The following impressions expressed in this preview are based upon what was played during Turtle Rock Studios’ Evolve Big Alpha over the last few days. It was tested on both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 and does not illustrate the final product in any way.
Turtle Rock Studios’ established its Multiplayer legacy with the highly addicting and teamwork-focused Multiplayer gameplay introduced in the Left 4 Dead franchise. These games had you and three other players fight against massive amounts of infected zombies by combining teamwork and gunplay. The Left 4 Dead games were remarkable high points for the Cooperative First-Person Shooter genre, and it shows with them being some of the most played co-op games to this day.
However, in its latest effort Evolve, Turtle Rock wants to build on what it has already sown in its previous work, but wants to give a lot more meaning to the game’s competitive element. Being heavily inspired by L4D’s Versus Multiplayer mode, Evolve puts four Hunters against a massive Monster in a 4v1 cooperative and competitive asymmetrical Multiplayer scenario, at least from what I saw while playing its Big Alpha. The developer promises that this upcoming title will contain a single-player campaign, but, from everything I have seen of it so far, it is putting a staggering amount of effort and attention towards its Multiplayer aspect, and rightfully so with its unique approach to it. That being said however, I am still very confused as to who this game will be for because, as an avid FPS fan as I am, I wasn’t as drawn into Evolve as I would’ve expected because it is a much passive experience that is heavily focused on strategy and teamwork. And that’s where I think it could really hurt the game in the long run.
Hopping into the Alpha, one of the first menus screens that pops up has the player select their preferred character class by ranking them in order of most preferred to least preferred, so that the game tries to find the best possible matches based on your role preferences, and that includes playing as the Monster as well. This is a great feature for players who want to keep using the strategies they are comfortable with, but it simply did not work in this Alpha build. Even if I had the Monster selected as my last character choice, I was put in matches where I had to use it. That is, four times in a row. Plus, it doesn’t help that there are some excruciatingly long loading times before getting into the match lobbies. It took upwards to five minutes before I could actually start playing any match on both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions of the Alpha, which, may I add, ran smoothly and looked great throughout my experience. Though the waiting must’ve been because of the high traffic on Turtle Rock’s servers for this Alpha test, I still found that very annoying. Hopefully it won’t be that long in the full release.
Let’s hunt some monsters!
The worst part is that, if you quit out of a game, you get to wait an additional 60 seconds before trying to find another match. Now, I can understand this kind of penalty when you quit out after the match already started as it puts the team at big disadvantage, but it still occurs when you simply back out of the pre-game lobby. Thankfully, you can join sessions-in-progress, so the disadvantage is only for a short period of time. The funny thing is that, at this time, I barely even played the game itself and was already frustrated by it. And that is never a good sign.
Once I was finally able to jump into some 4v1 action, everything became a little be more interesting. Evolve’s four Hunter classes, consisting of Assault, Medic, Trapper and Support, are all surprisingly well-balanced and complete each other in a very cool way. You cannot successfully vanquish the Monster without using all of those characters to their full potential: Confront the beast with the powerful Assault Character, help out your team with the Medic, trap and lure the Monster with the Trapper class and assist the team with the Support character. Each one has its own unique set of abilities, which has you adjust your playstyle every time you play as a different person. Sadly, because of the inconsistent character-matching system, I wasn’t able to try out every class, but your selected class will not be the defining factor of whether or not you win or lose the matches. It will depend on how well you can play as a team and communicate with each other to take down the menacing beast, or how well you can confront the Hunters if you are playing alone as the Monster. Because you get a little tutorial video on each class before the matches, which are greatly appreciated, you can easily adapt to their differences because you know what to expect out of it beforehand. Though the adaptation process doesn’t happen instantly, it is done fairly quickly because there isn’t anything significantly different with the core mechanics of the Hunter classes.
Trapping the Monster with the Trapper’s mobile arena is one of the keys for success in Evolve
Playing as the Monster however, is an entire different story. The perceptive is switched into Third-Person as your goal is to evolve your abilities to become more destructive and easily kill all of the Hunters within a short amount of time in between because, of course, the Hunters do respawn two minutes after their death. It is reckless to take on your prey head-on as you’ll get destroyed and overwhelmed very fast, and I learned my lesson quickly on that one. What you must do as the one of the Monster class is to kill and eat the AI-controlled creatures scattered around the map to level up your evolution stage and, ultimately, become stronger. This basically means that the opening minutes of any game in Evolve consist of wild goose chases for both sides. Nothing really happens for the first five to ten minutes of the matches because the Monster is constantly running away from the Hunters, while they are needlessly chasing after it. The main problem is that this aspect isn’t very well explained once you get control of the Monster, which led to me getting absolutely crushed because I simply did not know how to play with it the right way. And that goes for the Hunters as well because your gut reaction would be to rush and try to kill the enemy as fast as possible. All in all, I did not have as much fun while playing as the Monster as I did with the Hunters.
Furthermore, there is a big grinding aspect to Evolve that I did expect it would have, and is the reason why I don’t think it will appeal to the audience who prefers fast-paced and to-the-point First-Person Shooters. After finally coordinating strategies with various teammates and successfully winning matches, it finally occurred to me: Evolve works the same way as a MOBA (Massive Online Battle Arena) game. It’s all about beefing up your characters, setting up strategies, gaining map control with those enhanced abilities and using each of the Hunters’ or the Monster’s skills to their full capabilities in order to successfully vanquish the opponent. What I am trying to say is that it’s a slower game compared to your usual Call of Duty or Battlefield experiences, and involves no run-and-gun lone wolf action whatsoever.
With competitive team-based games such as League of Legends and DOTA 2 dominating the eSports scene, I am not surprised at all that Turtle Rock and 2K Games, which is Evolve’s publisher, want to explore that territory even more with a game that will capture the attention of a wider audience because of its First-Person Shooting nature. Yet, this could turn off a lot of people who are expecting an FPS where you simply kill a gigantic beast because only the 4v1 aspect has been marketed thoroughly and not the whole layer of passiveness and strategy involved behind it. Evolve could attract a totally new audience of players and could have strong eSport-like potential (Only need to figure out how teams will work in a 4v1 context), but it could also put off players who have enjoyed Turtle Rock’s previous work with Left 4 Dead and are expecting a similar experience out of Evolve. It comes back to the point I made earlier of how I don’t know who this game is for, and I am worried this will hurt Evolve’s reception and numbers in the end.
If you think about it, Evolve may be the next generation of MOBAs
As I prefaced at the top of this preview, this is all based around an Alpha that was mainly given out to test the game’s servers. All the criticism and concerns addressed in the previous paragraphs could be irrelevant come Evolve’s official release on February 10, 2015, but it is important to address those elements to compare the work-in-progress to the final product. Hopefully, it will be another great success to add to Turtle Rock’s legacy.
Have you had the chance to try out Evolve during its Big Alpha period? If so, tell us what you thought of it in the comments below and, as always, stay tuned to Gamer Headlines for all things gaming.
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