PAX East: Hunting the Goliath. Evolve Hands-on Impressions

By Marcus Jones Posted on April 19, 2014

My time with the game at PAX East proved to me that without teamwork, Evolve will be impossible for hunters to complete. Given our roles, I eagerly jumped into the game as the Medic.

The mission started with players dropping onto the planet, hunting for the creature. Players must track it down in the early stages of the game, using tracks left in the mud or even startled flocks of birds. The fun begins when hunters actually manage to sight the beast and begin their assault on it. During that tracking time though, the creature is moving about the map and is able to continue working on their evolution by devouring the other creatures present. While we did manage to take off the creature’s armor after a tense standoff, it escaped back into the jungle while we nursed our wounds.

We started hunting the creature back down, but our real trouble began when a teammate wandered off on his own. The world’s environment is no walk in the park, with giant man-eating crocodile creatures, huge flesh eating plants, and more stalking players in the alien jungles. My intrepid teammate fell into what can only be described as a pit of death, a water filled crevasse guarded by one of the giant crocodile creatures. We jumped down to help him, but in that time the player-controlled creature reached Tier 3 and followed us into the watery arena. It became a systematic slaughter that left the trapper alive while the rest of us waited for a respawn.

Unfortunately, before we could drop back down into the game, the creature managed to destroy a power generator on the planet, completing a secondary winning objective for himself.

While hard to stomach, the bitter defeat still tasted so sweet. Evolve is certainly set to be one of the best upcoming games this year. I certainly feel it deserves the game of PAX East 2014 and I do recommend diving into the game if you are a fan of Turtle Rock’s previous titles.

Evolve is currently slated to release to PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One in Q3 of this year.