Also on: PS5, PS4
Publisher: Astrolabe Games
Developer: Spikewave Games
Medium: Digital
Players: 1
Online: No
ESRB: T
As much as I love indie games and want to see them succeed, I canโt help but wish that Evotinction had been made by a studio with more experience and a bigger budget. Itโs got interesting bits and pieces to go with some intriguing ideas, but overall it feels like a slightly missed opportunity.
Take the core idea: youโre one man trying to sneak through a space station filled with murderous AI bots. The bots want to replace humanity โ so they represent the โevolutionโ part of Evotinction (that is, โEvo,โ and you should be able to guess what part of the name and the story come from โextinctionโ). As premises go, itโs decent, and it opens up a lot of possibilities.
Unfortunately, because this is a smaller budget game, in practice it means you spend most of your time in the game skulking around, trying to avoid being caught by little floating globes. While theyโre certainly kind of menacing โ especially since they can kill you with a single hit โ the lack of enemy variety gets a little repetitive after awhile.
To be sure, all the skulking fits in well with the Evotinctionโs stealthy gameplay. Your character is some kind of hacking expert, so again, while youโre sneaking around, youโre always on the lookout for items you can take control of.
Unfortunately, thatโs pretty much all there is to the game โ which, again, feels like a limitation imposed by the size and budget of the development team. Thereโs nothing inherently wrong with a bit of sneaking and hacking, but it all feels a little repetitive the further in you get.
Normally none of these things would bother me very much โ I play lots and lots of indie games, so I have no problem overlooking limitations. The reason that Evotinctionโs limitations stand out more is that the game looks a lot more big budget than your usual indie. Admittedly, this is because you spend most of the game sneaking around hallways and dimly lit lab rooms while wearing a spacesuit that means you never see the gameโs human protagonist, so itโs easy to make the game look especially snazzy, but still: because it looks so great, you canโt help but wish the gameplay stood out as much as the graphics.
Does this mean that Evotinction would be perceived better if it were a little less ambitious? Quite possibly โ however unfair that may be. In other words, if youโre after a solid stealth game it delivers, provided you can live with feeling like the game couldโve been a little bit more.
Astrolabe Games provided us with an Evotinction PC code for review purposes.
