, grindy mess, but so packed with options that a better game is hidden inside it.

In its best moments, Ark is the dream game of every Dino fan. But bugs and the grind-based game-mechanics often spoil the fun.

After a long early acces Ark Surival Evolved became a gigantic game in terms of content. Hundreds of hours will be spend building bases, taming dinos en making new friends (or enemies). However fun it all seems, technical issues will impact your experiences.

ARK is an ambitious project that, at the moment, lacks in optimisation: bugs, glitches and crashes happen too often and affect the gamer experience. The potential is enormous, but the devs should concentrate their work to solve all the issues and to fix what is already done, instead to produce new contents. Beware: the PvP servers are full of awful people, that's why you should buy the game if you are oriented to a PvE experience only.

Alone or with friends (lots of friends, close friends, while barring out the rabble) ARK is a playful haven, a giant toybox with endless possibilities for both fun and boredom.

Like so many survival/crafting games, from Minecraft to Subnautica, ARK presupposes a player with a lot of time to dedicate to the experience, a high tolerance for repetition, and a fondness for chaos and the unexpected. With its sci-fi inflected single player campaign, ARK at least offers a solo player the chance to get the gist of the game without the threat of anti-social humans ruining whatever progress has been made. For the past two years, ARK has been helping to shape the genre and now that it's finished, it feels like the genre is due for the next stage of evolution.

Specialises in trick shots before mastering the fundamentals. Deeply flawed, but hard to ignore.

Ark Survival Evolved is a good survival game with awesome mechanics, but it's also a technical disaster (lag, freezes, connection issues...). Such a shame.

This outstanding sense of place and mood is offset by the sheer difficulty of everything that you have to do, the spectacular amounts of time necessary to experience even a tenth of what the game has to offer, and the randomness of death constantly destroying everything that you have built.

Ark: Survival Evolved is a good game that gets bogged down by an over-abundance of ancillary features, frustrating bugs, and a horrendous grind. It can be intimidating for new players and playing with friends online is more important than ever. But if you can get past the rough edges and dig into the prehistoric survival fun that makes Ark so special, there is an entirely unique game here that’s unlike anything else you’ll play.

Ark: Survival Evolved is a game full of rough edges. It's also a game full of some amazing moments over my total playtime. It's the kind of experience that has a lot of boredom and tedium, and a great deal of looking the other way in the face of bugs, but also some clear water cooler moments. There's something very cool buried in here, though I can't tell if that's because of some developer decisions or in spite of them.

This ambitious survival game emerges from Early Access fully featured but just as in danger of toppling in on itself as ever before.

While ARK can be a lot of fun – grabbing another player off of a raptor with an Argentavis feels bloody brilliant – it’s rarely worth the hours of tedium. If you can spare the 100 or so hours it takes to get your teeth into it then I’d recommend you spend them elsewhere.