preserves Left 4 Dead’s core in amber – or, if you prefer,
secures it in a safe room. The modern touches intended
to give the game longevity, like the deck of unlockable
cards that offer percentage tweaks to health or reload
time, are merely layered on top – there to be engaged
with if you want to, or not. Turtle
Rock knows better than to mess with
the rock, paper, scissors simplicity of
its premise. A hulking boss is still best
dealt with using napalm; a horde
lured away with a pipe bomb.
It’s not exactly evolution. In fact,
if Turtle Rock were a monster from
its most famous failure, you could
say it had reverted to Stage 1 , rather
than grown into its most powerful,
final form. But let’s allow the studio this one, fond
throwback. Doesn’t Turtle Rock deserve to rest on its
laurels when, for so many years, those laurels were
mistakenly handed to Valve instead?
Jeremy Peelwhatever,” drawled your guide in Evolve’s tutorial. “You
are hunting a monster on an alien planet, and that ain’t
like anything else. You already know how to use a gun and
run around and how to face which direction and all that
bullshit – you’re not an idiot. We’re gonna teach you
monster hunting. It may seem... it’s a lot to deal with, but
after only like three or five matches, you’ll get it.”
It’s hard to know whether Turtle Rock’s high opinion
of players – both their intelligence, and their appetite for
novelty – would have been rewarded in the long-term.
Evolve was already hamstrung at release by a punitive
pricing policy, introduced by 2 K, who had picked up the
game after original publisher THQ went bankrupt.
“If your customer needs to find four friends to enjoy
your game, maybe don’t charge $ 60 for it,” says Turtle
Rock lead writer Matt Colville in a Reddit postmortem
three years ago. “Because getting your friends to spend a
total of $ 240 on a game is a hard fucking sell. We were
already thinking about this. We knew this, and THQ knew
it. Alas, THQ went tits up.”
TURN LEFT
Evolve ultimately went tits up too, shutting down after a
brief free-to-play redesign. Besides
the price, Colville partly attributes
that outcome to sheer design
challenge. “It wasn’t just
asymmetrical,” he says. “The two
sides were playing fundamentally
different games. That was a problem
we never solved. It meant all new
content was a colossal pain to
implement, forget balance.”
Given the cost of all that ambition,
it should be no surprise that Turtle Rock has since
retreated to more familiar ground. This year it put out
Back 4 Blood – the Left 4 Dead 3 that Valve, with its
democratised development process, seems unable to
rally its workforce around. Back 4 Blood’s genius is that it
ABOVE: (^) Trapping a
sentient, player-driven
beast in Evolve was an
undeniable thrill.
“THE TWO SIDES
WERE PLAYING
FUNDAMENTALLY
DIFFERENT GAMES”
Shooting zombies through
the barsof the saferoom
door is a hobby in itself.
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