Recent reviews by Trichno

If you're looking for a very simple "Will I like playing this game?" review, the answer is HELL YES. If you're here for a longer, more in depth review, then let me tell you why I think this game is possibly the best persistant survival world created to date.

To begin this review I'd like to say that when I bought this game I bought it soley because a friend of mine had it and I was bored of most other games on my PC so I decided to pick it up while it was on sale. I was skeptical because as most people in the gaming community know, early access games have burned thousands if not millions of players in the past. some of them going completely pay-to-win and others being overun by griefers and/or hackers.

I was ASTOUNDED by the amount of work the devs have been absolutely pooring into this game. I've been playing for about a week and already have 90 or so hours looged, as you'll be able to see on the header of this thing. I have encountered no hackers and very little griefing (albiet I've heard that's mainly because I play on a well-managed unofficial server rather than an overpopulated official one).

There are some things you may have heard about this game which are concerning and I don't by any means think it's a game for everyone for a few reasons.

1) There are hackers everywhere!

No there aren't. It may seem that way if you've had a couple run-ins with hackers throughout your gameplay experience, but the devs patch any and all exploits as fast as possible and even have a $100 bounty on exploits, literally paying for specific information leading to the discovery of hacks so that they can kill them off as quickly as possible.

2) It's a persistant world. When you log out and come back the next day, your house has been plundered, your dinos are dead and you have to start all over!

This is partially true, but it depends completely on the server you choose to play on. I can't stress this enough. When choosing a server (and keep in mind there are PVE only servers) Make sure to choose one that will not make you hate the game so much because a select few people playing it are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Also, due to the leveling system, even if every scrap of your awesome house and all your dinos are gone, you still retain some kind of progress and can quickly regain what you've lost.

3) The bugs in this game make it unplayable

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Yes there are some bugs, but to be fair, this is an early access game slated to come out about this time next year. You will see a freshly killed dino float into the sky, never to be seen again every now and again. There will be server crashes, pathing bugs on dinos, accidental over-nerfs or over-buffs of certain aspects of the game and more, but all of these things are fixed A.S.A.P and thanks to one of the most amazing early-access game developer teams I've ever seen, it's pretty damn fast.

4) if you don't have the most amazing computer in the whole wide world you'll never be able to play this game!

Yeah, there's some optimization issues and as beautiful as this game is, you really can't appreciate its full graphical potential without a pretty good rig, but in the last few days alone there have been optimization patches for up to 30% increase in performance and with my semi-mediocre computer I can run the game on medium settings pretty well when I was struggling on all low before the patch. If you've got some dinky netbook or a dinosaur of a desktop, or perhaps just not a very good one in general, I'd wait until you hear more further optimization patches to pick up this game.

Overall and to conclude this review, Ark: Survival Evolved is an immersive, massive, wonderfully beautiful experience and if you're on the fence about getting it DO IT!!!