By far the weirdest round I've experienced was one in which I played as a monster, the Goliath, and continuously demolished members of the hunting team, only for the survivors to lead me around a chase long enough while they each respawned one by one. This went on for several rounds before I finally bailed, reached stage three, and demolished the relay while they went for a similar tactic of waiting on respawns. I caught on to their flight-not-fight strategy, and decided to spend my attention elsewhere, thereby securing the win anyway. Different teams with behave differently, and it's up to everyone involved to adapt and, hopefully, communicate where necessary.

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Everything in Evolve hinges on teamwork, on each player both mastering their class as well as respecting their role and their teammates' roles in the fight. Without a good level of understanding of who is best at what, and maybe even which characters in each class mesh best with each other, the hunters will be at the monster's mercy.

When playing as the monster, matches become an entirely different, actually somewhat lonely experience. They usually go something like this:

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Playing as the monster can be hit or miss. They're often stressful experiences; you can feel like you can't get away long enough to get your bearings. You're painfully aware that you're being hunted and that you're fending for yourself. Everything on the map either runs from you or runs at you. Trees collapse around you, giving away your location. You leave behind corpses in your desperate need to feed to evolve, giving away your location. Birds fly off as you walk by, giving away your location. There's not much you can do that doesn't work against you. Every step is a careful one, or one towards your inevitable capture. And you realize that quickly.

As the monster, you will undoubtedly be put in at least one uncomfortable position per round, unless you're lucky enough to have experience and go up against an inexperienced team of hunters, but that's no fun.

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The moments of struggling and despair make your triumph that much more empowering, though. You get to experience this three times over: once with the Goliath, once with the Kraken, and once with the Wraith. I'm still having a hard time getting a handle on the latter two, but I feel like I've finally perfected the Goliath's movements and attacks. I like that, even though each round asks the same of you. It can feel like you're hitting the reset button once you switch to a different monster.

Matches don't always go as planned, even with the most put-together of teams or most trained monster player. The appeal to Evolve is in confronting the same challenge in different scenarios. See, the problem with the repetitive nature of a game like Destiny, for instance, is that it's literally the same task over and over that you're often forced to carry out. In Evolve, it certainly looks like you're just playing a game to kill a monster or kill a bunch of hunters out to get you, but it plays out differently every single time. I've had rounds last a minute and rounds that lasted 20. I've demolished teams and monsters, and I've been demolished. And I'm still learning the best method to tackling a Wraith.

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There is technically no difficulty variance in Evolve—no 'normal,' or 'hard' options—but the differences between the monsters feels like the equivalent of one. Going up against the Wraith feels like the toughest challenge. It takes time to figure out both how to play effectively as a Wraith and how to go up against one. Facing a Wraith helps you realize just how crucial the differences within each hunter class are, and how much of a difference seemingly small things like class perks and buffs found on wildlife in each map can make. Each monster requires a different strategy to tackle, and so they require a specific team of hunters to do so effectively.

There's a fairly steep learning curve as you are introduced to each new monster, both in playing and fighting it. It's like relearning the rules of the game. So, yes, it's technically repetitive. But it doesn't really end up feeling that way.

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As for the elephant in the room, sure, there are already plans for new hunters and new monsters in the form of DLC that publisher 2K would love for you to pay for. Evolve could certainly use variation in the available modes—I find the current objective-based missions lacking and in dire need of ones where several monsters might go up against several teams of hunters—and I could see those being sold as extras later down the line. But I've found enough variety in the selections of characters—the 12 hunters and three monsters available across 16 different maps and five different modes.

In fact, I like that there isn't too much variety in the selections of characters. I like that my focus is restrained to a handful of permutations of scenarios so that I can refine and perfect my methods. I'm perfectly at home loading up another round, with the same team of the same hunters, against the same monster on the same map and figuring out the better route we could have taken or training towards becoming a better team together or sniffing out hunter weaknesses, as the monster, in a more informed way.

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I'm ok with the redundancy because I'm interested in taking a game structure and perfecting it. It's not enough to simply win. Evolve pushes me to perfect. I can't say how long that challenge will last, or how long my interest in flaunting it after that will last, but it's certainly got my attention.

It doesn't take long to get familiar with Evolve. After a few rounds spent sampling all the available playable characters and monsters, you've pretty much got the idea of what you're playing with. But to know the game intimately, and to play competitively, you'd have to spend hours with each character alone.

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Evolve is, by its nature, repetitive. But the first time you play it won't feel like the 100th time you play it. Imagine you have never played basketball before. The first time you pick it up, it's hard. You're frustrated. You don't understand the rules or how to play well with your teammates. But once you start getting the hang of it, your 100th game won't feel like the first one. Because you'll be better, and you'll be employing skills you didn't even know were available to you. And at that point? Well, it's more like you're playing basketball rather than letting basketball play you. It's a lot more rewarding to be a good monster, and a good teammate, rather than just passable ones.

To contact the author of this post, write to tina@kotaku.com or find her on Twitter at @tinaamini.