Evotinction review for PC, PlayStation

As much as I love indie games and want to see them succeed, I can’t help but wish that Evotinction had been made by a studio with more experience and a bigger budget. It’s got interesting bits and pieces to go with some intriguing ideas, but overall it feels like a slightly missed opportunity.

Take the core idea: you’re one man trying to sneak through a space station filled with murderous AI bots. The bots want to replace humanity – so they represent the “evolution” part of Evotinction (that is, “Evo,” and you should be able to guess what part of the name and the story come from “extinction”). As premises go, it’s 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 they’re certainly kind of menacing – especially since they can kill you with a single hit – the lack of enemy variety gets a little repetitive after awhile.

To be sure, all the skulking fits in well with the Evotinction’s stealthy gameplay. Your character is some kind of hacking expert, so again, while you’re sneaking around, you’re always on the lookout for items you can take control of.

Unfortunately, that’s pretty much all there is to the game – which, again, feels like a limitation imposed by the size and budget of the development team. There’s 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 – I play lots and lots of indie games, so I have no problem overlooking limitations. The reason that Evotinction’s 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 game’s human protagonist, so it’s easy to make the game look especially snazzy, but still: because it looks so great, you can’t 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 – however unfair that may be. In other words, if you’re after a solid stealth game it delivers, provided you can live with feeling like the game could’ve been a little bit more.

Astrolabe Games provided us with an Evotinction PC code for review purposes.