[Update]: Four years after the big shut down, Evolve: Stage 2's multiplayer servers have turned back on!

Evolve was a game with a tremendous amount of potential behind it. A truly asymmetric multiplayer game where you not only got to hunt down giant beasts, but also play as them and use all of your cunning and trickery in order to turn the tables on the hunters! What could go wrong?

Unfortunately for Evolve, the answers to that question were quite numerous and ranged from DLC complaints to balance issues that took far too long to solve, all of which slowly resulted in the playerbase packing their backpacks and migrating to greener pastures. Now that Evolve has gone free-to-play as a part of the Stage 2 Update a new question arises: has it managed to improve enough to warrant a second try?

First of all, however, here's the announcement trailer to give you an idea of what to expect:

As for the question I posed previously, the answer is a resounding... maybe. In an effort to streamline Evolve and make it more accessible to a wider audience, Turtle Rock has removed all but two of the game modes, reworked many of the monsters and player characters, and in general created a simpler Evolve than you might remember from the past. While I don't doubt this is going to get fixed at some point soon, these changes have also resulted in the monsters feeling incredibly under-powered, so much so that most of the matches I've participated in have devolved into the hunters chasing down a monster who's just rushing his level 3 upgrade.

In other words, there are still plenty of flaws, but on the positive side this is still the same sort of enjoyable cat & mouse gameplay I was first drawn to Evolve with. The characters feel unique enough, the monsters are fun to play, and from what little I've experienced so far it seems that the progression system is generous enough that you won't be hitting dry periods where you unlock nothing for weeks at a time.

Whether its worth your time and patience, that's hard question to answer, but if you've ever enjoyed Evolve or simply wanted to give it a try, now would be the perfect time do so as the playerbase is still riding high. You can download Evolve Stage 2 for free on Steam.