Evolve pre-release impressions: Finding balance in asymmetry

Editor's Note: Our full review of Evolve will go up in the days after the game launches on Tuesday to give us a chance to evaluate the servers and online competition in a real-world environment. We are also waiting tosee the significant changes promised for a 3GB day-one patch. These impressions are based on extensive play time with the alpha and beta test versions of the game, as well as "near final" preview code provided by the publisher in the weeks before launch.

Team-based games are a hard enough thing to get right when both teams have essentially the same selection of characters, weaponry, and tools to take out the other side. Even if a few of those options are too powerful, both sides at least have equal opportunity to take advantage of the broken options, leading to a boring-but-fair matchup between equals.

With a game like Evolve, the balancing is that much harderand that much more crucial. If either side in the battle between four hunters versus one super-powered monster is overpowered, theunderpowered side is going to be decidedly not fun to play in the long run. The developers at Turtle Rock have the unenviable task of pumping up one character so he's precisely competitive with four others, with the knowledge that a miss to either side could easily ruin the entire game.

So far, those developers seem to have done a pretty good job. In my early play-testing with pre-release versions of the game, both the monsters and the hunters have their strengths and exploitable weak points. More importantly, both sides are thrown into play situations that make the four-on-one skirmishes fresh and exciting.

Hunt mode, where the bulk of the pre-release focus for Evolve's various test builds has been, can essentially be broken down into two very distinct phases. The first phase is best described as hide-and-seek with guns. The monster, who gets a slight head start, tries to hide inthe dark, tree-strewn environments for long enough to eat some local wildlife and evolve into a more powerful force for the eventual battle. The hunters try to find the monster while he's still weak and easily killable.

My enjoyment of this phase of the game so far has depended entirely on which side of the divide I've been playing. As a monster, evading the hunters is an incredibly tense experience in which you have to constantly balance the need to keep moving with the need to stop and kill smaller creatures for power. You also have to be constantly on alert, masking your tracks by running through streams or sneaking short distancesand usinga radar-ping-style sniffing ability to highlight any hunters that might be nearby. In this tense mode, crashing into a loud wooden shack or setting off some noisy carrion birds is enough to make you jumpout of your skin and run for cover anew.

There's a wonderful freedom of movement to controlling the monsters, who seem generally faster than the hunters and can make use of a slowly recharging dash to get away even more quickly. The ability to climb up walls just by holding a button gives the monster an easy verticality that can't be matched by the slow, awkward jetpacks used by the hunters. Hiding as a monster really makes you feel like a feral beast being pursued by an unseen but inevitably encroaching force.

On the hunter side, I found the hunting part of Hunt mode to be much more frustrating. Finding the monster usually means hunting for the glowing tracks he leaves on the ground, but those tracks can be hard to find and easy to lose, especially if the monster knows what he's doing in covering them up. Some of the hunters have special abilities that can aid in the searchmost notably a super-smelling dog that can home in on the monster's locationbut none of these really make the hunt feel any less of a random walk through what are usually very dark environments.

I would spend a lot of time following tracks in one direction only to hear the monster set off an alarm way off in the other direction, making me wonder how fresh those tracks actually were. Or I'd set out for a far-off carrion bird call, only to get there and hear another call that was equally far away in some other direction. Half the time, it seems, I'd find the monster completely at random while aimlessly hunting for tracks without any clue about where I should go.

Then there's the matter of sticking together as a hunting party. This is manageable when playing with a group of friends who all have headsets, allowing you to coordinate the search. When playing with random strangers, though, this kind of team-based play is a total crapshoot. Often, your teammates won't have headsets, meaning you have to communicate using in-game "beacons" that point out particular areas on the map.

On each four-person team, there always seems to be at least one person who goes off in his or her own direction or lags behind to check out every bit of flora and fauna. Then there's the person who can'tquite seem to figure out how to use the jetpack to vault the wall everyone else just climbed. In a game that's so dependent on sticking togetherand where a monster can pick off a single, unaccompanied hunter with easethis becomesincredibly frustrating. Maybe this problem will be alleviated as the player community gets more refined and experienced. As it stands, though, I'd stick with playing the monster (or playing the decently robust single-player mode) unless you can play with people you know you can work with.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/02/evolve-pre-release-impressions-finding-balance-in-asymmetry/