In a savage world of man vs nature, are you the hunter or the hunted? The creators of Left 4 Dead, Turtle Rock Studios, bring you Evolve, the next-generation of multiplayer shooters where four hunters face-off against a single, player-controlled monster. Stalk your prey, execute your attack and prove you are the apex predator in adrenaline-pumping 4V1 matches.
Release Update
The Day 1 DLC being shoveled out is downright comedic. Over $60 of skin packs alone, plus the season pass to boot. Without second thought, I now consider 2K a worse company than EA in every respect and will until EA does something incredibly stupid again. They obviously have zero respect for the consumer, with the full intention to nickle and dime you the consumer over every last pixel.
Alpha Review
Without the $60 price tag in consideration, it is generally a good game that will most likely be polished by release and is worth paying some attention to at the very least. Among many concerns though is a lack of content and customization in general, to make this more than a rinse & repeat sort of game like L4D. Granted the maps are pretty but that does not make up for their relatively small size and lacking variation between maps or in them, in general.
The length of any given match is short, making it feel though this is more of a showpiece or demo intended to present a concept rather than a full concept in itself. It may seem a stupid criticism given the primary objective is to hunt the monster but it ends up becoming boring after a while doing that one thing over and over again. It would do this game well to give players something to do aside from running in the general direction of the monster as it eats enough within a couple minutes to hit level 3.
Of course its badly optimized for the time being but as mentioned I doubt it'll be a problem in the official release, not even my rig can run it at the moment on anything more than Medium without any AA settings; otherwise stuttering like a madman and becoming unplayable. It does look pretty good though, on the highest settings at least but not better than most others released these days.
The pre-order bonus hints at the future of this game all too much, especially given the game's publisher. If a single monster pre-order bonus is a big deal, they're going to charge for every last bit of new content until it probably starts to outweigh the game's price; like Borderlands or other developers such as Relic. That's just greedy as **** and a way to artificially raise the price of the "full game." Considering the price for this generally repetitive game with limited content, I can't recomend it and nor will I consider buying it until a big price drop or Steam sale puts it down to maybe $20 or so.
An absolute beauty. It's unfortunate most mainstream 'gamers' who only latch onto whatever's most popular, completely ******* ruined it and screamed about the supposedly insane DLC- which caused even worse issues down the road. Day one DLC (which was literally skins)? Not enough content? MY ***. Few of those ******** even played the goddamn game. Give stage 1 a real shot. It's a game that requires deep thought, knowledge of game mechanics, and all in all, a great ************* game. Idiots wouldn't know a good game if it beat them to death.
A step in the right direction removing the paywall by making it F2P, and instead of hiding 50% of the content behind DLC they decided to make it all unlockable by playing the game daily. Its not overly grindy either.
However it still has pretty glaring issues from before:
- Matchmaking. Their system forces you to play a role you don't want to play. This is major negative thing and they should have fixed it before going f2p. Now you see people complaining again about matchmaking all the time.
- Social features. This game is lacking in this direction. You cannot add people to friends from within the game, there's no way. Steam overlay does not show the people you've recently played Evovle with.
- No spectator option. There is no way you can spectate a game in Evolve. People have been asking for this since launch. Correct me if I'm wrong here but I think they even said they were working on it.
- No hunter skins. I mean reall skins, not paint jobs. People have been sking for this since day one. Their response was - "No". When I came back to the game with f2p change I saw they finally introduced hunter skins, even though paint jobs only.
- Elementary thing like character display with abilities, perks, etc. There is none. It's ridicuolus. Why the hell? What were you thinking?
- These crates right. You don't even know what's inside those. They open automatically and you ususally get no notification.
They have taken this game in the right direction. Instead of just letting it die (had less than 100 active players to now more than 25'000 and growing) they have balanced the gameplay to make it more action oriented but it still carries over way to many of the non-existent features. Its clear that the problems it had before of them focusing so much on "sellable content" is still hurting the game by having missing core features.