Evotinction review — Stealth and hack-tion are what the doctor ordered

Artificial intelligence has been a hot topic in the tech and science fiction worlds, particularly what could go wrong should A.I. go rogue. Evotinction from Spikewave Games puts you in the shoes of Dr. Liu, who faces an A.I. that has taken a facility’s human population hostage by infecting the very systems they built with a virus. It’s up to Dr. Liu and his own A.I. companion, Oz, to get to the source of the virus and put a stop to it before things become catastrophic.

Evotinction is a near-future dystopian SciFi game with a focus on stealth and hacking. Your success throughout the game is dependent on not being discovered while exploiting the vulnerabilities within the system. You’ll spend a lot of your time crouch-walking around, deactivating, destroying, or befriending the corrupted A.I. robots, called Genies, while you search for the ‘cure’ to this virus and save the remaining survivors. Dr. Liu is a researcher at a place called HERE, a self-sustaining research facility, and he alone has seemingly been spared.

Overall, the game’s mechanics are fairly simple. As you navigate the facility, you’ll interact with devices that give you access to information and other resources. Much of the hacking involves simply holding the interact button (triangle on PS5), though there are some hacks where you have to enter a specific combination. When confronting the corrupted Genies, you use your e-gun to override their visual, audio, mobility, and other functions, allowing you to take them out hopefully before they sound the alarm and a whole swarm of them come after you. If you’re lucky, you’ll have what is essentially an EMP blast that will temporarily stun any Genies close by so you can try to make your escape. You have no weapons in this game to beat them down with, so maintaining your anonymity is key.

I would have liked to see more depth from the hacking mechanic since it is such a huge focus of the game. Going beyond a simple interact button and having the player use different functions of a device or even at least show an animation. A good example would be how the game The Invincible handled using computers and accessing compartments to extract drives, where you’d have to interact with different knobs, buttons, clasps, etc. As it is in Evotinction, you press or hold the button and your character just sits there until the process is complete.

Obviously in the ‘combat’ settings, I can understand where this would be more complicated, but I actually like how Spikewave did the interactions with the Genies. We already mentioned the e-gun, but you also have other gadgets that can be deployed, like a box hologram to mask your movements or a phonograph holo to distract Genies with noise. The only issue I had when dealing with the Genies was that sometimes it felt like the results of attempting to hack a Genie or toss out a gadget were inconsistent or even inconsequential entirely. For example, figuring out how to infect nearby Genies with a virus I’d used on another was a chore that I never mastered before completing the game.

The narrative of Evotinction is an interesting one, especially with our hero not being your typical mercenary. The story the game aims to tell has a lot of potential. However, I feel like it fell a little short. Some of the major story events are less climactic than they ought to be and the dialog falls flat in some areas where I feel there should have been more depth. It’s also hard to say if it’s intentional or if the writing actually needed more time because, in the end, it still kind of works. You reach the conclusion with no loose ends, and there’s a lot you can learn about HERE by what you find while you’re exploring the facility.

Speaking of exploration, the game is linear, though you can venture into rooms and hallways off the main path. In the various nooks and crannies you’ll find all sorts of things like audio logs, diary entries, action figures, and more. You’ll also find resources to upgrade your e-gun and unlock additional skills and gadgets to use against the Genies. The HERE facility has many interesting areas, like a museum, shopping center, and others that you’ll sleuth your way through and you never know what you may find hiding around every corner. Will it be a Genie or just a Genie action figure?

The game is also well designed and very solid graphically. The different areas of HERE are distinctive, having their own personalities representative of the area’s purpose, though obviously a little empty without the people to occupy them. Dr. Liu’s attire is also very detailed, as are the Genies. The devs do mention the recommended specs for PC to include at least a 30-series GPU (or AMD equivalent), but on PS5 you shouldn’t experience any hitches with display or game performance. For this review, I played on PS5 and had no issues to report, no load times beyond a few seconds, and no bugs or glitches.

The choices in music and sound design helped add to the suspenseful and sometimes scary moments in the game. The tempo of the music changes when you’re actively being searched for and quiets back down again when the immediate danger has passed. When you’re sneaking around and investigating things, the tune switches over to a more detective theme to fit the vibe of the moment. Alert sounds will put you on edge and the sound of Genies closing in on you as your screen starts flashing red and the music becomes more intense… And you’ve been hacked and sent back to the last checkpoint. Should have used that EMP.

My biggest gripe with Evotinction was the lack of clear directions at some points of the game. I’d get into a boss encounter or need to find the exit, but there was nothing pointing the way or the instructions were never made clear as to how to accomplish something. This often resulted in me getting compromised and having to restart the same area or encounter multiple times until I just happened to figured it out or the game would finally tell me what I needed to do.

Overall, Evotinction — which, if you haven’t noticed yet, is the combination of ‘evolution’ and ‘extinction’ — is a good game with an interesting plot and not too shabby gameplay. If it filled in some of the story gaps or smoothed out some of the hacking confusion, that solid foundation could easily become more.

Unless otherwise stated, the product in this article was provided for review purposes.

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