But on top of all this, there’s still the incoming threat of a giant meteor that you have to find a way to destroy, lest all life on earth perishes anyway.

If you cut down too many trees, you can jeopardise the world. If you burn coal, you can endanger the planet. It has been lauded as a great educational tool for teaching younger audiences about how to respect the planet, with specific pathways of industry meeting a negative feedback loop. Where Rust sees you shooting other players on sight, Ark focuses more on developing your base, taming your dinosaurs, and building your online posse, and when it gets going, it can be an enjoyable ride.Įco is an intriguing title – part survival game, part sustainability simulation – that features a diverse and interactive ecosystem that you must keep alive. And because it rewards that grittier gameplay loop, there’s less incentive for senseless violence, promoting peacemaking between players.

Rust often sees you raiding someone else’s base unawares 30 minutes after you spawn in Ark, it takes a lot longer to get to the point where you can compete against the players who have put in their hours on the grindstone. Ark often gets compared to Rust because they entered Early Access at around the same time, and both feature open-world PvP combat, but they’re fundamentally different games.

This makes for fascinating team dynamics as people cheat, manipulate, or support one another while fending off hunger, thirst, and cold.Īdding to this a highly customisable base system, flying vehicles, a randomised map, and dense weapon variety, you’re left with an incredible experiment into what the genre can be at its craziest.Īrk is a survival game with dinosaurs. Open voice chat allows players to talk amongst themselves as though they were standing next to one another. Possibly one of the most infamous survival games in the genre, Rust has become known for the emergent gameplay held therein.

Top down colony survival game