It's a sandbox game that's positively bursting with opportunities: you can explore, build, farm, craft, fish, trade, live high among the forest branches or deep beneath the waves you can kill bosses, raise baby dinosaurs, or wage wars to assert your domination - and all while playing with other humans on massively populated servers across the world.Īrk's breadth is spectacular, and it's easy to lose hours to its tight loops of resource gathering and expansion. Take a look at Ark's feature list and it really does seem like no stone has been left unturned: there are more than 100 water, land, and air creatures - from the humble dodo to the mighty giganotosaurus - nearly all tameable, and nearly all have distinct utilities for gathering and fighting. Ark's narrative through-line - in which you wake on a secluded beach, scrape together a soggy thatch hut, then slowly, doggedly establish a presence through weeks of toil until you're finally atop some fearsome beast, surveying your vast domain - can make for an incredible journey. Unfortunately, it also unflatteringly highlighted the game's rather graceless ground-based play.Īrk isn't just a prehistoric showcase though its real strength is that it gives you the irresistible opportunity to live among its beasts, forging an existence through hard, but satisfying graft: gathering food, collecting resources, building a home, domesticating animals, and gradually asserting your dominance over nature and - in the brutal, relentless battles of PvP - other tribes. Ark's controversial flier nerf, which saw massive reductions in the speed and stamina of airborne creatures, was meant to bring players back to earth. It's a game of pure adventure, of unspoilt lands and long-dead civilisations, of fearless explorers and ancient mysteries, of mighty beasts, impenetrable jungles, sun-dappled forests, steaming volcanoes, crumbling ruins, terrifying oceans, frozen wastelands, and endless sand dunes it's a game where triceratops and stegosauruses graze lazily in verdant pastures, where brontosauruses tower majestically beneath brilliant blue skies, where drooling, screeching carnivores can come crashing through the trees at any moment. And Ark taps right into a thick vein of nostalgia, letting you live out those childhood fantasies in a world where dinosaurs still roam. Eventually, that paleontological fascination subsided, but somewhere in my heart, my love for those beautiful beasts of a bygone era lingered on. Like many, I was obsessed with dinosaurs back in my early years: I'd spend hours with my head in books of bones, memorising complicated names, and gawking at the pictures of sharp-teethed behemoths and big friendly giants. Platform & availability: Out now on PC, PS4 and Xbox OneĪ huge part of Ark's appeal, I think, is pure wish fulfilment.

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