I actually love this game. The whole aspect of it is amazing. Are there some problems and balancing issues? Yes, HOWEVER it is an early access game, the whole premise of an early access game is to be released for people to play, give honest reviews on what they think about the game as it stands in its current state, report any bugs or glitches in the game, balancing issues etc. This review is mainly going to be centered around the alien side game-play as that is what I mainly enjoy about this game. However I have played several matches as the mercs in both the open beta test and in its early access release.

Merc side review:
-Gameplay is very fun and fairly challenging, the horror aspect adds a nice little adrenaline rush and challenge on top of having to fight other mercs.
-Movement while a little wonky at first, is actually fairly realistic and immersive, way more so than call of duty where your gun stays at the ready all the time with little accuracy fall-off from shooting and turning to follow the guy you're shooting at.
-Loot-wise, the game is a little lacking at the moment, there's not a whole lot of variety for things that you can loot that are valuable enough to be a real game changer for the mercs, I'm talking about specifically monetary value of said items you can find, also there aren't that many alien related items to loot which is kind of the whole goal of the mercs is to get those items for the company that they work for. This is also being actively worked on and is stated in their roadmap which is available on their website and in game at the menu available for review at any time.
-Lights are both your best friend and worst enemy depending on the situation you're in. Lights give away your position to enemies but are also very important for fending off the alien players when they attack you. It's up to you the player to decide when to turn on the lights and turn them off.
Alien side gameplay:
-Great hud for viewing your available abilities and cool down times.
-While the aliens are very weak to light, they make up for it in their abilities if you use them correctly. This (admittedly very annoying) weakness makes you have to use your brain and real strategy to overcome this weakness and take out the merc players. a helpful hint is to wait until the player turns on their flashlight and then use your EMP to take out their light source and charge in for the kill with your claws.
-Abilities are your best tools, use them. Don't just charge in to fight mercs without using your abilities, if you do that you'll very rarely get a kill and just have a poor experience playing as the aliens. The abilities are VERY useful for getting kills. if you use them correctly you will be able to single handedly take out a group of mercs on your own while your alien companion fights their own people.
-You won't win every fight you try to take on, so don't get too upset that you keep failing to kill the mercs. Take time to properly assess the situation and determine whether or not that player is killable at your current level of energy and available abilities. I've killed really geared players right off the rip from judging their current situation correctly with the most basic abilities. Just take a moment to analyze the situation, your surroundings, their gear, the nearest light switch and where they might go during a direct confrontation. Your goal is to get them panicked so they fumble on their execution of trying to fend you off.
-There are some visual bugs and glitches that still occur but they are currently being worked on, one such bug is that occasionally when you take damage from light the animation of taking light damage will be visible to both you and everyone else on the map and your alien will be screeching the whole time until you die and reset. Sometimes if you try to go invisible right before dying to light or another form of damage, you respawn invisible and might not notice unless you look at your energy bar and hud. That's the only ones I've really found so far since its early access release but I will probably find more in the future. It's an early access game, this stuff happens all the time in early access games. Report it properly so it can get fixed instead of complaining and doing nothing to try and help fix it.

All in all, this game has it's flaws. However the devs seem to be really adamant about fixing any issues and seem really passionate about adding more new and interesting content for players to enjoy. The gameplay itself is really fun and enjoyable if you give it a little effort to learn the mechanics properly and utilize what you have at your disposal to your advantage. I personally can't wait to see what kinds of mutations you can give the aliens to give you another edge against the mercs. Personally I would like to be able to talk to or taunt the players as an alien. Imagine being a human and just hearing a distorted alien voice trying to lure you to it. The sheer amount of possibilities for it are near endless, because other than talking to your teammate as an alien, the voice chat serves no purpose, if you're playing with a friend it really has no purpose then. Why talk in game where you have to press a button to communicate when you could just use discord to communicate, rendering the function useless to you.

I do recommend this game to anyone who enjoys looter shooters but wants something a little different to all the other games emerging in the genre lately. Give it a chance, and help the devs make this game better for more people to enjoy.

This is my second account that I've used to play Ark and it only has 716 hours on it. My other one had over 1500 hours on it, while I can say that Ark is a good game it comes with it's downsides like requiring 338GB of disk space with all of the added DLC's and then an additional amount of storage to allow for updates. however this is one of my all time favorite survival games because of the following reasons:
1. DINOSAWERS!
2. TAMING DINOSAWERS!!
3. Many technological enhancements added so you can advance and still have awesome DINOSAWERS!!!
4. Adjustable times for taming DINOSAWERS!!!!
5. Many different creatures that aren't DINOSAWERS but are still cool in their own ways!!!!!
6. Many more other reasons I can't be bothered to state because I'm too busy looking at and taming new DINOSAWERS!!!!!!
Yeah anyways Ark is fun but still a challenging game that I would definitely recommend for people looking to get a game that allows you to tame DINOSAWERS and advance with your own buddies and make tribes that can take down even the biggest of evil bosses :D