Sometimes I’m not sure if my passion for gaming is dying, or if I’m just choosing really poor games to suit my lifestyle. I’ve realised I spend more time on both the PS4 and XboxOne watching video through the Plex and Youtube Apps. I got games with my Xbox I haven’t even looked at! And yet when I do play games, I feel cheated. I feel that “Next Generation” is really the same as other marketing bullshit like “Fresh Frozen” and “Organic”.

Evolve, the latest game added to my collection, feels like such a game. I’ve bought into the marketing hype and come out disappointed. Evolve is like a collection of everything from last generation scrambled up and packed as next generation. The four classes of tank, healer, support, and hunter is standard fare of any multiplayer game out in the last decade. The idea of 4 against 1 was introduced in games like Unreal and refined in Left4Dead. The witty banter mistakenly written to provide characterisation to dull, insipid character tropes has been here for as long as we’ve had 3D characters.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Evolve isn’t a poor game. It looks fantastic. The character models look amazing, and are highly detailed. For example, the way the robotic eye moves on Markov the tank is a nice little detail which would have been difficult and expensive (CPU wise) on previous generation machines. It’s just a pity you only ever see this kind of thing when you start the game. Sure, you see the other players when you’re playing the game, but you’re never close enough to see good detail, and there are usually so much other shit on the screen to actually bother to care. I get it, this is “next generation” so I should be impressed with the amount of effects and filters and animals and shiny which can be rendered on my screen. But it’s amazing that graphics and displays can be so detailed we can use them to see inside far away galaxies and into our own very cells, but yet I can’t tell if I’m shooting at an enemy, another team member, or a rock.

The game plays well enough too. The balance between the monster and the monster hunters feels fairly even. You can still take down a monster when it’s fully evolved as long as you have all members of your team alive. But speaking of monsters, this whole evolve thing is a crock. All that is happening is the monster levels up during the game. Big fucking deal. Like seriously, this is meant to be “evolution”? The same thing happens in Left4Dead.

Worse still, it doesn’t even feel like a threat. In Left4Dead, it was always scary when you see that alert flash up. You know that if you’re caught alone, you’re screwed. In Evolve, you see the warning and most of the time you haven’t even seen the monster! Maybe that’s just the sign of good monster playing, but yet the best games I’ve played is where the monster struggles against the players a couple of times. Playing as the monster, when you evolve, you get stronger and get to add points into the abilities you already have. So, during a good game, you might catch a player out on their own at level 1, kill them (each character has 3 resurrections and then are out of the round for good), then run off to evolve so you can take on the whole team later. The old cat and mouse. It’s a poor game when you don’t even see the cat.

A major issue is finding games and people to play with. The offline solo mode is reasonably similar to the online game. The game uses AI to fill in your roster of hunters and monsters, and you earn XP after a game. You can play Hunt, a one off match, or Evacuation, which is a series of 5 games. After each game, the world “evolves”, so if the monster wins, the next match he might have plants which can help it evolve faster, or if the hunters win turrets pop up in certain parts of the map. It’s not a terrible tacked on story mode which is good, but it’s not as fun as playing with other players.

However, finding those players seems difficult. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of people playing the game. That’s when the servers are up. I know that server downtime is to be expected in this day and age, and I don’t know if it was unfortunate timing or an ongoing issue, but on more than one occasion my game time was stymied by the servers being down. When the servers are running, it seems to take a long time to find games, and I find I’m always on with the same people. Again, it’s hard to tell if this is a feature and I’m matching with similar players, or if there just aren’t too many people playing. Those who do play also tend to leave their headsets off. There’s no communication. I guess it’s better than screaming kids dropping the N word, but still, in a game focussing on co-operation it’s annoying no one is communicating.

I think another major problem is the grind of the game. Yes, you level your monster up during games, but it’s only momentarily and as I said, it’s only upgrades to your existing form. No new powers, and you don’t even look that different. After the match you’re rewarded XP like every other game these days and you ever so slowly unlock slightly better upgrades and even more slowly, new monsters / characters. The new monsters and characters go through the same slow grind to upgrade their weapons and unlock more new characters. Why? This type of progression is taken from Dungeons and Dragons which is 40 years old now. Why do I have to start off with a shit character and grind to be better? Why haven’t we come up with a better system yet? This sense of false progression is becoming really tedious.

Here’s the other thing – this game has microtransactions, but they don’t help you overcome the progression blocks. Yes, I know everyone hates microtransactions, you should pay for the whole game, blah blah blah, but the old model of making money from games has collapsed due to the global economy, piracy, ease of distribution across networks, the pricing mechanism of App Stores and so on and so forth, so the games industry had to change their methods of making money or they would have vanished. It’s here now, if you don’t like it get over it.

However, what is annoying is when games don’t do it correctly, and this is what we should be focusing on criticising. Buying skins in a game which makes you grind to level up shows these guys have no idea how to properly monetise their game. Good monetisation comes from a well designed level flow which limits your progression and only prompts you to spend money when you get stuck or want to do something faster. If these skins allowed you to earn XP faster, or gave you unique but balanced abilities, sure, by all means put them in. But this is just pure nickel and dimeing and the resources wasted putting this together could have been used elsewhere in the game.

Conclusion
As I said, Evolve isn’t a poor game. It simply doesn’t live up to the expectations and the hype the “Next Generation” promised us. And I think people who got the game quickly realised this and stopped playing. Its progression system seems deliberately tedious, meaning even the people love it dropped off perhaps quicker than they would have in other situations.

Pros
Well balanced 4 versus 1 gameplay
Great graphics

Cons
Absolutely nothing next generation on offer apart from the graphics
Progression too tedious
Can’t find people to play with online
Crap microtransations

70/100