Evolve, the new team based shooter from Turtle Rock Studios, has gone gold and will be officially released February 10th. The game is published by 2K Games, who acquired the rights when Take-Two Interactive (the parent company of 2K Games), bought the title during the THQ bankruptcy auction back in early 2013.
Originally set to release last year on October 21st, 2014, the game’s delay was plagued with equal amounts of marketing hype and gameplay woes. The alpha version released on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 was met with lukewarm reception and the PS4 release was practically unplayable with problems stemming from the PS4 2.0 firmware release.
Xbox One owners will be treated to an open beta of Evolve while PC and PS4 players will only have a “closed technical test”.
According to the official Evolve site – “Starting January 17th, we’ll be holding a smaller closed technical test on PS4 … which is limited in scope and will not include Evacuation or have Hunter and Monster unlocks carry over to Evolve’s launch.” A similar message explains the same limitations for PC players as well.
It is not clear why the open beta is only for Xbox One. This raises questions about the game’s online capabilities both on PC and PS4 as of now.
While Evolve looks interesting with amazing creature designs, interesting characters, and levels, I’m hesitant to embrace this 100% multiplayer shooter experience. Being 100% multiplayer and looking a bit repetitive from what has been shown so far, the jury is still out on one of the first major game releases of 2015.
