10 GENIUS Concepts Wasted On Buggy Video Games

8. Evolve

Friday the 13th the Game
Turtle Rock Studios

I adore asymmetric multiplayer titles. There’s something about the sense of skewed odds that really interests me - I love playing as the underdog, as it makes victory so much sweeter.

Evolve, then, is something of a bittersweet course to me - like sugar-dipped earwax, consuming it gave me the uneasy sense that the enjoyment wasn’t worth the diarrhoea.

As a team of four hunters, you and three pals must track down and defeat the beast, which can evolve as it eats, making it stronger over time. As a result, you and your mates ideally want to find it fast - but this is where the core gameplay loop faltered. The vast majority of the match is spent tracking the beast - a bit of a King Kong treasure hunt - before an explosive, brief and unsatisfying bit of action, and it’s over - like making love with me.

With an imbalanced cast and bizarre glitches like killing the beast in a single hit, though, all the money was instead spent on paid DLC and a big marketing push to re-release the game as free-to-play.

Neither solution worked, and those involved with Evolve resolved to have it dissolved.

Contributor
Contributor

Hiya, you lot! I'm Tommy, a 39-year-old game developer from Scotland - I live on the East coast in an adorable beachside village. I've worked on Need for Speed, Cake Bash, Tom Clancy's The Division, Driver San Francisco, Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise, Kameo 2 and much more. I enjoy a pun and, of course, suffer fools gladly! Join me on Twitter at @TotoMimoTweets for more opinion diarrhoea.