Genre: Sandbox
Developer: Various
Publisher: Studio Wildcard

ARK's tropical island setting is reminiscent of Crytek's 2004 release "Far Cry"-- except that it uses a mind-boggling eight gig of system RAM while running! And for a game with that kind of memory footprint, there isn't much to show for it; while there are some nice post-processing effects, shimmering water, and pixel-shaded beachheads, the title mostly looks like a cheap MMORPG, with ugly label fonts over objects, static geometry clipping through the terrain at strange angles, and a hideous user interface that lies in stark contrast to Minecraft's simple and clean look.

There isn't much in the way of sound in ARK; occasionally a forgettable melody will play, and the odd-- but muted-- dinosaur roar can be heard. But the game takes place in a tropical environment! Where are the roaring, crashing waves? The constant chirp and buzz of wildlife, large and small? Even the dinosaurs themselves sound utterly underwhelming and uninspired.

In ARK, crafting is done by unlocking recipes through level gains, in a pseudo-skill tree manner. Level gains are accomplished through combat and item collection. Unfortunately, the execution of the conceptually sound concepts is poor: the world is huge, but not interesting to explore, and too extraordinarily dangerous for exploration to even be worthwhile. The "safe during the day, dangerous at night" dichotomy of Minecraft would work very well here-- but was eschewed. The user interface is a total mess, making actions continuously cumbersome. Combat is "Elder Scrolls" shallow. And every death, of course, means a loss of an entire inventory.

ARK's prosaic aesthetic would be acceptable if the gameplay was strong. Unfortunately, the designers took the worst things about Minecraft-- the iffy pacing and brain dead combat-- while ruining the things that made Minecraft so enticing-- the fascinating-to-explore worlds, and the "build anything you want" Lego-world sensation. Like an MMORPG, ARK also has massive time inflation-oriented balancing, with actions like taming a single dinosaur taking nearly a full hour of real-world time. ARK isn't hopeless; the idea of having a Minecraft with dinosaurs and a cutting-edge graphics engine is a good one, and during isolated stretches the game can be enjoyable. But the totally amateurish design needs an enormous amount of professional help before it can fulfill its potential.