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__Hello People! This is a review of "Ark Survival Evolved" for the PS4. The game is also available on the Xbox One and Steam. Ark Survival Evolved is an Action-adventure survival game developed by Studio wildcard. The game sees you dropped into a prehistoric Island full of Dinosaurs and other creatures. The aim of the game is to escape the arc, to do this you have to find all the artifacts obtain rare animal trophies and defeat a variety of bosses. The game can be played online in PvP or PvE servers. You can also play in a private match with your friends or just play offline solo or via a split-screen mode. The game has two main modes Survival Evolved and Primitive plus the main difference being survival evolved has more sci-fi related items whereas primitive plus is restricted to more basic tools and weaponry.__
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__The main map is the Island but you have several other free Maps such as the center Ragnarok and Valguero you can also create your own procedural arc through the menu system but it doesn't really work that well in your own private match you can alter the settings so if you want a more relaxed experience with more resources you can do that. There is also a creative mode which when it's enabled you can basically import any item that you please So what is the game like to play?__
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__Well things start out with the character creator and it's pretty limited so don't get too excited you can't really create anything that unique you can alter the gender skin tone and hair color you can also edit the physical options like height and size of your limbs but most of the characters you create will end up looking pretty similar but further down the line you can dye your clothing and items so that's really where the customization options kick in once you're done creating you spawn on a beach and are free to explore to your heart's content, in the beginning, you'll be collecting rocks gathering berries and punching trees to gather wood you also need to eat and drink in order to stay alive as you level up you'll learn blueprints to craft primitive tools that will help you gather resources more quickly and you need resources to build your first home to store items in and shelter against dangerous predators or other players.__

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__One thing that Ark does really well it creates a real sense of danger and the island is a huge and terrifying proposition to explore fully it will seem at a start like deadly creatures are everywhere and they are everywhere, TRUST ME, sharks will eat you alive in the ocean Raptors will jump out the dense jungle and if you get caught in the swamp giant snakes leeches or crocodiles are a constant threat it's quite a stressful game to explore when you're on your own but if you team up with friends or you join a tribe in the online mode then things become a lot less traumatic but it's not just other players who can help you out its the dinos almost all of the wildlife on the island can be tamed and used for mounts attack animals but some of them also have specialist resource gathering abilities to help alleviate the grind but taming dinos is not as easy as you think the most part you have to sedate the animal or knock you out then feed it the food of choice.__
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 __However taming can take quite a while so you'll have to guard the body otherwise other predators may come along and eat it but once you've tamed the creature you can give it a name and tell it what to do and over time it will level up. It really is a game-changing moment once you get a raptor or even a better a t-rex it makes exploration easier and it really opens up the map the island is broken down into different biomes from the beach areas dense forests swamps and frozen mountains there is a day/night cycle and the nights are very dark so if you go out bring a torch or you literally won't get to see anything there's a vast ocean to explore but it's the caves where you'll find the most sought-after artifacts you require to leave the island personally I felt the caves were far too difficult and the enemies in them were so overpowered it just became a massive chore as when you die you drop your gear and die enough in occasional and you just have to abandon all of that loot that you've accumulated and that can be very very frustrating another key part of Ark is building and it's a fairly user-friendly system you start out with basic structures using your fetch but as you progress you can use wood stone metal and even glass.__

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__you can grow crops you can create irrigation and even install an electrical grid to power your base so as I said earlier you can play offline or online for me I enjoyed online in the PvP maps but after a while some of the tribes become a little bit too powerful and it does ruin the experience PvE online is a more collaborative type of game but even then you still get the odd bit of trolling .for me the most enjoyable experience I had with ARC was playing in private servers with my friends and exploring the island together building together and just having that adventure without all the regular online drama you get with PvP the local split-screen mode is a nice inclusion but it is poorly optimized and the font choices are terrible they aren't scaled at all and it's impossible to read anything even if you have an enormous television there's also some DLCs you can get there is a new one called "Genesis" which I haven't played so I can't comment on that but if you get the first season pass you get new maps like scorched earth, aberration, and extinction. All three of those maps are interesting and worth a look personally, I thought scorched earth was the best of the three the other two they're more for advanced players but still, all of them are worth a look.__ 
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__Graphically the game does look nice most of the time but there are a lot of technical issues there was quite a lot of slowdown and pop up when exploring new parts of the island also the menus are not well optimized and the decision to have a blue on blue menu makes the writing very difficult to read the fonts are very small and there wasn't any way you could alter that so that seemed like a bit of anoversight also the human characters do look a little bit rubbish but the island and the dinos do look nice in terms of sound the ambiance is really really good and it really helps you immerse into the different biomes.__

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__The music although it's fleeting it fades in and out from time to time but it is pretty good and kind of sticks in your brain when you hear a piece of music you know the sun's coming up or going down okay, What's good and what's bad? what's good the game has an addictive game loop and a satisfying progression system being able to tame dinos and eventually craft sci-fi weapons is great fun the game is really enjoyable when played with friends the varied maps out of replay value the building system is well implemented and it's a very dangerous and challenging game what's bad the grind can get a bit much at times the PvP online mode ends up getting tedious when tribes become over powered building system is great but when playing online you just end up building dinosaur warehouses to stop people's killing them or stealing your stuff and the menus are absolutely terribly designed and had the smallest worst possible color combination for text you could imagine.__
__So what's the verdict? Ark Survival Evolved is an in-depth and challenging survival game but saying that it's not really a survival game once you get past the first few hours after that it's very unlikely you're gonna die of starvation or thirst it's more of an exploration adventure game with a good building system varied animals and dinosaurs and a taming system that makes the whole adventure much more enjoyable it's got a wide variety of maps to explore and plenty of DLC. If you're left wanting more but like most survival games Ark does have a ceiling of enjoyment once you've explored all the maps, seen all the dinos and died about 500 times you might get a little bit bored of it but if you want an open-ended adventure game to play solo or with your friends then Ark is a whole lot of fun. Now if you like this review please Upvote and comment as suggestions are appreciated__
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<center> ***Points 8.7*** 

***The above screenshots are the property of [Gamepedia](https://ark.gamepedia.com/Screenshots)***
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