Bonfire Notes #002 - ARK: Survival Evolved

 𝗚𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗱, 𝗚𝗮𝘀𝘀𝘆, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗚𝗿𝘂𝗺𝗽𝘆: 𝗔 𝗟𝗼𝘃𝗲-𝗛𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄 𝗼𝗳 𝗔𝗥𝗞 

Today I want to review the world of ARK: Survival Evolved and since I’m trying to get away from the common reviewing culture, I decided to give it a score between ‘ultimate gourmet masterpiece’ to ‘something barely edible’

I confess that I never got interested in this game when looking at it through Steam, and the amount of times I heard about it being very buggy was enough to make me stay away from it… But it turns out that my partner got really into this game and since we’ve been playing a lot of co-op games together, I offered for us to live this experience together.

At first, opening the game was followed by laughs from both of us, as we opened it almost at the same time and the loudest music ever started playing. After sliding the ‘music level’ bar all the way down, we connected to our world and started playing.

Character creation was full of options on how to make your character look horrifying, which I successfully achieved in mine. The game is an open-world survival type game. You can play it in first-person or third-person. As you level up your character, you can choose to have better stats and you get points to unlock different engrams for buildings, tools and other stuff that improve your well-being.

 So, basically, the first impression was like, “Ohh… we are half-naked… on a beach… OH LOOK IT’S A TRICERATOPS!” followed by a loud fart sound. 

Our character pooped. 

Yes. 

There is a pooping system.

We agreed that I would be the builder of our team, while my partner would unlock things related to fighting and taming. The dinos that are around can be tamed and each have a different skill or characteristic that will also improve your well-being, help you gather resources faster, walk faster, fight better, carry a lot of weight and eventually fly around the map.

 𝟮𝟱𝟬 𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀 𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿...

What I thought could be a divine double-burger hamburger with everything that makes one extra tasty, turned out to be just a barely tasty hamburger that makes you feel disappointed after eating it because you were just too hungry… Nothing special.

And I felt this way for a few reasons:

• The game is not optimized at all. Graphics are glitchy, U.I is the opposite of easy and intuitive, the amount of times we had to restart the game because of bugs was frustrating and oh-my-god the building system is annoying as hell. Nothing fits properly. If it finally fits where you want, you click to add the piece and it goes to the wrong place anyway.

• 95% of the game stuff had to be researched on google. There is no care for explaining anything. And I mean, A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G. I understand the survival part of it, but it’s clearly not a hard-core type of game. It’s just a game that doesn't care about the player.

• The game is to be played with at least 5+ to be bearable. We used a lot of cheats to improve our well-being, considering that to craft stuff, eventually we would have to spend hours in the repetitive process of getting resources. Even with the best resource-gathering dinos tamed, it was still a very slow process. And guess what? Equipment has a very short life. The constant breaking of everything has taken much of the fun out.

I enjoyed the experience though, but mostly because we were playing together in our own world, full of mods to counter the bad decisions the developers made and cheating a lot, rather than because the game offered us a plate full of fun to be had.

The importance of testing, solving bugs and taking care of the basic structure of the game, before thinking about new content is essential for a game. Unfortunately it did not happen in ARK: Survival Evolved.

That was our messy adventure through ARK, held together by duct tape, mods, and a looot of teamwork. 

Now I’d love to hear from you:

What game served you the gaming equivalent of a soggy sandwich?

Drop your stories in the comments!