EVOLUTION: The Video Game Review for Steam

It is survival of the fittest in North Star Digital Studios’ board game-turned-digital, Evolution: The Video Game, and with your digital pal, Charles Darwin, to guide you along the way, help new species survive and thrive in this strategy game, currently available on Steam for $14.99. I have never played the board game, so I dove into the new, digital version with no clue what to expect, but I made sure to read up on the original Evolution after I had played for some time, just so I could try to look at it from various perspectives.

The video game has an in-depth tutorial, which walks you through the somewhat complicated game mechanics. You and your opponent(s) create animal species that are competing for food in the same territory– giving your creatures advantages against both their enemies and their environment while each hoping to be the last one standing. The majority of the game is played through Trait Cards, which have several uses in play. They can be played to create new species, add special abilities (traits) to existing species, add number to populations, increase the body size of a species, or be turned into food. If this sounds confusing, you aren’t alone–these various mechanics took me a bit to figure out. It wasn’t necessarily difficult to put together, but it became tedious after a while, and I felt that the introductory/tutorial levels didn’t particularly entice me to keep playing. 

I imagine that it’s probably more difficult to learn to play without 2-D Darwin to help you out with the intricacies of the game, and from my research, it appears that North Star have simplified many of the mechanics for digital play- an admirable feat that couldn’t have been easy. While the mechanics and rules of the video game take some time to fully understand, the ‘how-to-play’ videos of the board game show several complex aspects that are simplified by the new, digital format- certain things like physically having to mark the body size and population of your species on a distinct game piece are made much easier with programming to automatically do so for you.

Once you move past the introduction, you can continue to play through the game’s Story Mode, which will eventually unlock various AI’s of increasing difficulty to play against in shorter campaigns. I’m sure it’s also more dynamic and challenging to play against real people in the multiplayer mode now that the game is fully released, as I felt that the story mode was, in a way, a disservice to Evolution, as part of the appeal I can see in it is the face-to-face competition that a board game can provide. This can be mostly rectified by playing in multiplayer mode against your friends, but there’s a level of social interaction that I believe gets lost in translation from analog to digital. When playing against a few friends, the goal becomes to beat them and win the game, but when you are given tons of “missions” to complete, it loses something fundamental from the play, making it more reminiscent of mobile games like Candy Crush, which motivate the player by using compulsion loops. Essentially, your drive to complete the levels is the promise of more levels to play–you beat levels to unlock trait cards or AI’s to help you beat more levels, etc.

Now, I’m not a big fan of games like this, but plenty of people are, so if you like that sort of play style, Evolution: The Video Game could definitely be a great game for you, especially since it requires more thought and technique than many other games in the genre. While it wasn’t for me, I do suggest giving Evolution a shot if it sounds like something you might enjoy.

Check Out the Evolution: The Video Game Trailer:

Evolution: The Video Game is available in English on PC and Mac via Steam for $14.99.