Yet despite its issues, Ark can so very often be a wondrous, rewarding thing; a fascinating, beguiling sandbox of possibilities and story generation. Many of my Ark adventures will stay with me long after I stop playing: the terrifying first time my tribe mate and I rode a rickety raft all the way a...

In its official guise, Ark is not a game thats shy about frittering away your free hours. Resource gathering, building, farming, taming, and breeding can all take huge amounts of time, even during an Evolution Event when all of Arks official server multipliers are cranked up so things happen faster....

You can abide by Wildcards rules on official servers, or brave unofficial servers where anything goes. There are servers where dinosaurs can never be tamed, primitive servers with no advanced technology, extinctions servers which reset once a month, servers with procedurally generated maps, and endl...

Ive been playing Ark: Survival Evolved for almost two years now, and Im still not 100 per cent sure if its a good game. Strip away the appealing dinosaur-themed veneer, and developer Studio Wildcards long-in-early-access survival adventure starts to look surprisingly routine. Its core systems are ov...

And in my homestead one morning, I discovered that all of my furniture was permanently glued to the floor. If I wanted to move my bed from one corner to another or add a crafting table to a corner, I’d have to destroy it, lose most of the resources I spent making it, and just make a new one. Certain...

I have been playing Team Fortress for about a year now in Steam. This game is really fun with friends and the best thing about it is that it is free to play. I feel like Team Fortress 2 is a great game for no cost. It is also convenient that you can play it on Steam. If you ever played Mad Paintball...

I have been playing Crossout for awhile now and while it is still in its developing stage, it is turning out to be a solid game. It is one of those games that you can just get on really quick and catch a quick round of battling. It actually encourages you to not battle for an extended, continuous pe...

Rail Nation USA is an entertaining browser-based strategy game that has players managing a train empire across the United States. While a little bit more control would have been appreciated, the game still offers an entertaining experience that is perfect for those pickup and play moments. In the ga...

The user interface is terrible. Seriously, seriously terrible. One of two things occurred in the development of Arma III, either the UI developer was a rogue, creative individual experimenting with a bold, minimalistic new interface, or they had never played a video game before and decided to fly bl...

Its hard to think of Arma III as anything more than a tech demo. It feels skeletal, like the wood frame of a house under construction. You see where its going, but you wouldnt want to live there yet. If youre ever played a game while in its early beta stages, thats what Arma III will feel like, exce...

While it smoulders rather than sparks, Survive concludes strongly and the momentum is carried over into Adapt, definitely the best of the three chapters. This introduces Altis, a masterwork of environmental design. I could write another 1000 words on its remarkable sights and sounds: its misty dawns...

Its the dead of night on the CSAT-occupied island of Stratis, and the peaceful darkness is about to explode into chaos. Im leading one of two spec-ops teams on a mission to liberate the leader of a local guerrilla faction and return him to the much larger island of Altis. A British squad is in charg...

The two new heavy lifters are much more interesting. Blufor’s new CH-67 Huron is a pretty standard take on the dual-rotor Chinook, but the cockpit interior is gorgeous and it can carry two full weapons squads and a fully loaded jeep anywhere on the map. Opfor’s new Mi-290 Taru is my favorite additio...

The other new mechanic is “slingloading”—suspending heavy loads beneath a chopper—which has actually been available as a community-made mod for some time now. The official version is much smoother, though, with nicely animated rigging ropes and fluid-body physics allowing crates to swing up and out...

Pitching yaw Now the training wheels have come off, and the helicopter is a multi-ton hunk of metal desperate to convince itself it’s a bird. The advanced flight model physics are no longer interested in friendly compromise. A mouse and keyboard control scheme is ineffective at dealing with the minu...