‘Evolve’ Gameplay Could Restore Your Faith In Original FPS Games


Evolve‘s gameplay is turning out to be a hallmark of originality in a market saturated with what’s being called Call of Duty clones. Turtle Rock appears to be taking the genre and giving it an RPG element, giving gamers the option to level up (or as they call it, staging up) and improve different aspects of their abilities.

In essence, Evolve is being developed with “infinite replay value” in mind. That’s an idea that the first person shooter genre has rarely seen. All too often you’re given a soldier of some kind and access to a gun, and the game points you at a villain and lets you do your thing.

The last time we saw a radical evolution in the genre was a Nintendo 64 title called Perfect Dark. It gave us a futuristic setting and high-tech weapons that each had two functions, beyond shooting and melee whacks to the head. As you progressed through the single player storyline, you could take cover and utilize various gadgets to help you see what Joanna Dark couldn’t.

What the gameplay in Evolve strives to do is give you the ability to improve your character in multiplayer battles against monsters. Again, you don’t need to shoot everything. Your melee and short range attacks are also encouraged, and some characters might not do much fighting at all.

Role-playing games and first person shooters are two genres that rarely ever cross paths, as different as they tend to be. While role-playing games have taken steps toward becoming first person adventures, they don’t often put a gun in your hands. Destiny is attempting to close the gap a little bit with its use of magic and various classes in a futuristic title, but it still reminds us too much of Halo.

As you do what the game calls staging up, so do the monsters, so there is always a challenge involved in Evolve‘s gameplay. Could it be that the monsters will gain different skills to counter what you can do? That would be a definite improvement over the classic technique of simply adding hit points to artificially make them harder to kill. There are now eight different characters you can use against any of the game’s beasts, which appear to range between mythical and mechanical.

The characters you can choose from also have a range of abilities, such as one who uses a sniper rifle and brings others back from the dead, and one who uses a trained pet to attack.

The mechanics behind different kinds of teams staging up to fight monsters that keep getting stronger and more versatile sounds like your average role-playing par, but it hasn’t been done much in first person shooters. The concept behind Evolve‘s gameplay certainly sounds refreshingly different as it’s planned to hit E3 2014 and eventually the PS4, Xbox One, and PC.

[image via GameSpot]

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