The ultimate game of hunt or be hunted, Evolve, takes its players into the situation of one player controlled monster versus 4 player controlled humanoids in epic battles of survival. We were fascinated with this game so we decided to give you an introduction to Evolve: the battles happen on the fictional planet of Shear, a surreal place with stunning scenery, beautiful atmosphere and a truly marvelous soundtrack. The game starts out with the 4 humans hunting down the enormous beast and trying to stop it from devouring enough wild life in its struggle to become powerful enough to battle the hunters.
Evolve is not a game where you simply fight off in an epic showdown. At the beginning, the monster, despite it fearsome looks and big size is quite weak and needs to level up from killing and eating anything it can find. This gives the hunters a feeling of growing terror for every moment they can’t catch it. As far as the hunters are concerned, they use a large variety of gadgets and tools to track down, trap and kill the monster.
They can shoot tracking darts into wild-life so when the monster eats them they know its exact locations while it’s moving around. There are also unmanned drones you can send to scout around for you. These are two tools needed to get ahead of the monster as following its tracks of slaughter may often turn out to be too slow.
Monster Classes
Interestingly enough while the different monsters have very powerful combat abilities it’s often their more passive components that truly becomes their signatures. The Goliath is the brute who makes the ground tremble as he passes and will use his immense strength to leap up cliffs and outdistance the hunters. The Kraken uses its wings to fly and hover, while the Wraith teleports and creates clones of herself to deceive and outsmart her opponents. Finally, the last monster, the Behemoth (only available with the DLC), is the biggest monster and rolls around the map and creates nearly impossible to pass rock walls, but cannot jump because of its huge size.
Humanoid Classes
Now on the humans side there is 4 types of hunters, each with 3 playable classes. First of there is the trapper, the natural leader of the team as his main role is to find and trap the beast. If you choose to play a trapper, your job will be to outsmart the beast as it tries to do the same to you. If you’re playing against a clever monster it won’t just run a nice and easy path leading you straight to it as it’s sitting in the open devouring an animal, it will double back on itself creating confusing tracks, jump up cliffs and even crouch to hide its footprints.
The second hunter class is the Assault. As an assault, you carry the big guns, you follow merrily along until the trapper has located the beast (or maybe you found it yourself?) and you unleash living hell on it. Third we have the medic. Once the fight against the monster is underway you will find that the monster in fact is a monster of nightmares and without the medic your team is likely to die horrible deaths.
The medic can, therefore, be considered the pillar of any monster fighting team. The last playable role we present is the Support, a wildcard among the hunters. Its skills vary greatly among the different playable characters for this role: it can cloak your team, offer great combat utility or help your tracker find the monster. The type of support to take will greatly depend on the monster you’re hunting and what team mates you have.
Game-Play
Now Evolve have very tactically deep gameplay, but one common complaint is the progression system. You only start with 1 playable monster (the Goliath) and 4 hunters and much of the complexity of the game is not within reach from the get go. You will need to level up each monster and hunter to unlock all its perks which can take anywhere from a couple of days to weeks depending on your time and how good you are which is a true shame as the true glory of this game lies in its tactical depth.
To conclude our introduction to Evolve: it is a game that took the idea of hunt or be hunted and made an amazing gaming experience out of it. This won’t be an experience for everyone, as we understand a lot of players is looking for more straight forward action, but for the users who are looking for a game that emphasizes on the atmosphere of a true survival of the fittest we strongly recommend Evolve.
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