‘ARK: Survival Evolved’ Is About Making Dinosaurs Your Pony

Fun fact, I love dinosaurs. I have always been fascinated by them for as long as I can remember. And while good dinosaur games are very rare, one game I had a very brief time playing this summer really stood out to me and I was surprised I didn’t hear about it sooner. Ark: Survival Evolved had me hooked from the first half hour I played of it.

Luckily those of you who also love dinosaurs, have an Xbox One and don’t mind playing an unfinished game can get early access by using the console’s Game Preview system, for a mere $34.99 starting Dec. 16.

This action adventure survival game developed by Studio Wildcard is one amazingly crafted game. I like the setup I was shown. Basically you have to survive in this prehistoric world that is a mashup of just about every epoch prior to the rise of humans, but allows you access to weapons that covers all of human history.

This game has a lot of mechanics to make a good survival game. Building fires to keep warm when you’re cold, eating when you’re hungry, drinking water so you don’t dehydrate, and even though it’s silly enough, pooping.

While I think some of the characters I ran into were pretty silly the character creator allows you to create some silly looking characters but is in-depth enough to keep you there for hours fixing every little detail. There is also a crafting system. You can make your own clothes, weapons, and supplies. Using tools you can harvest plants, trees, rocks, and even the local wildlife, which can include fish, herbivores, giant bugs, giant alligators, sabretooth tigers, and even giant dinosaurs.

The dinosaurs come in all shape and sizes, whether you fight a raptor, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, or even if you think you’re tough enough take on a T-Rex. But not only can you fight these dinosaurs, you can even tame them. There is one thing I’ve always wanted to do in a videogame — ride a dinosaur into battle. And Ark allows this. Riding a Tyrannosaurus has to be one of my favorite moments in gaming this year. And it’s not just limited to Rexs. I was also able to ride a Spinosaurus which has the ability to swim, sabretooth tigers which are fast ways to get around, a Pterodactyl to fly around the free roam world, or possibly one of the other coolest things in this game — taming a Plesiosaur. That’s right I was able to ride one all throughout the ocean. And they’re fast enough to get you from one part of the depth to the other in a fast enough time you won’t drown.  

There is something satisfying about fighting dinosaurs using another dinosaur. You will never feel so badass in your gaming life. Just saying using a Brontosaurus to crush smaller dinosaurs has to be one of my new favorite things I did in this game. I want this game, I was hooked on it from my brief time to play. While the game has been available via Steam’s Early Access program for just the PC since June, I look forward to owning it when it fully releases in June 2016 for Xbox One, PS4, OS X, and Linux/SteamOS.

You get to ride and tame dinosaurs, need I say more?