ARK: Survival Evolved APK

What Is Ark: Survival Evolved?

This is the mobile version of Ark: Survival Evolved. Ark is a survival builder/crafting game, following the line of games like PUBG, Rust, Conan Exiles, and many others.

The difference here is that you're on a research island where dinosaur and other megafauna are developed to be living, breathing creatures. Yes, it's Jurassic Park without the Jurassic Park story.

Thankfully, it's not designed to be a Jurassic Park clone, and the concept of living in a place where dinosaurs thrive is hardly specific to the JP franchise. To be clear, this is a near future setting where you're expected to just survive.

In the game's still evolving story, ARKs are space stations with livable habitats, where humans presumably live after some world disaster-level event rendered the world inhospitable. The details around whether the world is limited to ARKs and the survival islands is still unclear. The cause is war, but it's not clear if its total destruction or if the ARKs are just where many lucky people are.

The player is an escapee, and a project just like the dinosaurs being bred on the islands. You're not a prisoner or a person; players are clones and likely part of the Homo Deus race discussed in a few lore snippets, with the ability to ascend--that is, add skill points for your survival and crafting.

Ark plays like your typical survival crafting game, where you gather your first few items to build basic tools, branch out into different stats for your survival style, and other things you'd expect in a survival game.

The differences are the world itself, and the pet system. While pets are a side feature for many games, in addition to living in a world of experimental dinosaurs, you can also tame, breed, and use the animals for progression.

Transportation, fighting, security, and even crafting can be enhanced by the creatures you control. That's the difference; it's not just Rust with dinosaurs, its Rust with actual pet systems that go beyond having an attack dog.

If you're looking for a sentence about playing as a dinosaur, stick to the PC version. Although it's possible to mod the mobile version of Ark, it's far more efficient to do so on PC.

Don't worry if you absolutely must play it on mobile and want to be a dinosaur. If you're a coder, you shouldn't being asking if it can be done in the first place. Just hack, nerd. If you're not into modding, the top mods slowly make their way to mobile as the completely unpaid modders get to it.

Ark Mobile Differences

As far as the mobile versus PC differences, aside getting better performance from being on a stronger machine, here are the feature differences:

Cash Shop. There is no console command or admin mode on mobile. You essentially buy cheats in the game. Or, as they're called these day, "boosts." There are ingredients, items, and resources that can be bought, and you can even buy God Mode unlocks.

Undo button for building. Instead of having to dismantle everything piece by piece and specifically, you can undo your last action with a simple tap.

Interface overhaul. The interface on mobile is much more clear and exact than PC, even after a few years of mobile and PC being developed and lessons learned. The mobile UI is bigger, points out more things, and even has more goals listed as quests to help mobile players learn the game and stay engaged in their tasks.

Overall, Ark is a pretty great mobile experience. The franchise is merely okay in the grand scheme of survival games until they get playing as dinosaurs more exact, but as a mobile game it's excellent.