Far from a simple moniker, ‘Evolve’ is a succinct embodiment of what developer Turtle Rock is trying to do. Here’s a game that has been classified as a first-person shooter but brings so many new ideas to the table that the task of categorising it within existing genre archetypes feels futile and crude. Clearly, the motivation here is not to further empower the cynically-held belief that players want more of what they already know – a crime that the FPS genre is particularly guilty of popularising. Instead, the core elements underpinning the design of ‘traditional’ competitive games have been thrown out of the window. It’s not that such ideas have been declared stagnant or old-fashioned; they’ve been determined not fit for purpose within the context of what has been created here.
‘Asymmetrical’ is the buzzword hovering around Evolve like a mosquito attracted to a wound, with two teams of unequal personnel doing battle and establishing a design pillar around which everything else orbits. Given Turtle Rock’s previous work on Left 4 Dead such a direction comes as little surprise. In fact, the setup here can be read as a direct and logical exaggeration of Left 4 Dead. Humans versus monsters is still the idea, only this monster is bigger and more powerful than anything a zombie could hope to match. Similarly, these humans are more specialised than the office workers and college kids that tend to star during a zombie apocalypse.
Then there’s the intensity. If you were tactical enough, you might just be able to navigate past a horde of animated rotting corpses without triggering too much commotion. Evolve doesn’t give you such clandestine opportunities; its sadistic design principles are forever tempting and teasing humans and monster to come face-to-face. It’s a game that desires blood to be shed. To turn this desire into reality, Evolve’s primary game mode is dubbed ‘Hunt’: a four versus one contest in which the hunters seek out their monster prey. Teamwork is the key for the hunters, each serving up a staunchly individual set of talents that only reveal their true potential when used in combination throughout the group.
The monster is a lone wolf, seeking to grow through three stages of evolution with a view to becoming bigger and stronger before ripping its would-be killers apart. Both sides are predator and prey, an actuality that works to amplify the stress and unpredictability of encounters. The hunters’ best chance of success comes from catching the beast early, attacking while it’s still in its most immature evolutionary phase and taking advantage of its comparative lack of strength and health. Predictably, crucially, this is easier said than done.
Players commanding the monster get a head-start at the beginning of each round, the time wisely spent moving away from the hunters’ drop-in point and searching for the food required to evolve. Alien fauna litter the otherworldly maps, the smaller examples of which are easily dispatched and digested. Their consumption fills up a gauge that dictates when you can evolve to your next stage and most players will want to do so as quickly as possible.
Not so quickly, however, as you can easily give your position away. Monster tracks can be seen by hunters, unless their quarry is moving in the much slower ‘stealth’ mode. Flocks of birds rest across parts of the map and are easily disturbed, their panicked flight providing a valuable clue to hunters. Similarly, freshly-eaten carcasses are a magnet for carrion; their presence in an area revealing recent monster activity.
The hunters have more than their eyes and ears to rely on when it comes to tracking the monster; a set of gadgets and companions amplifying our lacklustre human senses. One hunter comes coupled with a reptilian dog of sorts that uses its sense of smell to lead you to the monster. Elsewhere, depending on which four characters you’ve assembled, you have access to aerial drones that can be flown around the map at high speed and provide a visual on the beast, motion sensors can be planted on the ground that trigger when passed over and a tranquiliser dart can slow the monster down when you see it.
Knowing the intricacies of your available tools/skills as a hunter is essential. Without learning your trade, you’re doomed to fail when facing up against any player with the slightest degree of monster talent. Hunters come in trapper, assault, support or medic varieties. As the name suggests, it’s the trapper’s role to trap the monster; a set of movement restricting harpoons and a time-limited impenetrable dome act as key aides for the job. The assault is all about dealing damage and, as such, is loaded with powerful weapons and mines. Support comes packed with a shield that can be focusing on allies from a distance, as well as a missile strike and less powerful weapons, while the medic is there to keep everyone alive.
Variations on each class are unlocked as you level up, but the basic concepts remain true no matter which tier you’re playing as. The four classes are so isolated in their playing style that each game must feature one of each type. You can’t, for example, play as a team of four assaults or three medics and a support. To do so would break the game entirely. The medic, for instance, can’t deal any direct damage and the assault needs to get so close to the monster in order to harm it that it would die swiftly without teammates to protect it and provide a distraction.
It’s a good idea to dedicate time to learning how each of the classes work even if you decide that you’re going to concentrate on
being the world’s best medic. By understanding the strengths and limitations of each hunter you are more readily able to put yourself in a position to allow your companions to do their jobs properly. It’s all well and good being able to whittle down the monster’s health as an assault, but without knowing exactly how close the medic needs to be in order to heal you you’re going to spend more time dead than alive.
As the monster, however, you can still use this teamwork requirement against the hunters. Dispatching of the medic first leaves the rest of the team incredibly vulnerable to attack, while removing the trapper from the equation gives you free rein to use all of your abilities unhindered. When you do manage to kill a hunter they enter a cool-down period of a couple of minutes that they must wait to pass before they can re-enter the fight. Killing all of them before they can return results in victory. Alternatively, should you reach the maximum level three stage of evolution then you can focus your attention on destroying a power relay that is present on each level.
It’s during the battle to destroy these relays that Evolve presents its most dramatic moments. As the hunters are given warning that the relay is newly vulnerable, their best tactic is to retreat towards it and wait in ambush until the monster shows its face. Level three monsters are extremely powerful and can kill individual hunters easily should they become isolated or fail to cooperate effectively, making hunter teamwork more vital than ever.
There are, however, no firm rules about how to act and it’s this that reveals Evolve to be a diverse and incredibly comprehensive experience. Instead of hiding and moving up the evolutionary ladder at the start of play, a particularly skilled monster player might instead choose to wait in ambush for the hunters to arrive. While level one monsters lack the strength of their level two and three brethren, they are much faster and their slighter stature makes them more difficult to spot. It’s entirely possible to stalk your prey one by one through stealth, delicately removing a whole skill set from the battlefield before the hunters know what’s hit them, crippling their effectiveness.
How you play is wholly determined by your personal ability, desires and the knowledge of those you’re playing against. Additionally, different maps offer different opportunities and approaches – learning each of the vast environments is just as important as learning your own abilities. This complexity has an uglier side, however. For all its achievements, Evolve is terrible at teaching you how to play. A couple of rushed tutorials highlight the basics of monster and hunter play, while a selection of optional video lessons provide more information, and we suggest you do go through these.
We live in a world of instant gratification gaming, particularly as far as first-person shooters are concerned. While Evolve is far from a typical shooter, it’s the shooter crowd that are naturally going to be drawn to it. By entirely separating the playing and learning elements, an unwelcome initial pacing is introduced that sees you having to sit through passive lessons in order to understand what you need to do and what might be potentially possible within the arena of play.
Of course, you can learn simply by throwing yourself in at the deep end and picking up information as you go. The problem with this, though, is that you’re invariably going to meet players with far greater ability than you along the way. Given the nature of Evolve, battles featuring unequally matched combatants are vicious and in no way entertaining. It’s entirely likely that a large swathe of players will be put off for life following a consistent early run of fatalities that are so swift that they offer nothing of educational value. Once you’ve got to grips with both the core and intricate concepts that support the ideas and interactions available here, Evolve shows itself to be one of the most rewarding and intelligent multiplayer games to have been released in a very long while. It’s no exaggeration to say that this is the most impressive multiplayer-only game to have been released into the ‘Triple-A’ space on this latest generation of consoles.
The pain that most new players have to go through in order to get there, though, will invariably limit its appeal. Evolve has more than enough quality and depth to satisfy an audience hungry for a fresh multiplayer outlook that they can commit to for the long-term, but the question of whether it will go truly mainstream is more difficult to answer. Then again, perhaps that’s the point. By not aiming its design at the mainstream – despite what publisher 2K’s aggressive marketing suggests to the contrary – Turtle Rock has delivered a game that the competitive multiplayer connoisseur can pour their effort into. Further, such players can feel secure in the understanding that the complexity hasn’t been comprised for the sake of courting as large an audience as possible.
Whatever the case, Evolve stands as a champion of forward-thinking game design that embraces risk and originality. For that alone, whether you end up enjoying it or not (but play with friends of a similar skill level and you surely will), Turtle Rock deserves respect.
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