The guns are really bad. Combat is flouty and impricise. You'll use a xbow 99% of the time. once you can use darts, you'll use a long neck rifle, but it fires like a old revolution musket.
The pike/sword work kinda well, but it's like minecraft. You kinda point i a random direction of the dino and just hit, the hit boxes are horrid so you got a 50/50 chance of nailing it.
Put it this way: the highest level gear you can get are tech gear. The coolest item in this set of tech gear is a saddle that you put on your rex, that gives your rex FUCKING LAZER BEAMS. Sounds cool huh? I dare you to hit something with those lasers. Good luck, you'll never land a single shot.
So yeah that's the end game. Broken gear that you'll never use. Oh and it's really expensive, the gas that this gear uses to power the suits....you have to tame like 15 level 300 rexes and have plenty of rockets. You'll never get there. No tribe is alpha enough to put this work in, if they haven't already done it.
Offline is garbage. Unless you're willing to turn on cheats, which degrades the replayability by a lot. You can cheat and tame anything you want, but it's the equivalent to playing SUPER EASY on any game that you normally play Normal or Hard on. And ark is at fucking Master Ninja Difficulty.
When you get your asses handed to you, not hundreds, but thousands of times by any number of dino (I personally hate the troodons). If you don't quit the game before this happens, then you'll be forever addicted. Once you master this game you won't be able to put it down. No matter what life demands of you, Ark will come first. I gaurantee it.
When you lose your progress and everything you've forgone has been for nothing, then you will break down. I picked myself up and re solo tribed 3 more servers. After 192 days played on my account, I can tell you this game isn't worth playing. Dumbed down with cheats OR playing it the way you are meant to play it (online), you're going to lose. Unless you are ok with frequently resetting progress, I advise just steering clear of ark.
You'll fall in love with it and it will burn you.
Not to mention the devs have questionable practices.
I bought SE the day it came out.
Now there's a season pass a year later that requires me to repay for SE AGAIN by purchasing the season pass...or paying extra by buying future DLCs seperately. Again, if you play ark, you will not play anything else. Ark will become your game whether you like it or not. Once you invest too much time into ark, it becomes really hard to pull out.
THIS GAME PLAYS ON YOUR ADDICTION LEVELS. If there was ever a game where too much of a good thing is implied, it's this one.
