Evolve – it’s certainly impossible to review in advance

GameCentral discusses the difficulties of reviewing online-focused games, and explains why its Evolve review won’t be ready at launch.

Although the embargo for Evolve reviews was at 5am today the public multiplayer servers for the game only went live at 3am. We hope you’ll understand that this has not left quite enough time to get a review done today. But the question for us is when a review of the game is ever going to be possible, not only for Evolve but any modern online-focused video game.

There has always been an in-built difficulty in reviewing online games, both in terms of accessing them before release – in order to provide a timely review – and playing enough of them to come to any kind of definitive verdict. That’s one reason why we generally don’t review massively multiplayer online (MMO) games, since you can make only the most shallow of judgements in the first week or so.



A game like Evolve isn’t that complex, and certainly doesn’t have the volume of content of an MMO, but as the last year has taught us just because a game works in beta, or at a publisher event, doesn’t mean it’ll work when it’s actually launched to the public. Halo: The Master Chief Collection was the last game we gave the benefit of the doubt to on that account, and as you can imagine we certainly won’t be doing so again.


And even if we are able to play online before a game is released, it’s become pointless to write a review until the inevitable day one patch is out. (The Evolve one is 3GB in size and is already out today – complete with matchmaking fixes, netcode changes, and quicker load times – as detailed here.)

All of this conspires to make it almost impossible to give a verdict on an online-focused game until days, or potentially weeks, after its release. But that’s not to say we think this is an artificial conspiracy created by the publishers. Although they’d much prefer reviews arrive as late as possible (a positive reception is far less likely to affect a game’s sales than a negative one), they haven’t made it more difficult on purpose – that’s just the nature of the industry today.

In fact in Evolve’s case it may work to 2K Games’ disadvantage, because the major question hovering over its head is what kind of longevity the game has. Evolve is a fun game, a 4 vs. 1 first person shooter that we enjoyed the first time we played it, at this time last year, and every time since. But as it has no single-player story campaign (you can practice on your own with bots, but that’s about it) its big problem is how long it’s going to last before you get tired of it.

Last year’s Titanfall was great fun but many complained that they’d had enough of it after a few short weeks. That doesn’t mean it was a bad game and nobody realised until afterwards, but the lack of longevity does have an obvious impact on its value for money.

Evolve may be in a similar situation, although it’s complicated by the fact that rather than Titanfall’s free-for-all action the game is largely pointless unless you’re with other people that are trying to play it properly. More than any co-op game we can recall voice chat is vital for the four hunter characters, as unless they’re working in tandem they’ve little chance against a halfway competent monster player.



And if you’ve been playing the alpha and beta you’ll know that meeting such people at random is not a very common occurrence. So you either go in with friends or hope that the matchmaking gets a lot better. Either way it only adds to the length of time before you can fairly judge the game.

One obvious answer is to review the game in stages, something we have done before with titles such as Destiny. But we try to avoid it if at all possible, as it’s very easy to get the wrong idea early on (Destiny, for example, was great the first day, until we discovered we’d already played virtually half the game during the beta).

Going back to re-review a game at a later date only further encourages publishers not to bother too much about its state at launch. If we complain about publishers relying on patches to fix their knowingly broken games it hardly seems reasonable to pursue the same scheme with reviews. And as useful as hindsight might be in going back to an old review it does defeat the purpose of them being used as any kind of purchasing guide.

There is another problem (relatively) unique to Evolve, and that’s the absolute shambles 2K Games has made of the game’s downloadable content and pre-order bonuses. It’s already managed to get fans upset, despite sensible precautions in trying not to split the community – by ensuring new maps are always free.


But the fact that the game has four pre-order packages, some of which are format exclusives and some of which involve ‘pre-purchasing’, makes the whole thing not only absurdly complicated but suspiciously desperate to get your money long before you, or anyone else, has had a proper chance to find out if the game is any good or not.

The end result is that we have to make a compromise when reviewing games like this. We’ll try to have an Evolve review up before the end of the week, but given all these problems and caveats we’ll only be able to guess at the game’s long term prospects.

Clearly this sort of problem is going to become commonplace in the future but we’re not going to be so glib as to simply tell you not to pre-order anything until you’ve read a review, because we know how good companies are at making it a tempting proposition. But just consider who you have more faith in: your friends and whatever trusted review sources you use, or the publisher that’s desperate to take your money before you have any clear idea what you’re buying.

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