YMMV / Evolve

• Critical Dissonance: On Metacritic, the game scored well by most critics, but players utterly trashed it due to the high price, lack of content, and the expensive paid DLCs.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: One popular consensus among fans is that despite the core gameplay loop being largely unfun due to poor balancing and basic design issues, the insane amount of dropship conversations and character backstory tidbits are quite entertaining, and people even have suggested they scrap the game entirely and use the lore to make a more focused and linear comic book or tv series.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Wraith has become considerably more popular than the other characters of the game, for some unfortunate particular reasons.
  • Daisy is this among the hunters. She's perhaps more popular than her owner, Maggie.
  • EMET certainly has his fans, due to him being easily the most insane character in the cast, having the most ludicrous lines, and the sheer juxtaposition of this sweet cutesy-designed mass-produced medical drone spouting the most profane battle cries you could ever find in a video game.
    Youtube Comment: It's like Baymax on PCP!
• Fan Nickname:
  • Blitz Markov is often shortened to Blitzkov.
  • Wasteland Maggie is usually shortened to Mad Mags in a shoutout to Mad Max.
  • Electro Griffin has been nicknamed Robogriff due to the resemblance to Robocop.
  • Renegade Abe is referred to as Renegabe.
  • A developer joked before Behemoth's name was confirmed that they should just call it Bob and the name stuck.
  • Glacial Behemoth is called Bobcicle in the fandom, derived from icicle and the original's nickname. It even appears on the launch page.
  • The Elder Kraken variation is usually referred to as Kelder.
• Fridge Brilliance: In the Evacuation ending where the monsters win, Bucket, Markov, Caira, Valerie and Hyde are killed first. Bucket's the pilot and his drones are a threat to the monster minions in Defend. Taking Assaults Markov and Hyde out weakens the hunters' damage output greatly, and taking out Medics Val and Caira removes the hunters' source of reliable healing since it would be suicide for Lazarus to go into the sea of monsters and resurrect someone. None of the Trappers are killed early because the monsters are advancing towards the hunters, not trying to escape.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Lazarus. His ability to revive dead hunters with nearly full health allows them to fight very aggressively. Add in his ability to turn invisible preventing the monster from finding and focusing him, and its impossible for the monster to fight his team before level 2 or 3.
  • Knock back is easily one of the hardest things to deal with as a hunter. Its easy for a hunter to be endlessly thrown around by monsters, unable to do anything as they take massive damage.
  • With crazy high damage, escaping ability, and a long range grab, the Wraith was easily the most overpowered of the original three monsters. In fact it was so comically broken that it snapped game balance over its knee- Supernova gave it a modest attack damage boost but a 1000% attack speed boost, and Decoy created a second AI-controlled copy of it that was invincible, could damage the hunters, and benefitted from Supernova- designed to let the Wraith slip away from the hunters, it instead allowed it to turn the fight from 1v4 to 2v4. It wasn't at all unknown for the Wraith, supposedly a stealth-focused monster, to jump the hunters right as they dropped in and slaughter them at level 1 without even needing to evolve, and it was one of the biggest factors that contributed to the game losing 90% of its player base in the first month. One YouTube commentor (on a video naming the Wraith as the single worst boss of the entire decade, even with the caveat that it was player-controlled) described it as "The first time in history a boss has ever beaten its own game."
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Maggie was against the idea of Hyde suggesting putting a flamethrower on Daisy.... then the Wasteland Maggie adaptation basically did exactly that.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: A frequent complaint about this game is that the matches, among players of differing skill levels, can devolve quickly into very short bouts. If all four members do not work well together to find the Monster it can become an invincible rampaging beast. Likewise if the Monster can't get away from a well coordinated team of hunters, it can have difficulty staging up and will be quickly beaten into paste. But the real problem is that there's no random factors and nothing really different happens. Every single match goes into the same routine and formula due to the design, which wears out its welcome quickly.
• My Real Daddy: Though 2K owns the license, Turtle Rock Studios is the one beloved by the fandom due to their connection to the community and actually being the ones to make the game. This attitude only intensified after 2K revoked TRS's use of the IP and called the game complete, to which TRS responded by using their last few hours of authority to answer fan questions, wrap up the mysteries in the story, and talk about what they'd had planned.
• Oh, Crap!: Any Hunter player's default reaction to hearing the Monster has become Level 3.
• Pandering to the Base: The Stage 2 relaunch, along with the shift into a Free-2-Play model, brought with it a ton of balance changes, some changes to streamline the game to make it quicker, more action focused, and more accessible, and a reasonable progression system that lets you unlock what you want when you're able. In the short term it seemed to have worked too, as the game's player numbers spiked by the thousands after it updated, going from only 100-200 players at any given time to around 30 thousand. Unfortunately it ultimately wasn't enough to save the game.
• Spiritual Licensee: It's basically been advertised as a sci-fi successor to Left 4 Dead for the past years, a title also made by Turtle Rock Studios under Valve, which they had recently left a while back to pursue their own career.
• Win Back the Crowd: The Stage 2 update was massively well received, and brought the game back in a big way, with player numbers reaching over 30 thousand concurrent players, higher than even the original launch. Unfortunately it ultimately couldn't overcome the stigma of its horribly bungled launch and the game promptly died again, with the servers being switched off for good in September 2018.

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