Evolve preview: on the hunt for teamwork

I’ve been pretty excited about Evolve since the first time I saw it. Developer Turtle Rock has an impressive pedigree with the Left 4 Dead games, of course, but I’ve always liked the idea of asymmetrical multiplayer games, and Evolve also features cool sci-fi weapons and horrifying monsters. What’s not to like?

After playing a couple rounds of the game at PAX Prime in Seattle, I’m left to conclude: nothing.

(See: What makes Evolve the true next-gen game (VIDEO))

Evolve puts you either in the shoes of one of four players on a monster-hunting team or into the shoes of the monster itself for an asymmetrical battle to the death. The four players, each with a different class and different weapon loadouts depending on the specific character they picked (each class has several), are tasked with hunting the monster. The monster’s job is to evolve into a gargantuan beast and then murder all of the hunters.

I played the Support class and the character Hank for both rounds, meaning that my job was mostly to try to give my team a leg-up by doing things like shielding other players from damage and cloaking our team so that the monster couldn’t see us.

I played as this guy.

It quickly became apparent that teamwork is absolutely essential in Evolve. You do not want to meet the monster alone, and you definitely want to find it and put some damage down on it before it has the chance to get too powerful. In the first game, my team (me and several other fellow journalists) made both mistakes: we failed to find the monster until it was already level 3, and when we did find it, we were too far spread out—our medic was lagging behind and got slaughtered before any of us could make it back to save her.

After that, the monster—a Cthulhu-like beast called the Kraken—made quick work of us.

But we remained unfazed, because even when you get slaughtered, the game is pretty fun! The creepy sci-fi environment we were playing in was really immersive, and there’s a real tension in a game where you know a gigantic monster could be lurking around the next corner. We also all felt like we could do better now that we knew how the game worked. We were playing on a PC using Xbox One controllers, and the controls felt really natural even though the weapons are quite unconventional.

We fared better in our second round, because everyone on the team had a better understanding of their roles, and a newfound appreciation for how important it is to find the monster early, before it can get rolling by eating smaller creatures and evolving. I was able to spot the monster myself pretty quickly, and we rushed towards it as a team. Our trapper tried to pin it down under a dome, but it was able to escape with minimal damage.

As we continued to chase it across the eerily-dark forest of the demo, we fell into a kind of rhythm: our trapper tried to track and trap the monster, and then our assault would fly in to deal damage while our medic worked to heal him and I worked to shield him. We were able to chunk the monster’s health significantly doing that, but ultimately, the monster’s airborne mobility got the best of us again. In a particularly chaotic fight we were split for long enough that the medic and trapper went down, and the Kraken successfully pushed back the Assault and my attempts to revive them. Once it was 2v1, it was all over: two hunters aren’t going to be able to take down a monster.

Although in the end I walked away with two losses, I also had a lot of fun, and I’m really looking forward to playing the game more when it releases in February of next year (in case you hadn’t heard, it got delayed).