Evotinction review

There’s a definite sense when playing Evotinction that at some point it started out as a horror game. Perhaps it was storyboarded as such, but a restricted budget meant choices had to be made between gorgeous environments and animating mutated alien beasts, and the décor won. Because the atmosphere in Spikewave’s debut is undeniably influenced by games like Alien: Isolation and Dead Space, but the use of an AI enemy and its army of drones robs a lot of the potential terror from proceedings.

You are Dr. Thomas Liu, a scientist who resides in a sprawling, cutting edge research facility where many of humanity’s greatest minds have assembled to attempt to shape our future. Unfortunately, the controlling AI of the facility has gone haywire, killing many of Liu’s fellow scientists and deploying its drone, called Genies, as patrolling guards.

As one of the few left alive and free, Liu takes it upon himself to work out what went wrong and how, and hopefully put it right again. From the off, though, something feels a little imbalanced in Evotinction. Ridiculous title notwithstanding, the developer has arguably spent too much time making the environments look good enough to eat (note: please don’t eat the environments) and not enough on creating real tension.

It’s an old school stealth game in many ways. Liu has no real combat training or capability. He’s no Gordon Freeman, graduating from crowbar to machine gun in a matter of hours. There is a weapon, and you can upgrade it with various hacking functions, but it’s used entirely to subdue the drones and you must do it quietly. If they spot you, it often results in a game over.

Instead, Liu can take out or avoid patrolling Genies to accomplish his goals, most of which involve crossing a room or hacking something. The hacking element doesn’t rely on obvious or OTT minigames, but it does get increasingly tougher, and all forms of hacking are timed. Take longer than five seconds, and you’ll set off a security alert which will bring every Genie in the area right to you.

Often, it’s easier to take them out first, sneaking up behind them and either hacking them or neutralising them violently. Movement feels pretty smooth, but the experience is often shaken by arbitrary barriers. Sometimes Liu can jump over a waist-high obstacle, but sometimes he can’t, and when the game has put a collectible behind one that he can’t, it just feels contrived and awkward.

A lot of the story is told in expository dialogue between Liu and Oz, a friendly AI drone who guides him through the facility. A great deal of effort has been put into making the location look good, and the voice acting is also superb. Liu’s voice actor is great, perfectly conveying the character of a man who’s simultaneously shit-scared and determined to leave no one behind.

Unfortunately the impact of the story is lessened by two main elements. Firstly, Liu is the only character you really see. You will hear audio logs and other people talking, but they don’t make a physical appearance. And secondly, it’s a bit confusing at first, and doesn’t do a great job of explaining what’s happened. You know the rogue AI has released a virus called RED into the facility, but you don’t find out what RED actually does for a while, and won’t get much insight into the what’s and why’s until you’re close to the end of the six or seven hour campaign.

Yet Evotinction does feel good to play. The stealth is handled well, the enemy AI is adequate if not super dynamic, and the Genies are menacing enough if never truly intimidating. Liu is a great character, and the world is interesting although it could have been so much more. Not everything has to be monsters or mutants, but Evotinction would have benefited from a little more horror and tension in its mix.

Despite having a silly name and a pretty well-worn premise, Evotinction is a solid debut from Spikewave. The hacking works well, the interplay between Liu and OZ is always entertaining, and it really does look lovely. It’s enough to put Spikewave on my radar at the very least, and was a nice return to the kind of stealth title you just don’t see very often these days.