Deal | Where the T. rex becomes your mount: Dino-survival game free on Steam for a limited time

In ARK: Survival Ascended, players take on the role of a defenseless survivor who awakens on a mysterious island teeming with dinosaurs. What begins with crude stone tools and a makeshift shelter can eventually grow into vast fortresses and advanced production facilities.

At its core, the game offers familiar open-world survival gameplay. Players gather resources, craft tools and weapons, and build increasingly elaborate bases, all while keeping hunger and thirst under control. So far, much of this will feel familiar to survival fans. However, ARK: Survival Ascended has one major advantage over many of its competitors: dinosaurs.

These prehistoric giants are among the greatest threats early on, but later become valuable allies. Dinosaurs can be tamed, bred and used as mounts, pack animals or combat companions. Particularly in co-op or on PvP servers, building a tribe and breeding powerful creatures can easily keep players occupied for hundreds of hours.

German gaming magazine Testing Buddies awarded the game 7/10 when it launched in Early Access in winter 2023. The review praised its impressive visuals, imposing dinosaurs and atmospheric world, while criticizing the cumbersome menus and relatively limited gameplay improvements over its predecessor.

Player reception is considerably more mixed. On Steam, only 60% of more than 111,000 user reviews are positive, while Metacritic lists a low user score of 4.7 for the PS5 version. Even so, the game attracted around 42,000 concurrent players over the past 24 hours. The most common complaints concern technical issues such as performance drops, crashes, bugs and server problems. At the same time, many players praise the core survival mechanics, the dinosaurs and the visual overhaul. Those willing to overlook the technical shortcomings may still find a solid survival adventure underneath.

ARK: Survival Ascended might therefore be well worth a look, especially while it is still free to play on Steam until July 13. After that, the 75% discount lowers the price from $44.99 to $11.24. According to SteamDB, the current offer matches the game’s previous all-time low, most recently reached in mid-May.

Disclaimer: Notebookcheck is not responsible for price changes carried out by retailers. The discounted price or deal mentioned in this item was available at the time of writing and may be subject to time restrictions and/or limited unit availability.