Balance. Balance is key. So when the marketing slogan and tagline for your game is “4V1” you really, really need to get it right. Evolve’s biggest triumph then, is that it’s almost there. It’s almost a perfectly balanced game (though that also depends on how well your teammates, or your opposition, are playing), but in my most recent experience with Evolve, where every game mode, every map and the final hunters were revealed, we had solid teams, decent communication and reasonable opposition most of the time.

By and large each encounter and mode we played felt pretty well handled from a balance perspective, though our final jaunt through one of the most ambitious modes revealed, “Evacuation”, left our four consecutive wins against the monster somewhat meaningless in the final part of its five-day setup where the handicap system was stacked four times against us and the monster player -- a Frenchie I’m not afraid to say was horrible at the game -- emerged unbelievably triumphant. To be fair, we had a player out for the first part of the round and so our medic was AI-controlled, which may have impacted our performance overall, but it still didn’t feel right. It’s not a huge issue though, because 2K graciously gave Turtle Rock a huge nod in the delay department and while the game was due to hit us this gone October, it’s new delivery address of February next year means balance issues like that should be ironed out.



On those modes though, here’s what we learnt: alongside Hunt -- the base mode the studio has been showcasing since the game’s unveiling which pits the four hunters against the one monster -- there’s also Rescue, Nest and Defend.

Rescue contextually splits up NPC humans into lost groups scattered about the map. Hunters need to find them and lead them to an extraction point while the monster, ceremoniously, is required to find and kill (or eat) them. The first side to kill or rescue six NPCs wins.

Nest was probably my favourite standalone mode because as the monster, you can actually hatch an egg and then have an AI-controlled Goliath minion by your side, regardless of the monster you chose to play as. This minion can’t level up at all, and is a beta to your alpha monster, but he’s also very aggro. The map is riddled with Goliath eggs and the hunters, as you’ve probably guessed, need to destroy the eggs for their own win scenario. Destroy six eggs and any minion that has been hatched (the monster can hatch a new minion when the previous one has been killed) and the round is won. You don’t need to kill the main monster outright at all.

Defend then, tasks the humans with defending three power generators while hordes of AI Goliath beta minions ‘creep’ the map and attack the generators. The player-controlled monster starts as stage three and needs to keep the hunters busy while its horde buddies work on the generators. The balance here is that the humans can respawn and be back in the map within 30 seconds of death -- a much quicker respawn system than in any of the other modes. Defend also has its own unique maps which makes it a very different-feeling mode than any of the others -- there’s less verticality which grounds the conflict and also makes it harder to splinter the hunters. It’s also the closing round in the game’s Evacuation mode I touched on earlier.



Evacuation is what you could lightly call Evolve’s campaign. It should be said the whole game can be played with just yourself and every other role filled by an AI companion. So even if you’re not really a multiplayer or co-op type of person, the game still caters to you. And in Evacuation, you get a unique and different experience every time -- friends or solo. It takes place across five in-game days, each day basically being a round until the fifth Defend round I mentioned above. The other four days can be any other mode: Hunt, Rescue or Nest, and they’re voted on by the playing group in between rounds/days. The progression and purpose of a five-day jaunt is that each map can offer up an interesting number of dynamic variables that, depending on the winning side and how they won or interacted with the map, will result in the next round having a persistent perk for the winning team, which is a negative for the losing side.

An example of this is one map has a caught Goliath in a cage dangling from a structure. If the monster wins that round, in the next round that locked-up Goliath is now free, and he’s not a beta minion but a full AI-controlled alpha capable of Evolving and generally fucking up everyone’s shit. Imagine then, if the next mode is Nest where you can hatch a beta minion and then all of a sudden four hunters are now dealing with three monsters. There are some 800,000 possible combinations and outcomes in this mode, and the average play-time is roughly an hour or so in the real-world.

The point of Evacuation is to tie all of the modes together and to offer players a dynamic experience each and every time. The team looks at it as their version of a Raid, though it’s hardly that hardcore. There’s an auto-balancing system in place so anyone who wins a game consecutively will have auto-balance blocks stacked against them in the next round. Animals in the game-world might be more aggressive to the dominant team or the losing side will have other advantages to ensure no one is effectively being steamrolled and therefore not having a good time.



All of the new maps we played on were spectacularly designed and look gorgeous. Random and dynamic weather means they also never feel the same twice and there’s just a real sense of this world around you being alive. Nothing on the planet Sheer is nice to you, but everything does serve a functioning purpose. It’s almost a shame there’s no more dedicated story mode to help flesh this place out, because all of the characters are brimming with colourful personality and the game-world itself feels alien and mysterious, which serves to bolster its myriad dangers and interactive points of interest.

The final four hunters revealed were, apparently, actually the first four characters the team designed. They’re the last you’ll unlock in its progression system too, and feature some pretty sweet abilities and weapons. I found myself gravitating more and more to the new Support character Cabot because his rail-guncannon is glorious -- it can fire clear across the map and if its round hits any object it passes through it but at a spread, sort of like a shotgun spray. Couple this weapon with his Dust Tagging ability, that allows you to see the target through walls and objects and you have a pretty devastating combination. He also has a Damage Amplifier that paints the target and boosts your teammates’ current level of damage as long as you keep it on the monster. His leather flight jacket is cool, too.

There’s also the new Medic, Caira who I didn’t get to play as, but she packs some pretty sweet gear that includes a grenade launcher that fires either healing grenades of napalm grenades. It makes her effective at long range in both healing and fighting. She has a speed boost ability too, that quickens the movement speed of anyone caught in its radius.



Abe is the new Trapper class and looks more like he could have just stepped off the set of Deadwood. He has a shotgun but it can actually be effective even at long range provided you maintain a steady rate of fire and don’t spam it. His tracking dart is also really handy for any fleeing monster, especially if you have Daisey in the team as well but its coolest feature is that shooting any wildlife with it, will still work if that wildlife is eaten by the monster. You can basically spray the game-world as soon as you drop in and a staging-hungry monster player will likely eat a tracking dart without even realising it. His potty-mouth is something I can really relate to, too.

The final fighter is Parnell, whose suit gives him the ability to trigger a “Super Soldier” perk. This will help him move more quickly, shoot faster and deal more damage, but it does impact his own health. His temporary shield can soak up damage though, so you can try and unify their uses, but as the Assault class you’re usually up close and dirty with the monster, so you really need a cool head to make sure any ability combos work and aren’t wasted. Cooldowns can be a bitch and a smart monster player can create decent space between themselves and the Assault player after certain abilities have been triggered. I spent a fair bit of time with Parnell and actually like him more than Hyde or Markov. He also has a sweet multi-fire rocket launcher that can be pretty devastating if aimed and used properly, especially on fleeing monsters.

How combinations of all the hunters, maps, modes and even monsters is going to play out once the game has been in the wild for a while is one of the most exciting things about Evolve. Learning of the new modes was a real confidence-booster because I was wracking my brain on what else the team could do beyond Hunt, and I’m actually glad they didn’t go down what seems like the obvious route of monster vs monster or hunters vs hunters. The game’s classes, characters, maps, modes and monsters have all been designed in such a meticulous way, you simply couldn’t do standard multiplayer modes. Instead, what we get is an ever-rewarding game designed to give you a different story to tell every time. I played something in the vicinity of at least three Evacuations with the Kraken, and roughly six or seven games as various other hunter classes. And it never felt repeated or the same twice. We even played multiple rounds of Rescue in one run through, and even they were never the same twice.



Evolve’s variety factor is through the roof. And there’s post-release content already lined up. No one is going to be gated from any of it though, even if you don’t buy into it, it just means you can’t select the monster or such (you’re still able to face him). This is easily the most excited I’ve ever been for a co-op or multiplayer experience, and at this juncture, with balance being the final thing to nail, it’s hard not to see the game’s current level of polish and progress as an immediate game-changer in the space. It’s monstrously ambitious, but I’m already trapped by it. February 2015 can’t come soon enough.

We have more Evolve content coming over the next week including captured gameplay footage from our time at Turtle Rock Studios, so stay tuned for more soon.