A Cataclysmic Dawn: Evolve Needs A Narrative

Evolve is flawed — solid, yet uninspired. Innovative, but repetitive. It’s a great deal of fun at its best, but mundane and boring at its worst. It’s superbly well made, but it still feels like so much more could have been made of the game.

Nowhere is this more clear than in its solo modes: playing the same multiplayer maps and modes without the presence of player-controlled monsters and hunters is a dull affair. The game may look great, sound fantastic and handle capably, but playing predictably — without the wackiness, unpredictability and occasional genius that human players provide so liberally online. This space, devoid of any personality of its own, would have been a perfect point to explore the personality of the characters and their origin stories.

An Evolve-ing narrative

There’s a fairly diverse set of playable characters in Evolve, who are renowned hunters from across the galaxy brought to Shear — a planet under attack by powerful monsters. However, while Evolve introduces you to this environment with an interesting cutscene and introductions to the characters, it never makes more of that.

I find this slightly disappointing. For a game to have such curiously interesting characters, and not allow the player any option to learn about them outside of snippets of dialogue between hunters is disappointing, and a little unfortunate, to say the least.

What makes this worse, however, is that the only classes that players ever have a proper introduction to are the first four hunters — Markov, Hank, Maggie and Val. Different hunters pop in and out of online lobbies, and put in their bits of dialogue, but unless you spend considerable time with each combination hunters, you’ll never really learn all you can about them.

Even short cutscenes between missions would fit perfectly. This would allow players to learn about the experiences which have crafted the hunters into the characters they are into the game (what happened to Markov’s face, and how Maggie survived a hostile planet alone) and see how these personalities interact with one another.

This allows the game to ebb and flow as it will, and a story, or at least some filling, to be added to match, in a game which otherwise feels quite devoid of soul and approachability.

Intelligent design

One of the finest examples of a functional campaign in a largely multiplayer focused game is in Star Wars: Battlefront 2‘s “Rise of the Empire” mode, which follows the exploits of the 501st Legion through the Clone Wars and early Galactic Civil War. It doesn’t severely alter the mission structure in matches, but it instead forces you to play with certain restrictions — less reinforcements, or certain units blocked off.

This is a system I believe Evolve could have benefit from using. Forcing players to use particular characters and restricting the abilities of those characters would have fit both in the game’s “Evacuation” mode, where victory or defeat means either claiming or conceding a buff, and in a context where characters are introduced and players are taught to use the characters’ abilities.

Additionally, it could have been used to vary Evolve‘s mission structure; missions could have slightly more complex paramaters. Escape missions where the hunters evade instead of fighting, and must depart the map before the monster(s) find and kill them, or facility missions, where the monsters’ indoor combat strengths are tested while hunters try and get facility systems functioning adequately both become options for missions, and those are just two ideas scraped from the top of my head.

The scripted mission line-ups also allow character interaction to be more carefully and time-relevantly written, while allowing for the monsters’ relationship to the world to be more thoroughly explored.

There’s no doubt concerning Evolve‘s focus. It’s an asymmetrical, multiplayer-focused shooter. In that vein, why wouldn’t any campaign it had be too?

Evolving

Having four-player hunter sessions in a Left 4 Dead campaign-style manner would allow all these players to experience the campaign, and bring the expected amount of unpredictability and human element into the otherwise very robotic gameplay.

The game has already shown that the basic formula of 4v1 multiplayer can work, so why not with slightly more varied mission types, and some insight to the player characters behind that?

Of course, this would be difficult to get completely right — everything worth putting into a game, especially one with the public platform Evolve has had, will be tricky to implement completely correctly.

It’s unlikely that the game will receive a campaign mode from Turtle Rock Studios, and it’s a little sad, as it would add a lot of understanding and attachment to the characters and their interactions, and add a lot of approachability to the larger game.

Our Evolve review goes live at 13:00 today! Tune in for that. 

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