Turtle Rock’s Evolve was, for me, an almost-brilliant asymmetrical shooter straining to extract itself from the jaws of a live service kaiju maddened by a sludgy diet of unlocks and micro-transactions. It was a huge round of hide-and-seek featuring one, very large and fast, upgradeable alien monster and four hunters equipped with jet packs, trackers, forcefield nets and assorted demolition gear. I had a grand old time at launch as the Wraith, a godawful sneaklizard with warping capabilities, like a xenomorph moonlighting as Corvo Attano. But such thrills were sabotaged by the grindiness of the early game and by an infuriating deluge of paid DLC. Publishers 2K Games delisted it in 2018, after attempting to reboot Evolve as a free-to-play game. The beast clings onto a little life care of a community Discord for existing owners.
Even given the reaction to Evolve’s nickel-and-diming, it seems unlikely a sequel would have stripped out the live service progression elements and reverted to something like the menu-light horror movie sandbox approach of the developer’s previous Left 4 Dead. After all, Turtle Rock went onto make Back 4 Blood, a zombie blaster marinated in grindogubbins. Still, I’d have liked to see them try it. And look, they almost did.
A concept artist portfolio flushed out by MP1st describes plans for a cancelled Evolve 2. These included ideas for what sound like more linear missions (boo!), and a level consisting of a massive spacerock-digesting facility that puts me in mind of Dead Space‘s USG Ishimura (yes please). “After Evolve released, the studio began work on a sequel,” writes TJ Frame, who was senior concept artist at Turtle Rock between 2011 and 2017. “Sadly that project was canceled after several months of pre-production.
“At one point the game design included locations such as a huge asteroid mining station, tentatively named The Akhenaten, as well as more sequentially oriented missions back on Shear,” the post continues. “It would have been fun to really flesh out new locations and architectural styles within the world of Evolve, but the studio moved onto other projects and pitches.”
TJ Frame’s portoflio includes a bunch of art for the abandoned Evolve 2, which I will hold off recirculating here because I don’t have the developer’s blessing. Some of the images are labelled “Evolve II”, though one “Scraptown” or “Slagtown” area appears to be an outline for some Evolve DLC. The concepts for the aforesaid Akhenaten map are definitely the highlights, in terms of inherent munsterliness. The subliminal theme TJ Frame and their colleagues appear to have been working with is “nasty insect biting/liquefying paralysed and helpless prey”. Now picture yourself standing on that insect’s abdomen, attempting to harpoon Godzilla.
Alas and alack, such antics will probably never come to pass. Turtle Rock were acquired by Tencent in 2021 – their current project is TBA. If you too mourn the extinction of Evolve, you might be interested to hear that one of its spiritual progenitors, Aliens Vs Predator, is enjoying a new lease of existence care of a sporadically reanimating community server.
