Evolve is the upcoming multiplayer first person shooter title from Turtle Rock Studio, the team behind the Left 4 Dead series gamers have come to know and love. The premise is simple: four players or “hunters” are tasked with hunting down a huge disastrous monster before the player in charge of the monster eats enough wild life to become powerful enough to destroy the hunter’s base or kill all four hunters. It plays as a sort of backwards cat-and-mouse type of game, where the cat is only able to hunt the mouse if he can hide from the mice for long enough.
Anyway, that’s besides the point. How the game is won as a team of hunters is all decided by team cooperation. Have a team that is all mic’d up and plays well together, and that monster is gone. Finding, hunting, trapping, and killing the enemy monster is an enormous ordeal that requires all four members to be working together to do. Have even one person who isn’t willing to work together and you may as well just lay down and die.
Well, maybe not that extreme. A solid team of two or three well-working hunters can take down a monster with a bit of luck and a lot of hard work, but it’s significantly harder. With the way online gaming is becoming these days, this puts Evolve in a very tight spot. You see, after spending quite a hefty chunk of time in Evolve’s Alpha & Beta stages, I came to realize something: this is an amazing game, an innovative game and a beautiful idea of a game… when it works that way. During my time with Evolve I played three types of matches, many with two close friends whose play styles we all understood, a few with just my close friend who I am wonderfully teamed with, and many by myself. Each time, as more and more people I actually knew fell away, so with it did my fun factor. While a few games ended with me meeting some amazing random players, many of them left me hearing nothing but echos as my call outs were returned with nothing but silence.
This is Evolve’s fatal flaw. Without a proper team or a good group of friends to play with, you’re left up to the mercy of random matching, and if those random matches don’t feel like talking to you, your team work will most likely go unmatched.
