Although more than two years have passed since the initial release of ARK: Survival Evolved, sitting down to write the review of the title of Studio Wildcard is far more difficult than one might expect. We are not just talking about one of the most important survival experiments in recent years, but also the first exponent of the genre to leave (albeit a year late) from its version in Early Access and embrace a launch on the shelves, on three consoles and with lots of of Collector’s Edition .
Understand well how to judge ARK, mean to judge years of work on a business model that has established itself on the market, with the disdain of a large slice of players and insiders.What can be said with ease is that today it is an extremely enjoyable and “complete” game in its sandbox nature. On the contrary, not everything is as it
should from the technical point of view and optimization, with all due respect to what on paper should be the foundation of a title to its final exit. It could be argued that, at the current state of the market, there are also very few well-optimized games, but ARK: Survival Evolved is the representative of a movement, and as such it should present itself at its best. It’s time for judgments, so let’s start!
THE ARK OF NO ONE KNOWS WHO
Point 0. You wake up on an island inhabited by creatures that come from a long time ago, too far to be part of it. On the wrist an object, like a graft, that remembers in a disturbing way those large columns that you see scattered across the entire land before your eyes.
Where am I? What is my purpose now? When you decide to embark on the fray of modern survival titles, you do not even face the problem of what you are going to experience from the narrative point of view.
ARK: Survival Evolved has always reversed this trend, only to leave everyone breathless about the nature of the “arche” themselves.Over the months, more and more content, documents scattered in the depths of the map and details from some dungeons, have hinted that Studio Wildcard would have answered this question and, as absurd as it may seem, it has done well.
The “mission” (if we want to call it that), finally reaches its goal and we have an answer, left to the interpretation but equally clear, of what has happened to our world. We are not going to ruin the only truly narrative element that the title has to offer, but know that, in spite of everything you might have believed, ARK will be able to give you even a cinematic, albeit very short.Yours will be a long mission,
which will take hundreds of hours (if played on official non-speeded servers) and will go through the search for a long series of artifacts and bosses to be defeated; until your final goal.
With the addition of a real end game, consisting of a last dazzling dungeon, and a rather scenic final battle, we can all have our answer, one of which, linked to the supply crates that fall from the sky, very nice and choreography.
THE PICK AND ACCEPT
For those who still do not know the basics of a survival, go here for a summary of the various iterations currently on the market and here for the basic advice related to the same ARK: Survival Evolved. For all the others already tested or lazy, we can reduce the survival to the concept of “serial accumulation”. After creating your character and choosing the map you want to play on, you find yourself naked in the middle of a rather hostile world.Your goal will be to accumulate as
soon as possible a number of resources that can create standard tools, to be used both for the search for additional material, and for hunting. What makes this environment unpredictable and anxious are the indicators of your vital state.
The first hours of the game will be dedicated, inevitably, to the stabilization of your physical situation, ending only and exclusively when you will be able to launch yourself on some expedition without the almost total certainty of remaining dry. This is where ARK opens up and becomes everything for which it has met with incredible success during the two years of its early access cycle.
