It was great to meet up with the other Battle Misfit guys over the 4 day event of EGX 2014 at Earls Court, London. Even if we did have to spend the night at a hostel that questioned the laws of human rights and even our ability to survive cleanly in said conditions. The event itself was a brightly lit, noisy collaboration of the three big console platforms, PC games, big name developers, cosplay (my favourite), retro games and already released games with cult followings such as Minecraft, League of Legends and Counter Strike. The place just sent all your senses into overdrive!
I want to talk about my main highlight of the convention which, to my surprise, was Evolve! There’s no doubt I wanted to get some time to play everything I could while I there and the games I wanted to see were more towards the Nintendo zone. Evolve wasn’t as high on the to do list than the likes of Super Smash Bros, Hyrule Warriors and the new Mario spin-offs Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker and Yoshi’s Woolly World, but it has left such an impression on me it has definitely become the talking point of every conversation I get into about my week.
For those who don’t know too much about Evolve, its made by the creators of the Left 4 Dead games, so already we’re off to a good start! The game is a five player game where a team of four go against one in a battle between human/robot and ever growing beast. The four good guys are given roles to play in the hunt, assault, medic, support and trapper, each with their own unique set of weapons and skill sets. As I was only able to take the helm of a support character, I can only really talk about that specifically and not the others, but I’m sure there’s plenty of info and YouTube videos out there though that can cover what I cant in talking about my personal experience.
So there we were in a dark, rocky terrain surrounded by wild beasts that could attack us while on the hunt for the big guy! My weapons as support included an automatic laser rifle, aerial barrage, cloaking devise that made the whole team invisible if close by, and another machine which seemed to help individual team mates from loosing too much health. Each role was well designed in a way in which it makes you communicate more than I have done while playing games online recently. In fact, the previous night I was expressing my amusement when I saw the E3 demonstration of an early look at Destiny and how cheesy I found the two players when talking to each other about tactics. However, once we put on the headsets and dropped into the game, I found myself becoming a cheesy tactician! Each of us constantly telling each other where we were, where icons appeared on our screens, and what to do when we spotted the enemy.
Unfortunately for us, the humans, we were unable to track the beast down before it could reach its most powerful form, which made it exponentially more difficult. When we were given the task of protecting a power generator, we managed to damage the monsters health enough for it to retreat for a moment, to which we all confirmed over the head sets that the trapper in our team should lower the force field to keep that thing out while we ran down the clock on the time for the generator to be protected. All that was left to do now was take down the creature, we lowered the shield as I sent my aerial barrage descending directly on top of its head. I felt pretty important. After a skirmish of guns firing and rocks being thrown we managed to defeat our friend Cam, who took the role of monster and with a great sense of accomplishment. We were also given a wrist band with our roles on and a free T-shirt! AWESOME! One of the highlights of EGX and I can’t wait for the February 10th release date!
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