Monster a Go-Go: Evolve Trailer Shows Oodles Of Gameplay

Left 4 Dead's Tank was terrifying for a while, grunting and crashing and smashing all over the place, before everyone realised you can simply set him ablaze then leg it. Something supposed to be so intimidating became a little pitiful, desperately chasing people around while his life ticked down. It's left me wary of L4D creators Turtle Rock's new multiplayer man vs. monster FPS Evolve, but a new gameplay trailer puts my mind at ease. I've been losing sleep over this. Tearing my hair out. Scratching at the walls until my nails tear off and I'm grinding bone.

The trailer shows an eight-minute round from all five players' perspectives (four humans of varying classes and the monster) and evidently the big fella's no slouch.

The monster in this showcase round is quite Tank-y (Evolve has several monster classes), swinging big pummelling arms into faces and tearing up lumps of the ground to hurl, but it's also leaping long distances and spitting fire. The monster has an interesting dynamic too, being weak at first and needing to flee and hunt, then it begins to power up and start smashing in earnest.

I do wonder whether it'll suffer from people not knowing how to play the monster. The human side is broadly an FPS with RPG-y abilities but the monster is quite alien. With five players in each match but only one monster, players will naturally be human more than a beastie and master that side a lot quicker. Will many rounds be ruined by highly-skilled hunters swooping in to murder a monster that's wandering aimlessly? I wonder. The early weeks and months of a multiplayer games' life are likely to determine whether people stick around. At least in Left 4 Dead's Versus mode, the zombies had teammates.

Anywho, here's the trailer. It'll first show you a version of the round spliced together from the five players' perspectives, but you can also follow their individual views by clicking on those annotated icons in the red bar. I do hope there's a tool to automate having five different annotations on every single second of that 52:35 video, or I'll feel very sorry for the poor intern lumped with putting them in and feel guilty that publisher 2K put them through it to enterain us. We're complicit, you and me.