My Review of the Game

[nova]

I will start by saying I really like games that you can just sit back and watch the AI do things. I for some reason am still mesmerized for hours by Rise of Nations, watching the AI battle each other and constantly change their alliances while developing more advanced technology.

That being said, this is the only other game that I have found that scratches a similar itch, where units can take over, slowly evolve to get stronger, look different and fight other rival groups.


The game rarely boots. I tried running it in Windows 8 mode and now I can generally get a level to start. Without notice however the game will crash during games, especially if you dare tweak any settings. The game autosaves but even those can be corrupted, meaning you lose what could be a days long session.

The creatures start as blobs and slowly "evolve" yet there seems to be no logic behind what evolution actually is supposed to be. They will grow stubs and usually become bipeds with extra floating limbs. The point of any of this isn't even clear. Besides changing from reptiles to mammals, I don't even really see any form of adaption whatsoever. You really cant tell the difference between an aquatic herbivore or a terrestrial carnivore.

Carnivores are absolute trash in this game. I set the viability of meat incredibly high and they were able to survive for awhile at times but the conditions have to be perfect. Most of the time the creatures end up all looking basically the same, and any time that any major difference occurs eventually one will overtake the map and starve out the new species.

The most entertaining way to play the game is with low fertility (0.1) and watch as they slowly die out bug hang on by a thread. Otherwise the game is just about watching ugly worm things run in circles eating grass. At least by doing this you can see them travel the map and have some challenge.

The most interesting part of the game is that you can actually make your own abominations and splice those genes with another species. The game fails at this as well because the vast majority of the time they will die immediately. If they do manage to survive you can grab one of them and save it. This also is a disaster because when you try to spawn in some of the new creature they spawn all at once on top of each other, run around aimlessly as if to learn the map and nearly always die before finding food right in front of them.

I thought that maybe the evolution in the game would either adapt to the environment in some way or that there would be sort of an end state or goal to the evolution (getting larger, more limbs, etc) but there doesn't seem to be. Meaning that all the creatures are probably going to just cycle between worms, worms with legs and bipedal monstrosities with nubs all over their body.

You would assume that by the way that this game is advertised that by setting up different zones with different temperatures that it would evolve drastically different creatures that can survive in very hard climates but would die in other parts of the map. From my experience, I was always generally left with one dominant herbivore/omnivore that could go anywhere, which seemed to make any form of last speciation impossible.

I also tried going about it in a classical Darwinian sense and created different islands far apart expecting drastically different species to form, but what ends up is a dominant species eventually migrates and finds the island and overtakes any species that may have formed.

Combat in the game is confusing, I never know if creatures are being eaten or attacked, they just die randomly. Unlike Spore or something you cant watch an animal go about its day because it will die in 30 seconds or less, usually because food was an inch away. If you slow down the game and zoom in you can sorta feel like you are playing a Spore clone but you can tell easily that nothing is physics based and the animations are crude and lifeless. Half the time you can't even tell if a creature evolved a face or has a series of random bumps on its head.

Very rarely will the game create something that looks somewhat agreeable and you will strive to save it and create a billion of them in the hope that evolution could start from there and make something good, but from my experience creating something humanoid or even long-legged does not have any advantage in the game and so will quickly be replaced by some ugly worm thing with two legs and 3 stubs.|

Overall the game is neat yet basic and flawed, but the main problem is how often it crashes. I do not know the policy Steam has about legitimately broken games that people know are broken but I will be seeking a refund because of that issue alone, despite my playtime. Even if Steam doesn't accept my refund, it is ridiculous that a game that has been around this long would be totally broken and yet sold with no warning.

[Manderish]

You might want to first learn about biology before going on with this review. Evolution has NO GOAL, it just goes in whatever direction produces the most offspring. The reason why there is no "ultimate goal" to evolution in this game is because including one would be nonscientific, pandering even towards the public view of the march of progress. Yes, it sucks the environments in the game always favour sad potato worms, but including gibberish taken from the public consciousness is not a solution. I really like your review and I think It's good advice for anyone trying to make an evolution simulator, just be careful with your word choice.

[nova]

Originally posted by Manderish:

You might want to first learn about biology before going on with this review. Evolution has NO GOAL, it just goes in whatever direction produces the most offspring. The reason why there is no "ultimate goal" to evolution in this game is because including one would be nonscientific, pandering even towards the public view of the march of progress. Yes, it sucks the environments in the game always favour sad potato worms, but including gibberish taken from the public consciousness is not a solution. I really like your review and I think It's good advice for anyone trying to make an evolution simulator, just be careful with your word choice.

Evolution has no goal, yes, but there should be an obvious series of visible adaptations to the environment. Water creatures should grow fins and bodies more suited for the water. Carnivores should have visibly large teeth and powerful hind legs, herbivores should have eyes on the side of their head, etc. Legs should drastically increase the speed of the creature but as of now seem to just be cosmetic, which is why I don't even understand why legs and leg stumps form at all on creatures. I don't understand why certain species are surviving while others are not. You would think that the game would select for fast creatures with more health that eat plentiful food but nothing like that happens. Evolution doesn't have a goal but someone can look at the fossil record for a given species and determine how it probably lived based on its appearance, what it was specialized for. This game just has blobs that sprout stubs that turn into legs and change color and random dots that appear on their face. Evolution is a process and there is a degree of progress that takes place in order for animals to adapt to a given environment, its not just totally random colors and shapes outbreeding each other.

[zeeb]

As far as I know, the most common species on our planet are annelids. (Worms)
Ranging from all kinds of different sizes and habitats.

So in that regard, it's pretty on spot.