Evolve

While it shows moments of brilliance when played with the right group, Evolve simply can't consistently promise that level of experience. Play with good friends or play as the monster - but anything else will leave you feeling irritated and unsatisfied.

An online experience of wildly fluctuating highs and lows that demands a lot but explains little. [Apr 2015, p.89]

Evolve has rare highs hidden amongst tedious lows. When the title hits its stride, it is easy to see why it was designed in this way

There's not something major wrong with Evolve, but it suffers from similar faults as Left 4 Dead did. Basically it's a title with a strong focus on collaboration, but which fails to vary its concept enough to make it entertaining in the long run. Evolve will probably get better when the players becomes more familiar with the characters. Right now it has a ways to go.

Admittedly, it can be hit and miss when paired up with AI players through matchmaking, but as with so many games, it can be pure gold when played with friends.

By locking away the other two monster classes at the beginning, Evolve needlessly gates off completely different styles of play that new players will want to experiment with immediately, if only to get a feel for competition. Even in the case of the hunters, the slow leveling and unlocking of new skills, perks, and characters feels needlessly complex in what could have been a simpler and more approachable game.

With the right people on your side, Evolve can be a surprising blast. However, get lumped with utter idiots, or the shoddy AI, and it quickly becomes very, very frustrating. [Issue#254, p.66]

There’s an ambitious and wonderfully tense multiplayer game hidden somewhere deep inside of Evolve, and on the rare occasions you can coax it out with perfectly balanced teams and a little luck, you’ll understand exactly what Turtle Rock was aiming for. More often than not, however, you’ll find yourself stuck in another dull and lengthy traipse through the jungle with an unsatisfying and lopsided payoff, made all the worse by a lack of substance or long-term appeal.

At launch, it feels neutered, and far too inconsistent to establish a lasting dominance on the multiplayer scene. [Apr 2015, p.110]

Evolve isn’t a bad game, per se, but the rage-inducing technical issues and design oversights, paired with a complete lack of heart-pumping “fight or flight” gameplay that the hype train and the Left 4 Dead series led me to expect have left me feeling unimaginably disappointed, cheated even, and I’m not even one of the countless people who had to pay more than $70 to find this out the hard way.

This is surely a game that'll only improve as its community stabilises, but right now it's hard to recommend unless you've got a group of willing friends.

The core gameplay is great, but everything surrounding it is problematic.

As it stands, it's a game that could really benefit from some additional content if it's to evolve into the next must-have multiplayer shooter.

Evolve should have been great. It isn't. Worse still is that its core idea feels as if it has been undermined by over-complication and, more disappointingly, the worst practices of modern publishing.