Review for ARK: Survival Evolved. Game for Android, PC, iOS, Steam, Mac, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Linux and Nintendo Switch, the video game was released on 29/08/2017 The version for Nintendo Switch came out on 20/11/2018
After about two years of Early Access, Studio Wildcard is finally ready to release the final version of Ark: Survival Evolved which seems to promise lots of new content and hours of gameplay.
We finally got our hands on what the developers had in mind from the beginning, both from a graphical and gameplay point of view, which seems to promise a lot of fun in company or alone.
Survive at any cost
As soon as you start the game you will have to create your character, which thanks to an ad hoc system, will allow you to create your survivor, whether it be a man or a woman. Once your character is created, it he will wake up completely naked on an island full of vegetation and dinosaurs, an environment that will test your survival skills.
What you have to do in the first few minutes of the game is limited to having to look for the primary resources that will allow you to survive in a hostile environment like this, even starting to build the first work tools, such as the pick and ax. You will have to collect berries to eat, wood, flint, fibers and stones, which will allow you to build the first items necessary for your survival. You will also have to try to hunt some nearby animals to collect some meat, essential for your survival.
The game environment seemed very hostile to us, in fact the danger lurks at every corner, constantly putting us on alert. During the first hours of the game, you will have to be careful of any dinosaur, as it could easily attack you, or steal items important for your survival.
Everything you do in Ark will give you experience points, which you can accumulate for level up, earning skill points and unlock points each time. Skill points will be useful for increasing your character's stats: life points, stamina, stamina without food, stamina without water, damage and so on. The unlock points will instead be spent to get new engrams, such as walls, doors, weapons and so on.
Build your shelter
After several hours of play, you will surely have reached a level sufficient to be able to build your first straw shelter, essential to survive during the night and to deposit the most important materials. By unlocking the necessary engrams, you can in fact build your first refuge, including foundations, walls and of course the various doors.
It will definitely not be the best at the beginning, but it will be enough for protect you from the cold and the creatures on the island. Continuing with the game you will be able to collect more valuable materials, and access more dangerous areas, which will allow you to unlock new engrams for weapons and armor, with which you will be able to face various enemies that you will encounter on your way.
Once you have acquired the necessary skills, you will find it quite simple to build your fortresses, which will be able to protect you, but also to welcome your fellow dinosaurs, which you will tame during your adventure in Ark: Survival Evolved.
Tame the dinosaurs!
An interesting aspect of Ark is certainly the possibility of taming dinosaurs, so that you can use them for travel, or to defend yourself from enemies. Taming a beast is not too complicated a task, if we are talking about a small and not too dangerous animal, while if we are talking about a Tyrannosaurus things are already starting to be a little more complex.
First you will need to find some meat or berries (depending on the type of dinosaur), which will be essential for taming the beast. Once you have collected the necessary, you will need to get some narco-berries, which will make the dinosaur fall asleep, making things easier: we just need to find for example a dilophosaurus, make it faint with ranged attacks and finally give it some narco-berries and meat.
Once the "Tame" bar is filled, the dinosaur will become your friend, you can choose a name, and you can take care of him by feeding him. It can be used to carry objects, but also to defend yourself, making it very useful in dangerous situations. It will also be possible to gradually increase your friend's level thanks to the experience points you will accumulate, then choosing which statistics to increase.
Graphically satisfying
In addition to the interesting gameplay components, we also want to talk about the work done from a technical point of view, which in some ways impressed us, but also partly disappointed us. The PC version, tested with a GTX 1080, is exceptional, thanks to almost realistic textures, all at the expense of the frame rate, in fact playing at a resolution of 1440p we found a fluidity that was around 45 frames per second.
Those who have already played Ark in early access will surely know what we are talking about, in fact the developers have limited themselves to putting many heavy textures and many objects, which almost completely saturate the memories of the latest generation Pascal cards. Optimization is certainly an aspect to consider in a game like this, since the average user is not willing to spend disproportionate amounts on hardware components, playing at medium / low details, and therefore not doing justice to what it is. the game has to offer.
We would have expected better optimization before the game launches, which partly happened, but which obviously is not enough. We believe that from this point of view the developers could have done more, but we are also aware of the limited resources of the team, especially given the production of the game in Playstation 4 and Xbox One versions.
Ark Survival Evolved is certainly a complex project, grown together with the community, and which consequently has become a product of excellent quality from almost all points of view. The survival components are many and well structured such as the possibility of building your own shelter, hunting and taming dinosaurs, getting food, wood and stones from practically any source on the map, making everything very realistic and pleasant. From a technical point of view, big steps forward have been made on the PC version, which provided you have a high-end configuration: the title manages to give a screaming atmosphere. However, the optimization still seems to be an unknown factor for the Wildcard guys, in fact the game struggles to run even on a 1080 Ti, managing to maintain 60 frames per second (with epic details) only in a 1440p resolution, while with a 1080 will be able to play the same frames in 1080p resolution. We do not hide that the amount of objects on the screen is enormous, partly justifying the memory abuse by the game engine, but we would have expected an improvement on this front. Ark is still an excellent game, which has also managed to land on consoles, allowing everyone to try this incredible survival experience.
► ARK: Survival Evolved is a Survival type game developed and published by Studio Wildcard for Android, PC, iOS, Steam, Mac, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Linux and Nintendo Switch, the video game was released on 29/08/2017 The version for Nintendo Switch came out on 20/11/2018
