Ark: Survival Ascended sure looks pretty, but it feels downright prehistoric

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SHOULD I PLAY ARK: SURVIVAL ASCENDED?

Only play this if you’re a lapsed Ark: Survival Evolved fan eager for a fresh look for the original game. Ark: Survival Ascended is a graphically enhanced version of Ark that’s currently in early access, and it’s janky and buggy enough to make it a pretty rough experience for anyone jumping into Ark for the first time, like I was.

TIME PLAYED

I played about four hours of Ark: Survival Ascended. I briefly dipped into a PvE server and saw that players had already created massive structures all over the starting area I had chosen, so I went to start a solo game on my own to learn the ropes. I spent my time exploring, searching for resources, and mainly trying to learn Ark’s outdated control scheme and menu interface, both of which seem positively ancient by the standards of today’s survival games.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT ARK: SURVIVAL ASCENDED?

• Incredible graphics. Hey, shocker: Ark looks way better in Unreal Engine 5, who would have guessed? All kidding aside, it does look fantastic: The way the shadows play in the crevices of sandstone formations and on the surface of the water, how the jungle vegetation diffuses the sunlight before blocking it out entirely, and the way the high-resolution textures on dinosaurs give them all-new life—each of these elements and more combine to create a visually astonishing world.

• Drop-in, drop-out gameplay. I liked that Ark: Survival Ascended never made it an issue if I wanted to stop a session to tend to other tasks or to take a break—I’d just pull up the pause menu, save my game, and quit. When I returned to the game, I’d be right where I left off. There was no messing around with setting spawn points or finding safe zones to make sure I didn’t lose progress.

• Dinosaurs. Just in case you haven’t heard, there are dinosaurs in Ark. Lots of them! The visual upgrade to Unreal Engine 5 has enhanced the looks of these massive creatures too, and it’s thrilling to run by a herd of grazing triceratops or see a massive sauropod nibbling on tree canopies in the distance. You can tame and ride these dinosaurs too, although I have yet to figure out how to do that.

WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT IN ARK: SURVIVAL ASCENDED?

• The awesome graphics come at a steep price. Unless you’re running the latest and greatest in PC graphics hardware, you’re going to have to crank those visual settings down for a smooth experience. Ark: Survival Ascended looks heavenly on 40-series GPUs, but you’ll have to make some pretty severe trade-offs to get a smooth framerate on anything in the 20s and below. Even my RTX 4070ti sweats a bit with this game. Further optimizations are undoubtedly in the pipeline, but this is always going to be a much more hardware-intensive version of the game.

• Bugs. I ran into a bunch of strange bugs while playing Ark: Survival Ascended, and they changed with every update. One I found particularly annoying was the loss of mouselook whenever I used a campfire to add fuel or raw meat—when I left that menu, I’d be stuck looking down until I held the E key down for a couple seconds and brought up the ping menu. At one point, menu tooltips disappeared until I manually re-enabled them. Objects disappeared from the world pretty frequently, and while I didn’t run into this issue during my time with Ark, many players have reported persistent crashes.

• Ark feels unpleasantly old-fashioned now. The survival genre has come a long way since Ark: Survival Evolved first came out, and while the modern games certainly owe Ark a debt of gratitude for figuring some stuff out, they’ve also surpassed it when it comes to user-friendliness and interface design.

Just a few examples of the baffling design choices in Ark: Survival Ascended: I had to tap E to light a campfire, but then hold the E key and pull up a radial menu to “access the inventory” of the campfire if I wanted to add fuel or meat to cook. The radial menu options didn’t even stay in the same place either—“access inventory” moved to  different spot on the menu depending on what I was looking at or trying to use. Other annoyances included having to put down my weapon or tool in order to use my hands to gather things on the ground, or the requirement to punch certain kinds of plants and cut others with a hatchet.

A remake like Ark: Survival Ascended really should have taken the opportunity to modernize the creaky old interface and bring the inventory management, building, and resource harvesting systems up to par with modern survival games like Valheim and Sons of the Forest. Sadly, that’s not what happened.

💬Are you ready to reexperience Ark in Unreal Engine 5, or will you be holding out for Ark 2? What's your favorite survival game right now? Let me know in the comments!