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ARK: Survival Evolved

$14.99
Release Date:
Metacritic:
70
Platforms:
Windows Mac
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About This Game

ARK: Survival Ascended!



Respawn into a new dinosaur survival experience beyond your wildest dreams… as ARK is reimagined from the ground-up into the next-generation of videogame technology with Unreal Engine 5! You awake on a mysterious island, your senses overwhelmed by the blinding sunlight and brilliant colors bouncing off every surface around you, the azure waters of a verdant Island lapping at your bare feet. A deep roar echoes from the misty jungle, jolting you into action, and you stand up – not afraid, but intrigued. Are you ready to form a tribe, tame and breed hundreds of species of dinosaurs and other primeval creatures, explore, craft, build, and fight your way to the top of the food-chain? Your new world awaits… step through the looking-glass and join it!


ARK: Genesis Part Two!




Your quest for ultimate survival is now complete with the launch of ARK: Genesis Part 2! Survivors will conclude the ARK storyline while adventuring through exotic new worlds with all-new mission-based gameplay. Discover, utilize and master new creatures, new craftable items, weapons, and structures unlike anything you have seen yet! The saga is now complete, and hundreds of hours of new story-oriented ARK gameplay await you!

Purchased as part of the ARK: Genesis Season Pass you gain access to two new huge story-oriented expansion packs -- Genesis Part 1 and Genesis Part 2 (new!) -- as well as a 'Noglin' Chibi cosmetic, a ‘Shadowmane’ Chibi cosmetic, a new cosmetic armor set, and an in-game, artificially intelligent companion called ‘HLN-A’ who can scan additional hidden Explorer Notes found throughout the other ARKs.

Features the voiceover talent of David Tennant (Doctor Who, Good Omens) playing the villainous Sir Edmund Rockwell, and Madeleine Madden (The Wheel of Time, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Dora and the Lost City of Gold) as in-game robotic AI companion HLN-A/Helena Walker.


About the Game

As a man or woman stranded naked, freezing and starving on the shores of a mysterious island called ARK, you must hunt, harvest resources, craft items, grow crops, research technologies, and build shelters to withstand the elements. Use your cunning and resources to kill or tame & breed the leviathan dinosaurs and other primeval creatures roaming the land, and team up with or prey on hundreds of other players to survive, dominate... and escape!



Dinosaurs, Creatures, & Breeding! -- over 100+ creatures can be tamed using a challenging capture-&-affinity process, involving weakening a feral creature to knock it unconscious, and then nursing it back to health with appropriate food. Once tamed, you can issue commands to your tames, which it may follow depending on how well you’ve tamed and trained it. Tames, which can continue to level-up and consume food, can also carry Inventory and Equipment such as Armor, carry prey back to your settlement depending on their strength, and larger tames can be ridden and directly controlled! Fly a Pterodactyl over the snow-capped mountains, lift allies over enemy walls, race through the jungle with a pack of Raptors, tromp through an enemy base along a gigantic brontosaurus, or chase down prey on the back of a raging T-Rex! Take part in a dynamic ecosystem life-cycle with its own predator & prey hierarchies, where you are just one creature among many species struggling for dominance and survival. Tames can also be mated with the opposite gender, to selectively breed successive generations using a trait system based on recombinant genetic inheritance. This process includes both egg-based incubation and mammalian gestation lifecycles! Or put more simply, raise babies!



You must eat and drink to survive, with different kinds of plants & meat having different nutritional properties, including human meat. Ensuring a supply of fresh water to your home and inventory is a pressing concern. All physical actions come at a cost of food and water, long-distance travel is fraught with subsistence peril! Inventory weight makes you move slower, and the day/night cycle along with randomized weather patterns add another layer of challenge by altering the temperature of the environment, causing you to hunger or thirst more quickly. Build a fire or shelter, and craft a large variety of customizable clothing & armors, to help protect yourself against locational damage & extreme temperatures using the dynamic indoor/outdoor insulation calculation system!



By chopping down forests full of trees and mining metal and other precious resources, you can craft the parts to build massive multi-leveled structures composed of complex snap-linked parts, including ramps, beams, pillars, windows, doors, gates, remote gates, trapdoors, water pipes, faucets, generators, wires and all manner of electrical devices, and ladders among many other types. Structures have a load system to fall apart if enough support has been destroyed, so reinforcing your buildings is important. All structures and items can be painted to customize the look of your home, as well as placing dynamically per-pixel paintable signs, textual billboards, and other decorative objects. Shelter reduces the extremes of weather and provides security for yourself and your stash! Weapons, clothing & armor gear can also be painted to express your own visual style.



Pick seeds from the wild vegetation around you, plant them in plots that you lay down, water them and nurture them with fertilizer (everything poops after consuming calories, which can then be composted, and some fertilizer is better than others). Tend to your crops and they will grow to produce delicious and rare fruits, which can also be used to cook a plethora of logical recipes and make useful tonics! Explore to find the rarest of plant seeds that have the most powerful properties! Vegetarians & vegans can flourish, and it will be possible to master and conquer the ARK in a non-violent manner!



By bringing sufficient rare sacrificial items to special Summon locations, you can capture the attention of the one of the ARK’s god-like mythical creatures, who will arrive for battle. These gargantuan monstrosities provide an end-game goal for the most experienced groups of players and their armies of tames, and will yield extremely valuable progression items if they are defeated.



Create a Tribe and add your friends to it, and all your tames can be commanded by and allied to anyone in your Tribe. Your Tribe will also be able to respawn at any of your home spawn points. Promote members to Tribe Admins to reduce the burden of management. Distribute key items and pass-codes to provide access your shared village!



All items are crafted from Blueprints that have variable statistics and qualities, and require corresponding resources. More remote and harsh locales across the ARK tend to have better resources, including the tallest mountains, darkest caves, and depths of the ocean! Level-Up your player character by gaining experience through performance actions, Level-Up your tames, and learn new "Engrams" to be able to craft Items from memory without the use of blueprints, even if you die! Customize the underlying physical look of your character with hair, eye, and skin tones, along with an array of body proportion modifiers. As you explore the vast ARK, you'll find clues left by other Survivors who have made the ARK their home in ages past, in the form of collectible detailed 3D "Explorer Notes". By uncovering all of these, you can begin to piece together the true nature of the ARK, and discover its purpose!



Everything you craft has durability and will wear-out from extended use if not repaired, and when you leave the game, your character remains sleeping in the persistent world. Your inventory physically exists in boxes or on your character in the world. Everything can be looted & stolen, so to achieve security you must build-up, team-up, or have tames to guard your stash. Death is permanent, and you can even knock out, capture, and force-feed other players to use them for your own purposes, such as extracting their blood to for transfusions, harvesting their fecal matter to use as fertilizer, or using them as food for your carnivorous tames!



The mysterious ARK is a formidable and imposing environment, composed of many natural and unnatural structures, above-ground, below-ground, and underwater. By fully exploring its secrets, you’ll find the most exotic procedurally randomized creatures and rare blueprints. Also to be found are Explorer Notes that are dynamically updated into the game, written by previous human denizens of the ARK from across the millennia, creatively detailing the creatures and backstory of the ARK and its creatures. Fully develop your in-game ARK-map through exploration, write custom points of interest onto it, and craft a Compass or GPS coordinates to aid exploring with other players, whom you can communicate with via proximity text & voice chat, or long-distance radio. Construct & draw in-game signs for other players to help them or lead them astray... And yet.. how do you ultimately challenge the Creators and Conquer the ARK? A definitive end-game is planned.



On the 100+ player servers, your character, everything you built, and your tames, stay in-game even when you leave. You can even physically travel your character and items between the network of ARK's by accessing the Obelisks and uploading (or downloading) your data from the Steam Economy! A galaxy of ARKs, each slightly different than the previous, to leave your mark on and conquer, one at a time -- special official ARKs will be unveiled on the World-map for limited times in singular themed events with corresponding limited-run items! Furthermore, you can now design or randomize your own unique 'Procedurally Generated ARKs', for infinite replayability and endless surprises.



You can play single-player local games, and bring your character and items between unofficial player-hosted servers, back and forth from singleplayer to multiplayer. Mod the game, with full Steam Workshop support and customized Unreal Engine 4 editor. See how we built our ARK using our maps and assets as an example. Host your own server and configure your ARK precisely to your liking. We want to see what you create!



The over-the-top hyper real imagery of the ARK its creatures is brought to expressive life using a highly-customized Unreal Engine 4, with fully dynamic lighting & global illumination, weather systems (rain, fog, snow, etc) & true-to-life volumetric cloud simulation, and the latest in advanced DirectX11 and DirectX12 rendering techniques. Music by award-winning composer of "Ori and the Blind Forest", Gareth Coker!

Screenshots

User Reviews

Mostly Negative
100 user reviews
33%
Positive
4,228 hrs at review
Recommended

Hello Steam Users. Small Review of this beloved game, ARK EVOLVED. I play since 2015. Started on Island map. When the Sea had no Fish inside (no water Dinos). When the Island had no Swamp area and no Snow Biom. I have seen it all over the years. From playing Official, taming a Bronto Level 150 taking 8 hours real time. Seen Official servers been taking over by Chinese players. Changed maps, till Gen 2. I love Ark, its a big part of my life. But now, 2025. Aquatica came out. All changed... ASE atm wont even start for me. Crash after crash. No fix. Yes ASE is a great game. But i ask all Steam users, to not spend 1 PENNY on Aquatica. Do not support Snail Games. Dont give them one Penny. The are destroying ASE. I will keep my memories and i hope ASE will stay, but my fear is that the show will be over soon... (took me 10 years to review this game) and in short. I Love this game... and i hate this game.

103 helpful 1 funny
485 hrs at review
Not Recommended

Great game, has always been buggy, but most of the time the game experience makes up for it. HOWEVER: Developer studio is getting worse and worse. After already moving on to the UE5 remake, the studio hired a completely new and untested developer team (Studio Sirens) to make a "10 year anniversary DLC". The DLC was lazily developed, with genAI slop for a trailer and reusing assets from a bunch of other products. It broke the entire game at launch. Since then, they've been introducing "fixes" that then have to be put on hold because they introduce new fatal game errors. Clearly, this developer team is not even remotely up to the task of developing for ARK. But hiring a cheap, inexperienced developer to maximise profits on a DLC nobody asked for was apparently more important to Snail Games than allowing the game to remain playable. I enjoyed it while it lasted, but likely won't be coming back to ARK, and I definitely won't put any money into Snail Games going forward.

59 helpful
4,643 hrs at review
Recommended

amazing game, what i like is there are a bunch of mods i can play with what i dislike is the fact that snail games made it so that i couldn't play the game for like a month so ark aqautica really better be a good map once snail games get their s**t together or else i'm never going to get ark aqautica so yea.

18 helpful
143 hrs at review
Recommended

Spawned in and got my food taken by a flying seagull. Anytime I would have the tiniest bit of food that bird would just follow me and take it. Every. Single. Time. It even killed me multiple times too out of spite. Anyways, goated game, 10/10.

15 helpful 18 funny
612 hrs at review
Recommended

stop make Useless updates!!! i can not launch game and enjoy to play game!!!

13 helpful 4 funny
2,002 hrs at review
Not Recommended

Ive been playing this game since 2015. Off and on i just hit over 2000 hours in it. Its by far, well was, one of my favorite games of all time. I would love to recommend the game to other players. I would love to see the game flourish like it once did. I would love to be able to consistently load up and play the game with not a care in the world. Sadly i cant. I cant because the developers of this game, and everyone associated with its development, are money hungry sociopaths who took a great game and are currently smothering the life out of it to get people to move on to the "new and improved" Ark. Ark was and is still a steaming pile of god awful optimization, glitches, crashes, mesh faults, game breaking bugs and general dogshit errors. Ark is a great game in concept, and over the like 2 times ive seen the game run well it really can be great. Currently, Ark is a beautiful diamond, wrapped in radioactive razorblades, guarded by rabies ridden possum the size of an suv. If somehow you...

11 helpful
1 hrs at review
Not Recommended

Just leaving a review to point out how the Developers/Corporations behind Ark: Survival Evolved recently DESTROYED their own game through the Epic Games portal with a completely unwanted update. Made it unplayable overnight. Ruined save files beyond repair. Left personal servers completely inaccessible. I'm newly here on Steam trying to salvage the literal YEARS I've poured into this game with my friend because this Ark update crippled Evolved. I didn't buy Ascended. I don't WANT Ascended. I'm still playing Evolved, the game I PAID FOR. Absolute garbage handling of their own IPs and terrible business practices in general. Studio WildCard and Snail Games need to do better. They owe us that much.

10 helpful
170 hrs at review
Not Recommended

I've spent a ton of time on this game over multiple consoles over the years and have loved it for so long so it sucks to see how snailgames destroyed this game, The release of Aquatica genuinely ruined this game, nothing works the way it used to it made 90%of mods unplayble and was a huge cashgrab to begin with. SnailGames released this DLC to destroy the game and force fans to buy acsended which is just a trashy thing to do, I will miss this game truly and it sucks that they ruined it completely just from some extra cash.

9 helpful
980 hrs at review
Not Recommended

The Devs Nuked the game. All mods gone and broken. Moving these devs to the "never again folder". Dont bother with this game anymore. It's just got murdered.

9 helpful 1 funny
86 hrs at review
Not Recommended

what the actual f is wrong with this game seriously it keeps on sending worthless updates and the game gets stuck on the main menu with negligible FPS what the hell man actual hell and these worthless piece of crap updates not only come once but its twice now

8 helpful

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System Requirements

Minimum

Minimum:
  • OS *: Windows 7/8.1/10 (64-bit versions)
  • Processor: Intel Core i5-2400/AMD FX-8320 or better
  • Memory: 8 GB RAM
  • Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 670 2GB/AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB or better
  • DirectX: Version 10
  • Storage: 60 GB available space
  • Additional Notes: Requires broadband internet connection for multiplayer

FAQ

How much does ARK: Survival Evolved cost?

ARK: Survival Evolved costs $14.99.

What are the system requirements for ARK: Survival Evolved?

Minimum: Minimum: OS *: Windows 7/8.1/10 (64-bit versions) Processor: Intel Core i5-2400/AMD FX-8320 or better Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 670 2GB/AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB or better DirectX: Version 10 Storage: 60 GB available space Additional Notes: Requires broadband internet connection for multiplayer

What platforms is ARK: Survival Evolved available on?

ARK: Survival Evolved is available on Windows PC, macOS.

Is ARK: Survival Evolved worth buying?

ARK: Survival Evolved has 33% positive reviews from 100 players. Metacritic score: 70/100.

When was ARK: Survival Evolved released?

ARK: Survival Evolved was released on Aug 27, 2017.

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