It takes a clever, competent monster to challenge Hunters who know every trick. It takes coordinated, acrobatic Hunters to keep pace with a fast, experienced monster. Tipping the scalesĮvolve also leans heavily on its matchmaking system. Evolve’s fun relies on the monster stirring up trouble. The objectives-shooting static eggs, moving to a waypoint and reviving AI, or in Defend, waiting for the monster to come to you-don’t generate fun in isolation. But there are also moments when these modes feel mundane. The monster must decide whether to attack colonists early on in Rescue, or to let the first few escape and spend the beginning of the match leveling up. The monster can sacrifice an egg in Nest to turn it into an AI-controlled Goliath minion. Short, map-specific cutscenes provide tiny payoffs after each win or loss.ĭespite their simplicity, Nest, Rescue, and Defend have some good tactical wrinkles. As I was getting the HP kicked out of me, my teammates were able to kill another pair of eggs. I’d put myself in a one-on-one cage match against a Kaiju. In one of my favorite Nest rounds I enclosed myself and the monster in the Orbital Arena, the Trapper’s class ability. Nest also prompts important choices around team composition, as it increases the utility of some Hunters’ abilities, like Bucket’s sentry guns. I like that the Hunters have to decide if, when, and how much to split up, a maneuver that makes them more vulnerable but means they’ll break the eggs more quickly. Nest, where the Hunters have to destroy six monster eggs scattered across the map, is probably my favorite. Other than Hunt, the three other modes within Evacuation (which can all be played individually), do an okay job of stimulating different playing styles and strategies. This format doesn’t address what I criticized at the beginning of this review-Evolve’s ephemeral nature-but it does at least form a bit of history between players and create the opportunity for comebacks, even if the specific events of a round rarely stick in your brain. Abomination omeletteĮvolve is best in Evacuation, where a group plays five successive rounds on a mix of maps and modes. This doesn’t jive with Evolve’s progression system, of course, which gates access to characters. A better solution for this would be a banning or drafting system, like Dota 2’s, where certain one monster or a few Hunters could be eliminated. I’d love to see his tracking dart duration (45 seconds) or range nerfed too. On the Hunter side, Abe’s stasis grenades are frustratingly hard to wriggle free from and can’t be destroyed. That said, if there’s anything that feels unbalanced, it’s the mobility and slipperiness of the Wraith-in the hands of a skilled player, you’ll be chasing for the entire match. Generally speaking this is the most compressed multiplayer FPS since Titanfall. It’s like playing Left 4 Dead’s Smoker at a graduate level. If you connect with a Hunter or wildlife, you’ll grab them, then pull them away from their friends and back to your original position. You aim yourself, fire, then close the linear distance like a rocket. Pulling off Wraith’s Abduction ability at its maximum range makes you feel like a horror movie monster and Robin Hood at the same time. It’s wonderfully annoying to the Hunters, and later on I figured out that I could use my doppelganger to kill wildlife too. I loved frustrating Hunters with the Wraith’s decoy ability, which makes you invisible as it spawns a weaker, AI-controlled mirror-Wraith for a few moments. More than the other two aliens, his movement style (hovering and lunging) and fragility encourages creative hit-and-run tactics. The monsters have their share of tough-but-fun movement techniques to master too.
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