The stony-faced refusal of the game to ever explain itself to you. Then there’s the strangely ad hoc feeling of it all: the cack-handed might-be-a-story that feels like it’s been slid in backwards. ![]() Add in the performance issues, pop-ins, framerate that fluctuates like the pulse rate of a critically ill loved one, and you’re building quite the stack. Don't miss my new video series, "Statham Factory"Īnd that’s just one of the many awful things about ARK - the fiddly crafting system, the incredibly repetitive resource collection, the unintuitive UI, the sheer grind involved in making any progress - that are deliberate features. You can’t make anything that doesn’t look like you’ve made it as grotesque as possible for a laugh, and no matter what body parts you distort, every single creation ends up with the lumpen, self-hating energy of a living fist. Because goodness me, ARK’s character creation settings are awful. Only now, the dinosaurs were in a computer, and both me and my dad were now anvil-chinned, hump-backed nightmare men, scurrying aimlessly around on hideous popeye legs and grunting. ![]() It was, in a way, the quintessential exploration game, with a side order of monsters - it was going on walks with dad when I was 5, and cajoling him into running away from imaginary dinosaurs with me. It really was a Survival game with a capital S, where the most basic existence was a struggle, and the greatest joy was in attempting treks through a vast and constantly surprising landscape, wondering how far you’d get before something pants-shittingly big burst roaring from a nearby treeline and guzzled you like a tin of meat-flavoured lager. I played it regularly for a couple of months with a friend, and while we were never much good at it - we barely managed to tame anything, and our base-building efforts amounted to a sort of pathetic shed that something ate me through the ceiling of - we found it genuinely enchanting. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. After hyping Genesis to high heaven, they’ve released an expansion that manages to negate everything that conceivably made it possible to call ARK a flawed masterpiece, while retaining every iota of the game-busting jank that made it feel like a shoddy, never-ending beta test. I'd be reasonable, even, if it seemed they had attempted something beautiful and ambitious here and fallen short. ![]() I wouldn’t be half so childish if the developers hadn't already made a fortune from pre-orders, or if Genesis wasn't so bloatedly overpriced. No, ARK: Genesis is a proper, merciless, nine-tins-of-beans ripper, unleashed in a crowded lift on a wet Monday morning. Not an abrupt, spluttering guff, nor an undulating trouser howl that reduces its culprit to ever more contorted grimaces of shame as it continues. And that’s fitting, because that’s exactly what its latest DLC, Genesis, is like: a fart. It’s a little-known fact that the “ARK” in “ ARK: Survival Evolved” is in fact short for “arsebark”. Developer: Studio Wildcard, Instinct Games, Efecto Studios, Virtual Basement
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