The Isle

One of the best dinosaur games on Steam, arguably in the world, features cool mechanics and amazing graphics, but you should expect occasional floating trees, rocks, or buggy AI.

I check in about once a year to sadly see they dont make much progress with this game. Its still boring, and a complete mess balance wise.

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☑ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☐ Decent
☑ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☐ Workable
☐ Big
☑ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☑ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☑ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☑ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☑ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☑ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☑ 10

Well, game has some bugs and it is very hard to report a bug so I have to create review....
In my case game stopped to save properly out logged dinos it means I can't grow them in another session because game ask me to create new one.
At the end it means game for me is pointless at this moment and I can't report a bug due to build in game button.

A game created by subhuman troglodytes with empty promises and absolutely nothing to show. Years of development and barely anything as changed. pile of complete worthless dogshit. May the devs burn in the nine circles of hell

After a decade, you would imagine that they had ironed out most of the game breaking flaws. They haven't, and it doesn't even appear that they've tried. There are many things I like about this game and not a single one of them can overshadow the fact that their servers reset and destroy all your progress, their spawn rates on food in the form of NPC animals is fundamentally broken resulting in most playthroughs ending in starving to death, combat is janky at best, it glitches out constantly, etc. You wouldn't be able to convince me they plan on finishing this game. Honestly, I don't know what they're doing but it isn't anything to do with these issues.

first time playing, my first dino i grinded out to 100% full grown. as soon as i put in my last mutation and exited the stats page, i got merked by a massive salt water crocodile. best welcoming experience i could have had. 10/10

I played almost only new Evrima branch and the review is about that version.

What a conflicting game. I love it, despite everything. I cannot say it is a horrible game nor can I say it is a masterpiece. It has its special good moments, especially first few introductory hours/days when you are perplexed with the complexity of things that is thrown at you. Unfortunately there’s little to no tutorial in game at all, except a few pop up information here and there, so anything that you’ll want to learn you’ll have to use other online means. And another unfortunate moment, game has 2 vastly different versions such as Legacy and Evrima and Evrima’s different updates differ from each other quite a lot. So finding up to date information or tutorial can feel challenging.

Basically everything regarding this game has some amount of fuss, confusion and running around (digitally). Yet if game clicks with you, you’ll find strength and willpower to force yourself through all that. By clicking I mean if you are really into Dinosaur theme, then with a great chance you’ll like it. You’ll just need to persevere first wave of shocks game throws at you. After that it will gradually smooth out.
The Gateway ingame map, is one of the most, and I can’t stress it out enough, most beautiful and satisfying open world maps I’ve ever experienced. It is so beautiful especially in the morning at dawn, it has verticality, sensible landscape, elevations, water biomes, highlands, jungles. It feels really satisfying, I wish we had maps in Bethesda type rpg open world games with this much details or GTA type games.

One important thing to note the game is not finished, and it’s been not finished for a really long time. And unfortunately it seems like it won’t be finished in near future. It has a lot of bugs, incomplete features and so on. If the game manages to surpass it’s incompleteness, if it manages to get into somehow more or less finished, stable state, then The Isle has every chance to become Flagship of dinosaur themed games, the definitive dino experience. I hope it gets there one day.

I get that they say this is a 'beta' testing game, but the core game has been out for over 10 years. Imagine growing your Carno to 98% for a sever reset to completely wipe the last 4 hours you spent playing. Now the next time you log in, the server is crammed with people who just got off work or out of school. Good luck starting fresh in a full server! Same problems, different day. Devs are slow to fix glitches and server rollback issues, and extremely slow to release new content! For being a BETA that you want to market to the world, why does it take 9+ months to release new content?!?? Instead you rework parts of the map that provided much needed variety of terrain into a giant lake/forest that severely limits diversity of creatures... Even worse, you continue to allow mix-packing, herbivores to kill AI food that predators need to survive, and que times of at least 20-40 people during peak play hours! My friends, that means you paid for an experience of sitting in a que for 45+ minutes to play a game that could very well take 4 hours, and risk having your hard earned adult dino getting wiped on the next server reset (which happens twice a day).

The premise of the game is insanely addictive and fun, if you have to time for it. The problems far outweigh the benefit and I am over it.

Played this a year ago where it was not in a great state but had potential. Came back some days ago to find out that is is in a worst state .. To my extreme dissapointment it is really bad. uninstalling and moving to path of titans.

It's just... boring. It's a boring game. The controls don't work half the time, and when they do work, they're not very helpful. Jump doesn't work, Scent doesn't work, Trot doesn't work -- WASD is functional and that's about it.

Even if the controls and abilities weren't lackluster, there's nothing to do besides wander around and slowly starve to death. The map is enormous to the point that you never encounter other players. There's also no tutorial or in-game tips, so if you actually want to figure out how to play the game, you've gotta look up how-to guides on Reddit and YouTube.

Just play Path of Titans instead.

waited 7 years to play this game and the first time I played it I fell in love with the graphics and the atmosphere of the game overall. If you are dinosaur lover, i totally recommend this game

The game loop is not fun. At this point, I don't know what would make this game enjoyable besides playing with friends and even then, there's plenty of games far more worth your time.

This is an early access game, but there's really a lot of good going on in here that it felt worth it when I bought it a while back. Played it a bit with some friends, then shelved it to let the devs keep at it. Coming back now, a lot has improved and I've been having a lot of fun. As others have said it's very immersive and a lot of aspects of it are really well designed (the new diet system is great once you get used to it, and the dinos all feel very unique with plenty more on the way). There are definitely problems with it at the moment (random spawns and a limited range of potential ai locations means that young carnos starve to death with some regularity, and afaik there's no way to spawn together as a group besides nests), and a very steep and unforgiving learning curve, but if you're persistent and don't get angry at the little dinosaur game when another dino eats you to stay alive there's a really unique experience to be had that you don't get in many other games. As updates have been pretty consistent, and there are now quite a few available dinos in the primary branch (evrima), I recommend checking out some videos of this game and, if it looks interesting to you, grabbing it on sale. Check out the different dinos, maybe read a quick guide or two, then hop in and be prepared to die. Repeatedly.

Starvation simulator. Spend your whole time running around holding shift, w, and q all to never find anything and just die a half of an hour in; unless you play deino or ptera where you can just eat fish. If you do find something, be prepared for the jankyest chase and kill you can have as npc animals change direction on a dime and will run into a river and sit in the middle until you starve. No map, despite giving you coordinates that you can use with an online map to figure out where you are, so you end up asking "what's the point of not giving a map?". No useful smell mechanic, the only food you can smell is stuff that's already dead, so it's useless to track anything down and you have to try and rely on your ears. Servers can simultaneously be full of players, yet feel completely empty. The entire game play loop is eat, drink, and hide with nothing bringing players together except migration zones that don't work. Unless you have a really good rig expect 15 fps in the jungles. Combat is just spam left click on someone and hope for the best. Only very few instances where there is any more to it than that. Be prepared to scour the internet to find out basic information like what the symbols on your smell compass that are not the obvious food or water mean. All the news I see on this game is about adding playables instead of fixing the crap mechanics and terrible optimization, or adding more servers so you don't have to wait in a queue for 20 minutes just to enter a game. Half the playables feel like they've been balanced to ensure that you have the least amount of fun possible except for Deinosuchus as you can one shot just about anything by the time you are half grown, and no one can see you in the water until it's too late, so all in all, unless you want to play prehistoric croc simulator, I'd say pass on this one and get another title in the dino survival genre.

If you want to waste multiple hours not finding food in "High" AI spawn locations or other players, this is your game.

Full of bugs and hackers in the recent updates. No support from the Official Server Admins. Would not recommend anymore. You won't have a good experience with the current state of things.

And you don't have to take my word for it. You can check the Official Discord channel where the Admins ignore hacker reports and then blame the players.

A lot of positive points can be made about The Isle (evrima). It has great graphics, a solid foundation for enjoyable gameplay, and a diverse and growing community. I really enjoy The Isle, and despite the bugs and server crashes, the gameplay is compelling enough to keep most people (including myself) coming back.
All that being said, the game has a serious issue of the administrative team being outright hostile and unprofessional towards players and abusing their position as administrators. It is reminiscent of how Gaijin Entertainment treated players prior to the free parts & FPE fiasco (for all you warthunder gamers out there). The administrators toe the line of rule 2, and are openly and frequently flaming players whom they dislike. They also give leeway to their friends, and allow them to do the same. Spend any length of time in the community discord server, and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. The upper level staff typically refuse to act upon abuse by their subordinates towards players upon player complaints, and the player is usually just banned from the discord server.

TL:DR
Great game, horrendous administrative and development team. Avoid until they shape up, they don't deserve your money in their wallet.

This game used to be good, but not anymore. After 2000 hours+ in this game, I can sadly say its not the game it used to be. The dev team refuses to acknowledge bugs, some of them game breaking that have been an issue in the game for years. From hackers killing you, starving to death because there is food stuck in your mouth, dehydrating to death because you can't drink water, and AI spawns being buggy making carnivores almost unplayable, surviving without having to be AFK for hours is nearly impossible, Instead of addressing their issues, the DEV team (*ahem, Dondi) act egotistical and tell you that instead of fixing their issues, to not play their game. The only DEV that isnt condescending to their player base and seems to actually try is Felipe. Watch his most recent stream on twitch if you don't believe me. It's a shame, 2000 hours in this game and I've made wonderful friends along the way because of the isle. None of them play anymore due to the poor quality and refusal to fix the bugs. If you want to play with your friends that's out of the question, as you cannot spawn together. You can kill yourself to get closer to where they spawn, but more often than not you will spawn in the same place as when you killed yourself. I have tried multiple times to enjoy this game again, each I have been left disappointed. Maybe one day I will come back and try again, and change my review. But my hopes are very low and I'm afraid they have ruined this once wonderful game. Save yourself the time, frustration and money and go play Path of Titans or another dinosaur game.

still after years there is virtually no food. it's literally a value on an excel doc to change spawn rates, but they insist on things like Ptyradon and Dinosucus to starve to death because there is no crabs or turtles or fish spawning. Flying for over half the map and not finding any fish or swimming till starvation in the swamps without ever seeing fish is unacceptable. The devs are incompotent and uncaring.

I want this game to be fun. I really do. But I can't recommend the game in the state its in. Specifically playing as a carnivore, it's so hard to find any kind of food to start out. You'd think this would be an easy fix. Increase spawn rates of npc prey, or make them spawn more frequently in migration zones. Increase player count on servers or decrease map size.

All I'm saying is, if starvation is what's killing players more than other players, there's something wrong with the game.

I like this game, but it is very unfriendly to new players, so it's hard to recommend. What is a new player supposed to think of all these icons that have no text or explanation and visually explain nothing? It's even difficult to find online answers to what these are. You need to play with a more experienced person at first. If you can find someone, friend or stranger to help you, then go for it, it's a one of a kind game.

There's nothing to do in this game except get stuck on rocks and take the entire irl night to find your friends then log off. Wish I could refund but I spent over two hours just looking for for my friend to pair with thinking the game would have things to do. Beautiful game and dinosaurs are awesome but there's nothing here

Bought the game in 2016 and it isn't done by 2024. Just wait until 2039 and buy it when it's complete

I really tried to love this game, as I was a dinosaur kid growing up. It has been nothing but a constant disappointment. The servers lag or disconnect on the regular, the developers are incredibly slow at releasing or updating or listening to their customers, and for some reason they can't have enough servers to support more than 400 people playing at once in NA. It seemed like the developers started to listen with the last map update but the game has only gotten worse concerning actual game play. Why does it take multiple years to release the only true apex predator that literally everyone wants to play, the T-Rex...

Best dinosaur game out there. Animations, graphics, and sounds are excellent. For such a low price, it is definitely worth the money. The development can seem a bit slow, but if you follow on Discord you can get more info and notes on all patches and also test new patches before they release to the public beta. There, the updates are almost weekly, although they are not always changing gameplay or adding things. Remember to change to the Envrima branch and install the ani cheat when you first install it.

it was fun for a long time , but new updates and changes makes everything unfun . I dont recommend this game at the current state . bring me back old map at least i would see players all the time , now in the gateway and random spawns i see nobody , really bad updades no one asked for . games are supposed to be fun and enjoyable and not stressfull . Moving to path of titans until they fix all the issues , at least they listen to community and make changes to make the game fun and not realistic boring and lame

Can no longer recommend this game for new players.
Over five years of development and still the same messy spaghetti code, each update comes with more bugs and performance issues and I'm not even talking about the poor choices when it comes to balancing.

At first glance the game is absolutely stunning and is the most immersive experience I ever had when gaming, It's a hardcore survival experience which would have been wonderful if it wasn't for the horrendous optimisation choices and the devs tendency to add more and more new content without taking care of previous unsolved bugs/issues, which creates more problems that can cost you hours of progress!

I really love that game and wish the best for it's future but it's in a very bad spot now especially after the last update which turned it into a starving simulator for new players and large species, the map is way too big for 100 or even 200 players, and for many there's sometimes a dramatic lag and fps spike when encountering other players or even entering certain locations, personally for me, I keep getting 300 ping when I follow the West Rail Access road and it keeps going until I leave that area (official and unofficial servers).

Hope to see better days for this game because it's truly one of a kind.

Summary: The game is basically just a Tech Demo showcasing creature simulation. That's it really.

I will get the short-lived pro's out the way ASAP and move onto the huge cut-throat cons.

PRO'S: absolutely fantastic graphics and animations; with this comes fantastic immersion. Can't fault it at all. Everything from creature handling and responsiveness to the sounds of the environment etc.

That's it for the pro's and that's why IMO this game is basically just a fancy tech showcase.

CONS: biggest and most glaringly obvious issue with this game is how little there is to do. you hop in with like three things to do: Explore, eat/drink find other players to attack or evade. Growth is basically just passive so im not counting that as a thing to do.

Exploring/eating/drinking: yeah great everything looks nice, but i swear to god, i spent probably 11 hours of the 12 hours i played just running through a very un-interactive map. you get some basic directional objectives using your 'scent' thingy - these produce very little variety in outcomes and also it's a bit braindead - you just head towards a marker on your screen. no intuition, no skill - just point and run. sometimes i would pass by an interesting looking bush to see if it does something or i can eat - or maybe i can use my intuition to forage for food or something... but nah. food spawns for herbivores are fixed and always there - as far as i can tell they don't even run out. so technically, most of my gameplay was finding a bush that i can eat - near some water - and thats it. job done. press button on the bush, press button on the water and press button to laydown in foliage to regain stamina and passively grow. done. survival complete.

Not a hardcore survival game: whoever thinks this is a 'hardcore survival' game is terribly mistaken. i got an adult dino on a busy official server within less than an hour after a couple of tries. not even playing cautious - just running to nearest marker or finding food to eat. yes there's a diet system - is it compelling? no. i just ate a single fixed bush over and over again and i was fine. yes its not optimal, but survival doesn't = optimal. i felt no need to run endlessly to another marker to find protein. no drive to do this. the drive is imaginary.

PVP - i will give some credit, coming across players can be really immersive. but again finding PvP involves endlessly running without anything else to do, sometimes nothing is there and sometimes what is there you can't take on due to size & species of other player and also how many of them there are.

Combat: i didn't really get into because upon reaching adult on my dino, there was nothing near me to fight and i genuinely got too sick of the endless running in a direction for any pvp encounter to be worth it.

Nesting: got absolutely no interest in doing this as it's just a roleplay fad. has no real gameplay impact apart from being able to make a youtube video with a title that will attract every single dino nerd on the planet like 'i raised a family of stegosaurus, heres what happened'. when the actual gameplay of that process is so boring when you really take a step back and look at it.

To conclude: I have realised how creature simulator games like this and path of titans sound way better as a concept than a reality. ultimately, they got nothing to do, its not like they need to build a fire to stay warm, they can't loot interesting items, they fkn dinosaurs mate what do you expect? why these games ar epopular is because the prospect of being able to live out your childhood dream of being a big scawwy dinosaww and going around emoting 'rawwwrrrr' and fighting n shit blinds oneself to the fact that it just doesn't make for compelling gameplay.

How could there be more, actual fun things to do? to make a creature sim like this fun you would need to put a stop to development on the dino playables, they are fine, they look good, theres enough variety, they animate well, just leave it. you need to solve the un-interactive map, the predictability of fixed food spawns and general lack of survival elements outside of eat and drink. though the only way i can see to spice the lack of things to do is to go all out on the human playable and literally add standard human survival game features to the map, like building and crafting, all that stuff. so that the dinosaur players have something more engaging to fight and those who get bored of running dinosaur simulation can hop onto a human playable and try to survive and fight of the dinosaurs, but have actual things to do like build, make weapons, fend of diseases and whatever.

Not gonna happen but idc. if this game didn't involve dinosaurs it wouldn't sell a single copy because if you strip away the fancy but superficial dino mechanics, you are left with a shockingly boring gameplay loop.

Thank you very much good night.

game is in constant development with them usually being for things that should be coming after getting the animal count back up because they have been on an update for years and still have not managed to get any apex predators in the game. it really doesn't matter what hardware you have there are areas or times the FPS will drop to be unplayable. id recommend you watch some videos before you buy. as i type the game is a starving simulator with another fantastic "update".

Starving simulator 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, etc.
The game seemed promising when it first launched years ago, but has been getting worse with every update, in both performance and gameplay. The game commits the ultimate sin in gaming, it's utterly, irredeemably boring. Years and years of development and almost nothing to show for it.

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☑ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☑ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☐ Decent
☑ Fast
☑ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☑ Old Fashioned
☑ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☑ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☑ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☑ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☑ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☑ Can get annoying
☑ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☑ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10
Final Verdict:
Good game genre with a alot of potential. takes a bit to get the hang of the game and how everything works just keep on playing it and u might just figure out a way to grow and hunt.

I'm going to get jestered a lot from the fan-bois for this review, but F it. The people need to know about this.

The devs are in over their heads with this game. Scope creep is real and its clear that they cannot keep the ship floating for much longer without a giant overhaul.

To begin, when you first buy the game and load it up, you're going to load into legacy that isn't updated anymore and is several updates behind. ... like what?

You have to activate the beta of the game to play to any means with people and with the dinos that people actually want to play as.

AI is just broken. Just broken. The re-spawn timers aren't working as they should. You can go literally 2 hours without seeing another player or AI, and at that time, your hunger has just either killed you totally or you're on the brink of it. "but its a pvp game" Stfu, you need the AI as a baby or as a small meal to keep you going between the constant pvping you have to do just to enjoy the game. AI is a core part of the game and its just utterly broken asf.

Low hunger meter means that your stam takes three times as long to refill, leaving you just totally useless. so now you have to move 50 feet only to rest again for another 5-10 minutes (depending on size) to refill stam just to be able to move and hope you can find food. like WTF even is this? Don't even get me started on the 'broken bones' feature that is just... laughable.

Sever crashes several times a day where your dino can just be killed instantly after reloading. also sitting in a queue to load into the server for almost 45 minutes only to load under the map where your only option is to Alt+F4 to get out and sit back in the queue again for another 45+ minutes just to log in and see that something went wrong and killed your dino during those glitches and now you gotta start over. That's SUPER fun!

Or, the fact that its so poorly optimized that even on a really high end computer, the game RARELY lets you get above 45 FPS. If you try and adjust any of the settings, the game will force a restart where, you guessed it, gotta sit again for 45 minutes. Funnnnnnnn, right?

The devs are ultra slow on updates, and honestly what they are focusing on isn't what the community wants.
This is made so abundantly clear on The Isle Discord channel. 100+ posts about fixing x or y feature only for the devs to totally ignore it and focus on the next dino that gets released. Like who cares about elder skins? Why don't you fix the core features before adding more stuff to bug out later?

Even on sale, I wouldn't suggest buying this game. It isn't even nearly close to actually being worth the price it is, and for as long as this game has been in development, its clear that its never going to get past that EA tag on steam.

Sorry, but - The Isle devs, you **** the bed.

Do better.

Came back to the game with some new friends and cant choose a spawn location (Evrima), so we spend almost a couple of hours looking for each other to no avail. This sucks.

They refunded it.

I've played just over 20 hours of the game so far, while visually it looks great, there are many reasons I wouldn't recommend it in its current state. In all of those 20 hours I encountered maybe 5 other players on a mostly 100/100 population server. The world feels completely dead and empty. I personally think the game would benefit by having many ai dinosaurs to help make it feel alive. It feels like the developers have built a level in unreal engine, put in some playable characters and that's about it (balance and abilities aside). Imagine playing unreal tournament or counter strike with no other players 99% of the time.

I hyped myself up for it by watching their trailers, and by watching youtubers play the game. However, the trailers do not accurately depict the gameplay and the youtubers must edit out days or many hours of not seeing or encountering other players to make it seem like there is more action than there really is.

An example of what I mean , I played the crocodile, I started in a swamp. Visually the swamp looks great, the crocodile model and sounds are fantastic, movement feels good. You dive underwater to absolutely nothing. No fish, nothing swimming around like there would be in a real swamp. Just an empty environment. I starved the first few times I attempted to play. Eventually I found the schools of fish, which appear to be spawned on a single point with preset animation like the fishing nodes in world of warcraft from 2003. Eventually I found some large fish but the AI is frantic and immediately runs away from you at top speed and I found it not worth the effort to chase them. Other than that, there is nothing else.

I do understand the purpose of the game is to eat other players if you are playing a carnivore, but surely there should be a compromise where there are more ai creatures wandering around like in their familiar faces video. I should say there are goats, boars and other creatures like that but they are few and far between. Again, like my analogy before it feels like joining a counter strike server with no one else playing.

I'm going to give it one more try as a different creature and head to the migration zone to see if I can actually encounter other players, but I feel like i'm still not going to see players often enough to be worth the time. Having said all that, it runs better than Ark on my machine at least.

One last point, I had roped a few friends into trying the game as well, there was no way for us to spawn together as a pack of raptors and our hour and a bit play session we were running around just trying to find each other and were dying from starvation, it was just frustrating and boring , the others refunded the game and I regretted recommending it to them first place. And again, none of us saw anyone else with 90/100 people on the server.

I wish the devs well and hope they continue working on the game and can improve these issues.

I should also note I have only played on the evrima branch as I had read that is the version of the game being actively developed.

UPDATE-
So I stuck with the game because there was something about it that I kept wanting to come back to. All my previous gripes still apply, however the longer I stuck with it I started seeing more and more players. So I would tentatively say its worth a try IF you have the patience for it. Changing my review to recommended.

I really wish to recommend this game, however in its current state it is a massive waste of money. In the 9 years of this games existance (Released in 2015) it has been in early access limbo. The game has had 3 full re-imaginings. I don't mean the art style changes or something I mean it in the terms of it may as well be a completely different game. Each time the game gets better sure I do give them that credit however everytime the game looses more playable creatures and each time the devs become more insufferable. I write this review as they currently delete reviews, and take away content creator badges for asking to revert a update that makes games crash every 10 minutes. If anyone ever so slightly critize them, you either get warned, banned, or attacked by people for no apparent reason. Their justification is that it is an early access game, an early access game in development for 9 whole years. A early access game that takes entire years for a singular creature to be added to the game. At this point it is not worth giving them more money. If, further down in development this game is in a proper state I may change this review, I also hope that the devs start taking critizism more professionally instead of warning and banning people because they want the servers not to crash every 10 minutes.

Had a lot of fun playing this game on Spiro, but now with the new map and every single update the game becomes less and less fun and ever more broken, the new map really seemed like the start of the end with every update being worse than the last.

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME

I had very high hopes for this game when it came out in 2015. At the time it was still new and fresh, so I made the decision to wait until the developers had added a bit more and improved the game. After nearly 9 years, I finally decided to make the purchase and try it out for myself. Upon installing the game and opening it for the first time, I was met with a black screen. Strike one. After several google searches and a few youtube videos I was informed that if you wanted to play the game you would have to go into your steam files and directly run the .exe file. It worked, I was in and I was on my way.

I know the game has never advertised having any PvE experience but I thought maybe after 9 years they have added something for people who dont want to get immediately wrecked by a large dinosaur that someone has been playing for who knows how long. Nope, Strike 2. Then after realizing the base version of the game is absolute garbage, I dove a little deeper to find Evrima, and downloaded the version to see if it was any better, and it was, barely. The graphics were nicer, there were a few more options for Dinos and some small tweaks to the UI, cool.

The real killer was afer joining a "official" server, starting out as a smaller juvenile dino, I begin to starve. No problem right? Wrong. After looking around for some for of food just to stay alive in the game(which took around 30 mins), I find a chicken in a heavily jungled area. Then because the dinosaur is so small, Id go to chase the chicken and Id lose it due to being so small and not able to see anything in the underbrush. STRIKE 3.

This game is not fun and it seems like the development team is very unorganized and perhaps understaffed. I even went to check their discord, facebook, and website and all are down or invites are invalid. This game had an amazing concept but unfortunately I am deeply disappointed with the experience I have had and Im sure many others are as well.

if you want to play evirma, ask in the discord if your computer can run it before buying it :/
spec requirements have gone up for it.

So apparently there is no solo PvE, i was expecting a solo PvE mod in the likes of Ancestors, but every people in chat told me that AI was just there for eat and dont represent any danger, and that this game is 95% PvP. I'm too old for PvP games, i find coop and solo much more interesting. So until they add a solo experience, i can't review this game well, a big miss for this game in my opinion.

Game has been in development for 8+years now, had good progress for awhile only for the devs to completely start over without stating it anywhere on the store page, leaving the "Live Branch" to rot with the majority of the roster of dinosaurs. Not only do you have to search how to get into the evrima test branch for new content, it also runs poorly on most mid tier pcs, let alone the ones in the recommended specs and failing to update it in the slightest.

Overall the balance is awful in the newest updates, constantly playing favourites and bias towards certain creatures, such as nerfing carno into the ground so people only play cerato.

The game really needs more of the team to help it succeed, which yeah isn't always possible but when the isle dev team was larger a couple years ago, we got way more updates, instead of just stagnant progression.

Honestly in it's current state, I would never recommend this game, if you want a regularly updated dinosaur survival game, just go play path of titans.

I like the game but it’s annoying
as a new player cool game
just sucks it keeps crashing
Dev Team really need fix the error
game been in early Access for 8 years
I feel like I just wasted my money
I feel more like a Beta Tester
I'm not a player in this game
Please don’t buy this game

Love the game play and the design of the game pluss when playing evrima the graphics are really good. Side note better hide when your small or your gonna be a nice snack for a bigger dino.

Specifically talking about evrima, this sucks. They themselves have said they don't cater to players while also being upset when said players criticize their game. They wont listen to the community. Each update breaks some crazy things that you wouldn't even imagine happening. The Halloween event was empty because of the horrid updates.

These dinosaur survival game devs still haven't figured out a fun and compelling gameplay loop that actually incorporates PvE elements in to supplement the PvP world. Instead, we get an empty walking simulator with permadeath that has you waiting in a bush for 5-10 hours before you can participate in the game's only activity (PvP) with nothing to do in between except drink water and stare at pixelated grass and foliage. Even fixing the game's horrible optimization and ridiculous balancing won't be enough if they can't nail the gameplay and give people a reason to keep playing. I can't get my friends to want to play through this slog and the ones that did quit a couple of days in and I can't get them to return and I don't blame them. I genuinely want this game to have a future but if the developers don't stop acting like they're better than everyone else and finish the product we paid for, it can stay in the past with the dinosaurs.

I really really want to enjoy this game and give good review as I've spent almost 1000 hours on this game but I just can't at it's current state. The game has it's plus and cons - like every game. But there are some things I truly just don't understand right now. I might update this review later on if things take a better turn (unless I get banned for leaving this negative review as I've understood from the community lol).

Things I find bad at their current state:
1: The performance issues are awful, they truly are.
2: The devs are changing things that were ok at some point and now some of them are just really bad. E.g. I guess they wanted more interaction between players so they've reduced AI _BUT_ they also disabled a chance to pick your spawn point -> now you run in dead areas of map without finding any players OR AI and either die of mixpackers or hunger, trying to work your way to the hot spots you know you could find food from. Starving is the most frustrating and biggest problem for me right now, especially if I manage to grow my dino for hours to a full grown state and then I die because there is literally no food anywhere.
3: I've run into SO many cheaters in this game (I know right, cheaters in a DINOSARU sim?!) The reporting system is utter **** as you need to report trough Discord (there is no option to report trough game) and you should be recording your gameplay to prove that you died to a cheater. Like. Why is it so hard to make a report system ingame? By the time you maybe manage to start recording the game, you're already dead because of the cheater. It's ridiculous and so frustrating because first you grow your dinosaur literally for HOURS and die to a cheater and nobody gives a **** and that's basically your own fault because YoU DidN'T ReCoRd YOuR GamEPlaY. Duh. Also, if you try to warn other players on official Discord server of the cheater and tell their ingame location, your messages will be deleted. :)) So have fun dying to a cheater whom are free to roam around the map without any punishment at all!
4: Mixpackers are annoying problem too, as there are no rules at all for them on Official Servers. I truly would like to play on Official Servers as the community servers usually have way too much rules. But I guess this is just a me-problem. (Somehow I just thought the game was supposed to be somewhat realistic but maybe the herbivores and carnivores really did mixpack back in their days! *laughs in dinosaur*)
5: The queue times to servers are insane sometimes. When a new patch gets launched, DO NOT expect to get on a server even within hours. I don't understand why there ain't no more Official Servers as there is always queue to the existing ones, especially when new patches come out?? Queuing on normal days takes usually anything from 15-40 mins which is insane as your game will probably get bugged at some point so you need to restart and do the queuing all over again.
6: I think most of the people literally only want new dinos and performance issues to be fixed, but instead we are getting reworked maps etc. and the reworks are just not good. We still don't have got the elderly system either which I've been waiting for years.

I don't know. I really love and hate this game at the same time. I've found some amazing people to play with from this game though. I think it's the only good thing right now. I didn't want to write a review earlier but it just has been a big downhill for a while now. I'd recommend people to wait for the game to be more balanced in every possible way before getting it. As said, I might update this review later on.

I have 15 minutes of gameplay. It was great spending them and at least 30 mins more to read how to make this game to start. Go do this, go delete this file, open with note pad write -1 instead of 0 and etc. It was a great experience, but I would love someday to be able to start it and play for real.

P.s. Solve your problem as said above I would love to play your game for real, without the need of me becoming a developer myself.

I don't write reviews, and there was a time when I loved this game. I'm telling you right now, do not spend a second or a dime playing this. Its a total waste of your time and appreciation. The developers are completely delusional and clearly don't play the product they are developing. Mixpacking (playing different species, talking on discord, indiscriminately ganking and removing the few functional aspects of balance the game has) is completely ruining the game across all servers i've wasted my time on this week. There is no plan to resolve this ridiculous, unintended issue, and no acknowledgement from the devs, this will only will continue to get worse and it's already made the game unplayable. You will spend most of your time as a new player running around wondering where everyone is only to realize they are all in the same area of this needlessly large map, actively destroying the server with their play, then you will die over and over again, never getting the satisfaction of a good fight. If you'd like to wait 10-40 to get into your server, spend time learning an unbalanced system, struggle with sudden disgusting FPS drops (100 to 5) due to player density, and if you are ambitious attempt to deal with an echochamber kool-aid drinking community led by devs that truly don't care about glaring issues, then welcome to paradise. This is a poorly optimized time gambling game, made exponentially worse by a degenerate community. All potential is overshadowed by how miserable this experience has become, and it's truly a shame. Trust me, and do not start thinking it's going to get better. It's only getting worse. And it's a massive shame.

developers are stinky and the game would be better if the developers listened to the community more and stopped making things worse, the game is alright :)

Not now. ping gets to 180 out of no where. Queue time is crazy and servers sometimes just dont work.