Hands-On With Evolve’s Distillery Map

The new Evolve map revealed at gamescom is called Distillery. Much like the rest of planet Shear, it’s filled with high cliffs and swampland. As the monster, your aim is always to evolve twice and then destroy a vital piece of infrastructure. In this particular case it’s called a power relay. Much like the other maps, it’s essentially a box that you need to punch for 3 minutes until it explodes and you win.

Distillery’s power relay is placed at the edge of the map, at the shore of a watery area. It faces onto a large, circular platform so, as the hunters, if you do let the monster reach the platform, there’s nowhere to hide. The rest of the map feels very much like a ravine – sheer cliff walls surrounding narrow paths, combined with claustrophobic corridors. Lots of places to hide but quite unpleasant if you get trapped.

It’s a wintery map, so you can easily lose the monster in a blizzard. The monster, however, can still smell out the hunters, even though it won’t be able to see any better than you. There’s not quite as much wildlife as the other maps, but you still don’t want to blunder into the big guys that lurk about the place. Thanks to the frequent snowstorms, you’re probably going to want to bring Griffin and his sound spikes instead trying to follow Maggie and Daisy into the white.

For the first time, 2k Games allowed players to mix and match hunters in a series of matches. You still need to bring one of each class – trapper, medic, assault and support – but it’s up to the team to decide if they’d rather combine Lazarus’s resuscitation speed with Hank’s shielding support.

Or you might want to combine Griffin’s single-tether harpoon gun with Hyde’s minigun bullet spray. We didn’t have enough time with the game to truly figure out the best team builds, but its good to know that the option is there.

The gamescom build didn’t have one of the niftiest features that I saw when I last played the Evolve Kraken – the match summary screen. It’s a timeline that pops up at the end of each match tracking the health levels and actions taken by each player. One the monster’s timeline you can see when it evolved. On the hunters’ lines you can see when each of them used their powers – the trapper deploying the mobile arena, for example. It’s an excellent way to see just when you did the most damage or who isn’t quite pulling their weight. I really hope it’s in the full game.

Evolve is coming to Xbox One, PS4 and Windows PC in February 2015.

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