Ark: Survival Evolved Xbox One Impressions

Ark has become quite a large game on Steam and I honestly never thought it would come to consoles, purely from a technical standpoint. Yet here we are with Xbox Game Preview getting a first glimpse of this dino survival game on the console space. I have had some experience with the title previously when I wrote a piece on it though that was during the earlier days on PC when optimization was rough and there weren't nearly as many features as there's now. This roughly translates over to the console as well with rampant screen tearing and it doesn't look close to what I'm graphically used to on PC. I'd never expect it get to that level as you can imagine and the game actually does look better than what I viewed at E3 this past year when I got an early look at the title. It does however feel more stable than what I'm used to on PC and if they can clean up some certain aspects we'll have a very solid looking game.





After getting that out of the way I must say that I'm shocked the developers were able to bring over the game in its entirety. Nothing is removed from the experience and it's very well put together. The environments feel realistic to their primal style and even have some weather variants. Another great aspect to the Ark dev team is that they consistently put in new content and are always working to improve the title so I'm eagerly looking forward to the final release along with their post launch support. If you've never heard about Ark before the game is a survival title which are all the rage of recent years and they throw massive creatures into the mix. These are mostly dinosaurs, but occasionally they add some other fun creatures like Dodos. The game focuses on survival above all else and you'll spend much of your time micromanaging this. Food spoils over time no matter what the source so you're constantly thinking about that while also trying to get ahead. Many will find this difficult and even I occasionally get frustrated with it as I just want to get to taming or house building. If you need to see gameplay of this, check out the video below or take a look at the lovely screenshot above. That was my favorite moment so far on Xbox One, these two T-Rex come out of nowhere and start fighting the Broncos and I was just a tiny savage running between to collect meat from the victims.

Ark works well in the console space and on Xbox One they've definitely got the control scheme down well. It's easier than I anticipated to move around the menus, craft and quick select weapons. I would however like some more hotkey things as it was a drag literally to take items out of inventories. Whenever I need to get my supplies from a hot zone surrounded by dinos that killed me it was rough. They also need to sort out their servers as it has been impossible to join a match on the regular ones and also hard to connect with unofficial. More servers are obviously needed as soon as possible though you can play solo or on your own private server if you'd like. So far I'm really impressed with the ported version so far and look forward to playing and seeing how the final launch version will end up performing.

Ark: Survival Evolved Xbox Playlist

Impressions Made on Ark: Survival Evolved on Xbox Game Preview