E.V.O.: Eden Found

I’ve postulated so much about acquiring E.V.O. – but it does beg questions concerning the gameplay. Why would this game leave such a lasting impact on me? Is it even worth remembering.

E.V.O. is legitimately flawed in some areas. It’s unbalanced, and there’s not as much variety as there really should be. But it’s extremely creative and oozes style. It’s a visceral romp through the stream of time. Paddle your way through strange aeons.

The gimmick to E.V.O. is the ability to evolve your character on a limb by limb basis. It’s a gradual climb to the top of the food chain in each area. You’ll go through many changes as you choose new parts to facilitate the growth of the rest of your body. Unfortunately, only at the end do your choices really open up. For most eras, the end result will look the same between individuals. What it comes down to is survivability and killing power, and sometimes your options there are very limited.

Enemies gain greater defense so you need better jaws to rip through them. So your progression really is a survival of the fittest affair. Its just that choices don’t really open up to you until later.

However, at a certain stage of the game you will be given the option to retain your old body or move on to the next tier. The path to becoming humanoid is completely optional, as well. Battles become more about how well your body can operate as well. The bosses become overwhelming, and while you can fight them without cheesing the battle they can quickly deplete your health with a few lucky hits.

This is satisfying, however. There is a lot of grinding in E.V.O. and unless you are grinding for points to use as a crutch this means that to be the ‘fittest’ you aren’t only required to simply evolve the most powerful parts.

 

The mammal stages demonstrate this well. You can choose a body and jaw that contribute to kicking, which will keep bosses at bay, or those that are resilient and powerful, which will allow you to juggle bosses for a lot of damage with your strong jaws. In the end, it’s hard but you can manage.

Although E.V.O. is limited in this respect it still allows you to create some humorous and boss creations. It does provide 50 slots to save evolutions. Some of these will be relegated to certain secret forms you can find by consuming crystals but others will be neat dudes you devise when you’re en route to the top of the tiers. The first thing I did when I played my copy of E.V.O. was to review the last player’s record of evolution. Just to see what kind of things he or she came up with.

I think this freedom of choice is what excited me most about E.V.O. way back when I first played it. These days I like to devise impossible anatomy, and while E.V.O. certainly has a lot that is possible it’s certainly improbable. Really, the limbs and bodies are just like armor and weapon pieces in an RPG. But because they do drastically change your appearance and play considerations I consider E.V.O. to be very formative for me creatively.

Not to mention I liked dinosaurs. As a kid I even designed a Power Ranger mode for myself based on one of the forms I put together in E.V.O.  and uggggh… this is getting way too lame now, heh.

I had the most badass Power Rangers avatar in my bad childhood fanart.

The point being, previous games may have cemented my love for monsters but E.V.O. made me expect a whole lot more.

But this game can be very grind intensive. When you start a new line of evolution, you are weak, slow, and fragile. Early enemies give very few E.V.O. points and more robust enemies will mop the floor with you as many of them have special attacks that take priority over your weak jaws. If you die, your E.V.O. points are cut in half. So what you are faced with is killing weak enemies for little reward or struggling against tough enemies for slightly better rewards with a higher risk of losing them.

The solution of course is to make gradual changes up the ladder until you can move on. Now, E.V.O. is a very straightforward game – most levels are a flat run to the right with a couple of ledges thrown in. This means a large part of the game is killing and eating other animals. The same, most lucrative animals again and again. This doesn’t paint the most attractive portrait but there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

I find that E.V.O.’s grind has a threshold that is directly correlated to the power of your body. Once you have the jaws or kick that can do the trick, you can curb stomp the competition in seconds. You start to gain E.V.O. points at a truly prodigious rate and can upgrade the rest of your limbs extremely quickly. Jaws can be very expensive (or bodies if you are a mammal and want to kick) but the payout is that the rest of your forms come much more quickly, and you can revert your jaws to another stage after the grind if you are seeking another utility or aesthetic.

Personally, I don’t mind a grind in a game like this because it has a palpable payoff. It can be very daunting for folks that lack the patience or the interest, however.

The other contributor to grinding woes is the music. E.V.O.’s music ranges from extremely haunting to short repetitive loops. And while these loops fit the areas and I appreciate them in a sense that they are tongue-in-cheek tracks in a tongue-in-cheek game they become quite droning when you are locked in a serious grind.

That said, some of the music is gorgeous and among the top SNES tracks to be sure. Not unexpected with the Dragon Quest lineage ;)!

I think what appeals to me greatly about the gameplay, however is that it is so utterly visceral. If you aren’t cheesing your way through this game it can be punishing if you trip up. You are thrust wholesale into the raw prehistoric battlefields and are expected to crawl your way up to the top of the food chain. It is demanding, but completely satisfying.

But like most games I cover on this site, it’s really not for everyone. And a physical copy will set you back a bit of change, so all of the standard caveats apply as per usual!

I’ve often wondered what a follow-up to E.V.O. or a remake would be like. There would be many more pieces with countless functions. This is one reason I was excited for Spore, but without saying much about that game it lacked the raw viscera of E.V.O. – you really didn’t get involved enough or have the same range of control for your creatures as I would have liked.

Cubivore is maybe the real successor to E.V.O.. I will write in depth about Cubivore in the future but this game is pure viscera. It is full contact evolution gameplay, ha ha. It’s also quite tongue-in-cheek, like E.V.O..

Which is another thing I need to mention is how E.V.O. treats itself. It is at times mournful, at times hilarious, and at times mind boggling. It is firmly entrenched in its own mythology yet at times there are factors influencing the scenario that seem to contradict the myth that the game is spinning. It takes itself seriously, yet with a grain of salt. I can’t help but think something was lost in translation that would have made E.V.O. much more cohesive. But it doesn’t hurt the experience in the least.

 

I really could talk volumes more about E.V.O., but I think you should go check it out and adapt your own decisions about the game.