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Finally, I thought, someone has created a game that was meant to teach as well as to entertain! We've all seen games reenacting historical events, but capturing them on such a grand scale without losing the scope of what's really going on is a challenge. Simulations that chart civilizations, planets, or even universes tend to marginalize the very basic nature of the events that the game is trying to represent. In this respect, Evolution succeeds at its goal.

Time flies by in thousand year increments as continents drift to and fro. And yet you can still watch representatives of your evolutionary life waddle around in the muck, listen to the creatures hiss and roar as they stomp around the vegetation and have other THINGS to interact with. There are all kinds of Things too: Things that crawl, Things that fly, Things that swim, and Things that eat other Things.

The gameplay is reminiscent of Warcraft in that while the beings you control will go about their daily business if you do not tell them otherwise, they can be told where to go, when not to go anywhere, and whom to chew up and swallow. This makes for a slow but thoughtful game. My fears that the game would be too slow were quickly squelched by the sheer amount of research required for each new evoluiontary being I wanted to develop. I needed to know the temperature, terrain, and feeding habits of each new beastie. All that information takes time to absorb, especially when you're racing against the computer for who gets to develop a sloth.

Each creature you control is just the bottom of a long evolutionary pyramid. Reaching the top of that pyramid is your goal. Achieve intelligence and you will probably win (but not always, you just get a big point boost).

You must allocate points between evolution, defense, and feeding. They're all placed on the same scale, so you can't allocate all points to one statistic without the others suffering. It makes for a challenge as you try to figure out what your generation of creatures should be doing at any particular moment. It also is by far the most annoying part of the game play. Because it's on a slide rule (suspiciously reminiscent of other slide rules in Windows 95-based programs) you must put your mouse over the correct part of the slide and drag it to the left or right, with the feeding statistic being the default in the middle. When a creature achieves a new evolutionary stage and no longer has any other creatures to evolve to, the game pops up your creature window and asks you to pick another creature to evolve since you have evolutionary points but can't spend them on anything. Why no one thought of just defaulting to 0 evolutionary points on your creature when you obviously can't evolve is just one indication that the game was rushed to production.

Another is that there is no historical earth setting. By far the most effective means of teaching children and adults about evolution would be to place them in our own historical scenario. For whatever reason, it will be included in a future patch instead. A terrible mistake.

Another irritating problem is that once an opponent goes down an evolutionary path he blocks you from evolving into it. I made the silly mistake of playing against five computer opponents. Within a few minutes, there was no chance for my wriggly amphibians to see the light of the next epoch.

Therein lies the games biggest problem. It's hard! I played dozens of games, reducing the number of opponents a bit each time. It was unplayable until I was against one other opponent (the default setting). I also had to shut the disaster function off. In almost every case, what killed me was not the witty tactics of my evolutionary opponents but the exceptionally nasty effects of a supernova, comet, or volcano turning my creatures into fossil fuels. Disasters also seemed to strike whenever I felt I was getting ahead, but that may just be my pride hurting after seeing my Platyhystrix finally crawl onto the plains he was born for and disappear in the blink of an eye.

Evolution requires some intelligence, but unfortunately, like the evolutionary process itself, the choices a player has are sparse. Temperature seriously affects your creatures. With evolutionary paths being cut off by your opponent, continental drift, and the ever changing terrain, you may be left with creatures who don't have even the slightest chance of succeeding. Continental drift provides its own agony, strangely leaving your creatures out in the middle of the ocean as the land recedes at high speeds, dunking your partially land-based life forms to struggle in a life-and-death race back to dry land.

There's also not much decision-making. Either your creatures can or can't survive in a terrain, there is no uncertainty or "getting by" that will allow you to pull ahead by clever moves. An early mistake can spell the death of your creatures. The end result: I ended up turning the game off, usually after a natural disaster when it became apparent all was lost.

This is not to say that Evolution is a bad game. I cheered when my first Platyhystrix stumbled onto a new continent. I cheered when I managed to finally breed a beast capable of surviving in the rapidly drying desert climate. And I keep going back to it in the belief that I CAN evolve intelligent life. The very thought of breeding intelligent wombats sends tingles up and down my homo sapien spine. I am still hopeful that with just enough luck, just enough creatures, and no random disasters whatsoever, my Things that slurp and spit will evolve into Things that think and spit.

Then there's this section of help that was listed under the title "garbage" in the index:

"We like Quake, we like Command & Conquer, we adore Civilization--but too often, computer gaming is a brain-dead medium exploited for high-energy motion and a visceral charge. When "more tasteless! more gore!" is considered a selling point, something is seriously wrong with the field. We don't believe in censorship, and we know we can't fight the market: but we can strive to create something of value. Good games need not be brain dead."

This game is definitely not for the Quake generation. Which is a shame. Because this is one of those games you actually LEARN from. The name Aistopod, those little snakey amphibians (that aren't snakes at all), is stuck in my head. I now know quite a bit more about the process of evolution than I ever did before. We could all do with a little more education in our games. I applaud Crossover's efforts.

But lest the folks at Crossover get TOO high and mighty, let me point out that predators play a very important role in the game too. And those predators have little combat bars that pop up over their heads as they hunt down your slow moving Elginerpetons. Then your poor prey's body goes limp. Then it turns into a little skeleton. Evolution itself is all about visceral charges. The fact that there are toothy dinosaurs grinning all over the box indicates Crossover is not afraid to capitalize on the same violent premise that dominates the game industry today.

Despite all those advertised dinos, I haven't been able to evolve anything even slightly resembling one. The closest I got to dinosaurs was a Dimetrodon (not even a dinosaur) eating one of my animals. I then watched him devour the rest of the herd, one by one.

Then a comet hit and killed everybody.

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 3 (Average)