Ark: Survival Evolved Review (WrothRaven)
I don't have so many hours on steam but between Xbox and PC I have thousands of hours total.
Please understand: you will can have a lot of fun playing this game. It is so rewarding in all of the best ways that are missing from so many games. This game is the pinnacle of survival craft.
But it will destroy you.
The devs do not and have never cared to fix the problems with this game and will almost certainly not change their ways for Survival Ascended. The PvP loop turns itself into a second job that consumes your life. There is no balance and no guardrails.
If you play single player, you very quickly lose the core experience of the game. If you play PvE, the servers bloat to the point you can barely turn your camera without setting your PC on fire.
If you play PvP..... God help you. Large tribes is a non-starter. Imagine the map is a dry erase board and tribe BobsTheRebuilders is a pressure washer. Every hour you spent gathering resources and taming is just...gone. Nothing you can do about it. There is nowhere to hide. There is nowhere to run. It's apocalypse rules: join the evil warlord 14 year old self proclaimed king of the server or consign your efforts to the toilet.
There is a meta: you cannot access it until level 100. Plain and simple. If your tribe doesn't have a lvl 100 there is simply no point in even pretending like you can maintain a foothold.
And yet... The constant anxiety and danger, the shaping of this game and this world lends itself to a real, not role-played, apocalypse survival scenario that is a high unlike any other. Trying to keep yourself hidden from the big fish until you're ready to launch yourself into the light is a wild experience. The loss after logging in, seeing red text and a spawn map and knowing that all you've built is gone. The desire for vengeance that fuels you to do it all again, but better.
It's addictive. It's bliss. It's pain. It's unhealthy. My friends have quite seriously told me I'm not allowed to play this game anymore and I agree. I sneak in some single player every now and again to sate the urge, but I know I can't ever let myself give in and rejoin PvP. I should honestly delete it from my PC and remove it from my library.
I imagine this is what heroin is like...