Vice: By the time Evolve came out in February 2015, it'd been preceded by a marketing blitz that assured us that something completely new was coming to our next-gen systems. They were right. Evolve is the shit. There's nothing like it. The uniquely competitive game features four human players working together as Hunters in order to take down a single human player who is a giant, frothing monster that wants to eat everyone.
You can see the parallels between Evolve and Left 4 Dead, a previous (hugely successful and critically acclaimed) title in developer Turtle Rock's catalogue. But where that cooperative zombie shooter shoe-horned in a competitive four-on-four, monsters-against-humans mode post-launch, Evolve was created from the ground up to be an eSport like nobody had ever seen.
Back in 2016, Turtle Rock announced that support for its 4v1 monster-hunting shooter Evolve would end but fans wouldn't let it die.
From NME: "Evolve: Stage 2 had its multiplayer servers shut down back in 2018, but today players are once again able to matchmake and join peer-to-peer multiplayer games.
Several months ago, peer-to-peer functionality was lost for Evolve Legacy, which was the only way fans of the series could play with friends. Upon a multitude of players reaching out to publisher 2K, the issue was eventually fixed earlier in July. It seems 2K have gone a step further now, and reinstated peer-to-peer and matchmaking functionality for Evolve: Stage 2 after four years."
Evolve is an asymmetrical multiplayer experience born at the tail-end of the wrong era, in the multiplayer world.
Great idea but poorly executed and destined to fail from the begging. Only thing I’m grateful towards this game is that it’s the one that convinced me to never buy a game blind again.
Shadowrun for the Xbox 360/PC would of been a better example of a great online game that launched At the wrong time.