You know the drill. Spawn on an island, naked as the day you were born. Run around lost, confused, and wondering why you appear to be starving and dying of thirst at an astounding rate, as if some cruel overseer has bestowed upon you an unbelievably fast and laughably inefficient metabolism. Punch some trees. Make some tools. Then, you die. Probably. Several times.
The difference here? Dineh-sours.
THIS guy knows.
In addition to the dinosaurs that differentiate it from other entries in the survival genre, Ark: Survival Evolved runs Unreal Engine 4, and it’s durned pretty, though you’ll need some thoroughbred specs to have both the pretty and the palatable framerate at the same time in its current pre-release state. On my modest ROG laptop with a GTX 950M, high settings gave me single digit FPS and a nausea-inducing blur effect. After tweaking it down to medium, it consistently ran between 20-30 with room to improve as development and optimization continues.
But forget that technical crap. Let’s talk about dinosaurs. Welp, they’re there. And some of them hate you from top to balls.  And beyond running from them, after just an hour or two with the game, I’ve done precious little with them as my goal is always to hole up and survive before branching out. Some dilophosaurs have straight up Nedry’ed me (aka Newman’ing), and I’ve speared a few to death in self-defense, but past that I’ve been more focused on keeping my distance from anything carnivorous or big or both. Taming and riding will hopefully come with my next sit-down.
Spielberg-branded Dilophosaurus. I now hate these guys.
My first concern was that my character was apparently born with a tapeworm, as he’s forced to eat constantly. He’s also a whiny little turd, as he’s constantly too hot or too cold in the middle of random parts of the day or night. None of this is terribly surprising or new, for though I wouldn’t call myself a veteran to the genre, I’ve played several more or less popular survival games before. However in Ark, hunger and thermal comfort are near-constant issues, and my sensitive single-player self would like to be bothered a little less frequently. If I go to the trouble to kill an animal for meat, make a campfire, cook the meat, and eat it, I expect my stomach to be a little more full than the roughly 10% I’m currently getting. Thank the good dinolord for the fact that you can constantly pick berries anywhere bushes are found by spamming your use key, which can in turn be used to simply maintain your hunger level.
Speaking of stomach issues, your character poops… constantly… anywhere… indiscriminately. Just be prepared for a wipe-free existence. No word yet on whether you’ll be able to craft your own tube of Prep-H in later builds.
3 out of 4 meth kingpins approve.
Anyhow, I died about three times before I felt confident I could keep from murdering myself. Once I stopped allowing myself to die as a result of my own negligence, I focused on finding a spot where I could get food and water easily while slowly leveling and building up my crafting in order to… well… craft more. I found a spot surrounded by trees and bushes for materials and berries, and a short tumble down a rocky hill to water and stones, which I could recover and then run screaming past the predators on the beach back up into the hills where my campfire awaited. Eventually I made myself a modest thatch hut, which I hope to find my character sleeping in when I return to the game. During construction, those darn spitting ‘Dilos’ blinded me and pushed me off a cliff, but hey, nature finds a way, right? Now, whenever I hear their familiar squeal/hooping sounds, I can run in and shut my straw door and hope the reptilian big bad wolves just go away.  Mission accomplished.
All it needs are all the comforts of home…
