Who was selected for Evolve's alpha and how stoked are you?

No I'm not excited for Evolve

The game is supposedly powered by Cry Engine but by the looks of it, it looks like Cry Engine 1 if anything, actually it looks like Unreal Tournament 2003. Anyway, all the ingredients are varied classes, necessity of cooperation, fun abilities but something isn't quite clicking - granted the game seemed somewhat better upon subsequent playthroughs. What I hated was the inconsistent gamepad rumble, actually more often than not it didn't work and this worked against the overall immersion and mastering the weapons. What's worse, the servers were wildly inconsistent but that was somewhat expected. Furthermore, creature placement was patchy at best, the pacing was a far cry from Left 4 Dead. Overall in my impressions the negatives outweigh the positives, even if I really wanted to like the game. Turtle Rock has a lot to improve if they want to be taken seriously.

My impressions are not too good either, I played a Medic as I like being a healer and thought no one will choose that class. It is not a very good class, healing doesn't mean squat when the monster out damages it every time. My team spent a good 10-15mins just chasing after and trying to find the creature then when we did it had holed itself in a factory of sorts which meant little verticallity to use to get away from it, plus I couldn't heal with so many walls and obstructions in the way, I got picked off extremely easy. Overall it was just boring hunting the creature down, there's only small creatures here and there to fight while searching and no one wants to do that as it means stopping and letting the creature get further away, which means everyone is just running for 10 mins doing nothing.

I also found nothing special about the graphics, almost Titanfall looking, also the pace of the game is extremely slow.

Yeah the load times are excessively long, the menus in the Alpha aren't easy either.

I got one gonna try it out tonight. :D

Nope, didn't get one. :( Anyway, I'm not that excited. I'm waiting for feedback before I get this game.

I freaking loved L4D1. It was like my favourite game ever for a while, then it got broken becuase of rage quitters. Play a match from start to finish was 100% impossible, unless you played with 7 friends. Same shit for L4D2. So these games are really awesome games, with extremely terrible community, which made the games unplayable for me. Why they never punished players for rage quitting to prevent it from happening as much is beyond me.

I wonder if it will be the same for Evolve, and I'm a bit worried about the balance between monster and humans..

Played about 2 hours yesterday and I loved it. As expected, the gameplay design is smart and there are many strategies available. The only issue I had is matchmaking with my party, it would split us up....but once I got into a game with randoms it was smooth from there.

Definitely gave me a unique online co-op vibe that L4D2 used to. The different classess play very differently, and the idea is you hunt the monster asap, because the longer he stays out there he can level up, and once at level 3 he becomes much tougher to defeat. You track him through his footprints, but you gotta play as a team.

Yeah I definitely feel like the L4D games had the single WORST community I have ever seen. I was lucky to have a group of friends who didn't suck at the game. It got infuriating trying to survive against a decent team when playing with randoms. For whatever reason people could not understand the very basic concepts of sticking together and going as quick as possible which were the key to surviving as humans.

Rage quitting was a huge issue too. If the first area went heavily in the favor of your team, you could expect the other team to rage quit immediately...

Game was still the best multi-player game ever though IMO. Nothing tops a good versus game!

Only been able to get into one match so far.. right now I have the circle spinning trying to join a match for at least 5 minutes (happened last night several times before I just went and played something else)

@sts106mat:

My experience was the same as yours. To me it was a more serious version of plants vs zombies garden warfare. Same principles of having a team that do specialist jobs.

Sounds like it needs to ummm, Evolve a bit more.

I played it on the One last night, and while I think it would be fun with a few friends, I will probably not be buying it until the eventual $5 status on Steam. For starters, the graphics were quite poor based on what I was expecting from previews. These graphics will probably be a lot better on my PC, but first impressions were not solid. For another thing, the load times and mandatory wait in between rounds were both ridiculously long. I thought my system had locked up or something. I know it's an alpha, but it was shockingly slow to get going. And finally, while I enjoyed healing my teammates (was a Medic), I felt that both the gunplay and the mobility were well behind other snappier, more responsive games I've been playing lately like Titanfall and Destiny. I liked the personality of the premise and the asymmetry as a concept, but without real friends and a really cheap price, I won't buy this unless I hear significant improvements have been made to all the aforementioned issues. II didn't try playing as the monster, though... perhaps that's a more entertaining experience.

I will reserve final judgment until I try the finished product.., I'm sure a bunch of Alpha testers who neither knew what they were doing nor communicated in any way didn't make for the best first impression, but as it stands now I am glad I got to play this game early so I can cross it off my list of must buys coming out next year.

You guys complaining about graphics realize this is an ALPHA right? meaning not even close to going gold.

Got selected for it....it'd be downloaded after the alpha got finished thanks to my super internet connection speed !

Impressions are "meh" ...seems that i didn't miss much...

If the monsters are good and balanced, you'd imagine playing as a human should feel overwhelming but fair. As long as humans have abilities that genuinely help one another, it may not feel so terrible.

I don't even know -- are there other things to shoot? Do the human characters "level up" like the monster or gain extra abilities? It's not like a huge deal to me, but I wonder how the game works out when there's only one thing in the whole game to shoot at.

But I don't know if there are other things, I'm just speculating.

I've been in alphas before... this was the worst visually with respect to previews. Destiny looked great in Alpha.

@musicalmac: I'll tell you. I played a couple of rounds, one as supp and one as trapper. They classes do indeed have abilities to help each other in a very significant way. Supp has this shield that gives protections and trapper, well he traps the monster and as I was able to see it's a very important role. It turns the tide with those little traps, especially in the early game.

In terms of shit to shoot at, there's a bunch of stuff that KILLS YOU! I was killed by this carnivorous plant that chewed on me without my team seeing. There's monsters that charge you and give you buffs like more damage or speed.
You get perks by leveling up your account.

So far the servers are the only problem I see. I do hope there's more game types in the end version, like 4v4.