Ark's summer event adds Hawaiian shirts, sunglasses, and squirt gun skins

What do Ark: Survival Evolved and Top Gun have in common? You'll have to watch the trailer above to find out, but I can tell you this much: Ark's Summer Bash is underway, and there's some solid reasons to hop into the dino survival game to check it out.

First, the price: Ark: Survival Evolved is 80% off, marked down to just $10 until June 9, if you somehow missed it when it was free on the Epic Store and want to scoop it up now. And until the end of the Summer Bash, which runs until July 14, dino breeding is boosted by 3X, and player XP, harvesting, and taming are all boosted by 4X. If you're the impatient type, it's a good time to level up and tame some dinos quickly.

Enough math. There's also a bunch of new summer skins like colorful Hawaiian shirts, Frisbee skins (they go on your boomerang), sunglasses, and squirt guns (which fit onto your flamethrower, so don't be surprised when you squeeze the trigger and fire comes out instead of water). There are a handful of new pets and emotes, too.

While visiting a crowded beach in real life is a bit out of the question these days due to COVID-19, at least you can have a festive beach party in Ark. The Summer Bash is live now.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.