All of which far too quickly leads you to ARK Items the game’s other half, a repellant wave shooter that’s at odds with the pre-established tone. Ark Park’s barebones action offering includes two maps spread across six levels of increasing difficulty that task you with defending a faulty brain-manipulating beacon that the park’s creatures are intent on destroying in their fleeting moments of mental freedom. With the sobering knowledge that the miraculous creatures you basked in the company of just moments ago were in fact slaves, you now have to mercilessly gun them down with dual-wielding weapons and mandatory slow-mo kills. It’s a repulsively more manufactured side of an otherwise refreshingly positive experience.
Moral contradictions aside, this section of the game is thrill-free, with its bare-bones content criminally padded out by the monotony of a crafting system that feels shoved in to tick boxes (weapons even degrade over time, forcing you back into the aforementioned grind). The game doesn’t even have the kind of longevity to sustain these survival-focused mechanics: you can race through all but the last of the levels as soon as you unlock two machine guns almost thought-free.