Evolve is the perfect name for Turtle Rock Studios’ newest first person shooter. It works on so many levels. For one, it’s the natural evolution from the game that put them on the spotlight, Left4Dead. As a team of four cooperatively playing humans, it’s your task to defeat a continuously growing monster who happens to also be controlled by another player. It’s certainly an interesting concept for a multiplayer game that worked its magic on me when I sat down to play it at E3.
The team of four is comprised of a gruff assault soldier, tasked with damaging the beast, while the trapper lays down a force field to contain the fight within, as well as ‘de-buff’ the enemy and track it, all in conjunction with a medic and support, who both heal the party and give them powers beneficial to their own class.
Having a team with only one of each type of unit brings out the heavy need to cooperate and communicate in order to be successful. Like Left4Dead, it’s extremely difficult to brute force your way through the fights, and if each class doesn’t do its job, the team will no doubt get a game over right away.
That’s much to do with how the monster play works, too. Being a monster forces you to start out in a relatively weak form, having you feed on small animals and grow, weighing in the balance of hunter and prey with the enemy team. So far, only two monster types were revealed, the Kraken and Goliath, with 2K keeping a closed lid on the final number. I got to get killed by a Kraken during our playable session.
The demo worked well, mostly due to the constant direction given by the 2K folks at the show, who coached us at our jobs. That was all following a quick video which explained our skills somewhat. Given that the majority of people who play videogames are considered to have zero low attention spans, the help was welcome. As a trapper, I was able to do my job satisfactorily somewhat, even if we ended up losing.
There are still many questions left on my mind about Evolve, mostly involving how the game can be fun for the hunting party in the long run, since the monster gets strong really quickly, and thus practically impossible to kill.
We’re still to get any word on the overall game that it comprises. Safe to say, the playable demo was very well put together. It was certainly enough to put Evolve in my personal radar, due to my personal disposition to cooperative online games.
The wait for this game won’t be for long and there’s bound to be a wave of info coming our way over the next weeks. Evolve is set to come out October 21st for Xbox One, Playstation 4 and PC.
