Hunting giant monsters with your friends or being a giant monster hell-bent on destroying your friends sounds like an excellent pitch for an online multiplayer game to me. Evolve lets you hunt monsters and gives you the option to become the monster yourself if you feel like it.
Is it any good? I’ll be running a proper review soon once I put a few more hours into it, but here are nine things that you can love about stomping around as a monster, or chasing after a monster that’s stomping around in Evolve.
1. Who doesn’t love asymmetric gameplay?
Like trying to push a wild boar across a tightrope, asymmetric games are a pig to balance, but when pulled off they are a spectacle. Evolve keeps things interesting by giving you four different hunter roles and then the option of swapping out to play as the gargantuan predatory monster on the other team.
Being the shooter or the shootee is a massively different experience.
When you swap between hunter and monster a couple of times, you realise that you’re not just playing different modes but almost entirely different genres. It’s remarkable that it slots together at all.
2. You get to see the same world from two different points of view
Going beyond just the ability to change camera angles, Evolve shifts more than a change of visual perspective. This is not just being able to zoom out, this is suddenly becoming bigger or smaller and experiencing the world completely differently as a result.
Games can be amazing at letting you see things from a different angle, but with Evolve you get to inhabit an increasingly familiar space in two completely different ways. This is probably just as well, seeing as there are not a massive number of maps to choose from.
3. You get to be Godzilla and feel what Godzilla feels
My wife wandered in to the living room to see what was going on after I mournfully wailed at the TV “leave me alone! I’m just trying to eat all of the things!” whilst rocking gently back and forward. We’ve all seen monster films and have likely felt genuine pity for the monster at some point. When Godzilla gets pegged by a tank shell and roars out, you feel his pain. All he wants to do is get on with his day really.
Some monsters just want to be left alone in peace.
As the monster, in initial stages you are running away from these mean hunters that have come down to your home where you’re trying to find and eat your dinner and they keep doing horrible things like shoot at you whilst you’re trying to mutate into a more efficient killing machine. So inconsiderate.
4. Getting to experience panic and supremacy within 20 minutes
Games can ebb and flow quite happily, but I can think of few that do it as quickly as Evolve. I’ve played competitive online games before where it quickly becomes apparent who is going to win and then it’s a case of going through the motions. Maybe it’s just my inexperience, but so far Evolve seems much harder to read in the early stages.
Evolve lets hunter become hunted become hunter become dinner, all in the space of a remarkably short space of time.
5. Jumping out of your drop ship on to the planet
Evolve is nowhere near the first game to pull this trick, but standing ready in your drop ship ready to jump down into a hostile jungle world feels incredibly exciting. This also goes a long way to get you going for that first initial chase after the fleeing monster.
Sometimes the monster just looks so happy.
Jetpacks are nice, the mobility and speed at which you can move around the map is great, but this little opening to each level goes a really long way.
6. Unlocking and character progression
Some of us are a sucker for character progression and yes, ever since Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, every online shooter of any variety has had to include this, otherwise the secret gaming police come along and shut the developer down, but it still feels good.
Extra upgrades and a smattering of extra characters to unlock do a great job of just nudging you into that just-one-more-match mentality. Of course, RPG systems like this are a skinner box but so what. Sign me up to Wolrd of Skinner Box Online.
7. Being a sneaky monster
A large part of the middle of each match sees the monster desperately trying to hunt for its food and eat enough to get bigger, all the while being careful not to let the monster hunter team work out where it is. There is something inherently satisfying about creeping around so as not to leave tracks, doubling back on yourself and generally trying to outwit the hunters whilst you yourself hunt.
Just when you think you’re in a safe spot to eat, a mean hunter will come along and shoot you.
There’s also something quite comical about the monster sneaking around. It feels like maybe it’s just a little bit too big to be getting away with this.
8. I like DOTA 2, Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead and sometimes I can’t decide what to play
With Evolve, you don’t really have to decide whether you want to play DOTA 2, Team Fortress 2 or Left 4 Dead because it is essentially the mutant combination of all of those games.
You could argue that by taking on parts of those three famously popular multiplayer games that Evolve loses a certain degree of focus. It’s definitely not as anarchic and fun as Team Fortress 2, it’s nowhere near as deep as DOTA 2 (I’ve tried to get started with DOTA 2 and it makes me feel like an idiot) and it doesn’t have anywhere near the level of charm that Left 4 Dead had.
9. You probably won’t have played anything like this one before
To contradict point number 8, it’s highly likely that you’ve never played anything like Evolve before. I found out the other day that there’s a relatively famous Half Life 2 mod called The Hidden which did something similar with the four vs. one mechanic, but unless you’ve played that you’d be hard pressed to find anything like this.
Large parts of Evolve are clearly cribbed from other places, but they fit together in an unusual way.
Make no mistake, Evolve is by no means perfect and I intend to publish a proper review soon, but there is plenty about it to enjoy. I have been playing Evolve on the Playstation 4