Good evening, my subjects...

And EVOLVE is about to unlock fennec-time. I am super excited, are you? Sadly I'll only be able to play a few hours before monster-hunting in dreamland (sadly those stats don't get saved), but it should be fun after the months of cruel teasing by those meanies at 2K Games! Meanness inflicted on your poor lil overlord by letting him play the Evolve alpha and beta and then shutting the game off for months!

SO WHAT'S SO GOOD ABOUT THIS GAME??
Where do I begin?

• BALANCE - At first glance the most obvious plus is the graphics, but after several hours of playing, the graphics just aid in the immersion, and the thing that really sticks out is that the asymmetrical gameplay still strikes an incredible balance.

• GAMEPLAY - Tight and responsive controls. Although that's hardly a feat for a modern AAA+ FPS. Evolve does a good job of making the controls transparent between the user and the game. Other gameplay-related pluses would be the very different classes, and how they were clearly well-considered and designed to be played differently. Each has very specific strengths, and even the guns and tools for each class are useful, original, and advance the character's role. The addition of fantastic character mobility: humans in the form of jetpacks (which are tons of fun!) and the monster(s) in the form of powerful lunging and climbing abilities, it gives map traversal more of a "parkour" feeling, with the monster trying to get some distance so he can grab a snack, and the humans trying to catch up.

• GRAPHICS & ART - Ok, ok I had to say it. The graphics are among the best of any game. Levels are interesting. Character designs are interesting. Monsters are VERY interesting.

• INTUITIVE - So... the very-first game I played I wasn't useful (due to my framerate being about 2 fps. I had to turn down some settings), but the first game that I was able to control, I was also able to contribute. The controls, weapons, and tools are very intuitive, and the details are covered in helpful (and gorgeously rendered) instructional videos prior to using each class for the first time. The result is a great "easy-to-use, difficult-to-master" dynamic for each class and tool-weapon.

• ORIGINALITY - yeah its like Predator-Prey Tag, if you ever played that as a kid. And while I'm sure someone sometime has made a digital multiplayer game out of it, its never been so high-profile with space technology and Cthulu monsters. Everyone else is doing L4D clones for their co-op multiplayer games, and I need to give Evolve props for really doing something new.

• ADDICTIVE - Tons of fun and keeps you coming back.

• SINGLE PLAYER? - Rumor has it that there will be a single-player campaign. Even though I will probably spend more of my time in multiplayer, I look forward to single player to see if there's a story. The beta had single player, but it was mostly just tutorials on the classes. I hope that there is more depth in the final version!

• AUDIENCE(?) - This is maybe less of a plus for the game as a plus for the people who play it, but... I haven't had any jerks sabotage the game or otherwise be total butts in alpha or beta. Maybe that will change for general-release, but I hope not.

IS THERE ANYTHING BAD ABOUT IT?
Yes, of course. Nothing is perfect.

• THE CHASE - You end up spending a lot of time just running. At first this is kinda fun, but after awhile it gets monotonous. You will spend about 80% of your game time just running. While parkour-y jetpack running is fun, even that gets tiresome after a few games, and you end up craving the action more and more.

• BEING THE MONSTER IS LONELY - while it seems like a great selling point (everybody fantasizes about being a huge powerful pseudo-god Cthulu monster, right?), its hard to feel good about all the other players ganging up on you, using their numerous abilities to slow you down and otherwise nerf your monster-powers to make you easier to kill. The result is that being the monster is frustrating and lonely, and I don't think I'm the only one who feels this way: In the games that I played, everybody set Monster as their least-favorite class, and so everybody eventually ended up playing Monster.

• DAISY AND DETECTORS - There's one class who's job it is to find the monster and "trap" it so the other humans can injure it. One hunter is able to put up motion sensors, but they seem like they're one-time-use. Not terribly useful. Daisy is a little better (she's a dog-thing that tracks the monster's scent) especially useful due to her healing ability. However, she's really REALLY slow compared to the monster, and so the tactic of "following daisy" usually doesn't work out so well. And yet - you inevitably end up following the Hunter and their tracking method, because nobody else has an effective one.

• 3RD PARTY DRM - I didn't have to sign up during alpha, but when I got closed beta access, I had to create an account in order to play. The account signup was very buggy, but with some persistence, was able to register. So far they've not sent me any ads or anything.

• WILDLIFE - the animals and carnivorous plants in this game take away quite a bit from the enjoyment. Its hard enough to track the Monster long enough to catch him a few times before level3 without getting trapped by carnivorous plants, eaten by crocodiles, and otherwise interrupted by giant... things. I can't help but conclude that this game would have been better with strictly herbavorial wildlife for the monster to eat and to occasionally attract the attention of humans, but all the others kinda clutter up the experience. I can see that maybe they're trying to break up the tracking monotony, and perhaps it would have succeeded - if only for the fact that as soon as you have one of these encounters, all you want to do is get away because the monster is evolving! If fighting animals did more good than just a one-off powerup, maybe this game mechanic wouldn't feel quite as useless.

CONCLUSION
The negatives are all rather-minor petty annoyances, vastly overshadowed by the incredible positives of this game. I highly recommend it.

Thanks for reading!

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Artwork by the amazing
Etheras the Fennec is (c) www.etheras.com

This image is a cosplay of Val. Val is most-likely (c) 2K Games

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Do you enjoy seeing Etheras depicted by Brindle? Here are a few more images that she's done of Etheras in the past:
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/15690667/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/14695545/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/13726441/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/13261850/

Want to see more artwork of Etheras in video game cosplay? Here are some of the games Etheras has dressed-up for:
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/15712224/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/14772186/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/12994455/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/10224958/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/10111786/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/9471954/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/8858645/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/7530838/

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