Evolve: What The Original Left 4 Dead Team Did Next
Unnatural selection
2014 would seem to be the year in which the games industry has another crack at making primarily multiplayer shooting games work all over again. There've been a few false starts in the past, but Destiny and Titanfall are some super-big, super-fat attempts at achieveing enormous mass market success from shooters where narrative takes a backseat. Now Evolve joins the ranks of big games looking for a piece of glossy, next-generation COD-seasoned pie, and it comes from Turtle Rock Studios, those former Valve chums who did the heavy lifting on the original Left 4 Dead.
Humans vs aliens assmmetric argy-bargy Evolve was due to be a THQ game, but wound up being scooped up by 2K in the now-defunct publisher's post-mortem IP auction, for no less than $10.8 million. And, pertinently, it really does sound like an evolution of the Left 4 Dead formula/ethos.
A major game retailer's in-store magazine inevitably has the reveal, and while the bulk of information is being witheld for a month-long drip-feed, what has been revealed is that it's basically tag with guns and aliens. A four-play squad of alien hunters searches for/avoids a lone player-controlled alien beast, picked from multiple skillset options, and which gradually becomes more dangerous as rounds wear on. There's the tiniest scrap of additional info and an image here.
Evolve's due for release this Autumn/fall, on PC as well as the Sex-bone and Pay Attention For.