10 GENIUS Concepts Wasted On Buggy Video Games
8. Evolve
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.