Explaining Evolve to someone who's not familiar with video games is a lot like describing a monster movie third hand.
Granted, people who aren't familiar with video games won't be picking Evolve up, but hearing myself describe it to someone else out loud made me realize how much of breathless middle-schooler I sound like once monsters get involved. Four players must band together, to take down a fifth player who's controlling one of three species of the game's central monster. Essentially every round of Evolve feels like a boss fight and the single most important thing you're going to learn about evolve is that without teamwork you're going to die. A lot.
Your team of hunters goal, unless you're playing as the monster, is to defeat the beast before it can consume enough wildlife and evolve into a tanking behemoth. If and when that happens the hunted very quickly turns into the hunter and this is where Evolve truly starts to shine. Your squad of four hunters must work together with complementary skills to take on the monster together, but they have to work together effectively or things get very pear shaped very quickly. Everyone has a role and the second you don't respect your teammates, you're all monster kibble. Evolve is a balancing act set to a Godzilla film and it's at its strongest when you're teamed up with a squad that can carry their own weight. Evolve begins to falter when you realize the game comes, as so many AAA titles often do these days, pre-packaged with more DLC and microtransactions than any game release in recent memory.
The full heft of day-one DLC (downloadable content) available at Evolve's release comes out to exactly $60. Which is the full retail price of the game, so doing some basic arithmetic here, the full amount of DLC plus the game itself comes out to $120. That's pretty steep for what is ostensibly the full game and all of its content on the first day. And lest we forget the most odious of trends that still seem unwilling to die, Evolve's Xbox One DLC selection includes 44 items that can be purchased piecemeal via microtransaction.
There are problems with 2K's decision to release Evolve in essentially an à la carte state, but if you can look past that–and for some, that'll be an impossibility–the game is a ton of fun to play. It just may be worth waiting for a different edition of the game or ignore the DLC all together.
