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In gameplay terms, Evolve is shaping up to be one of most enjoyable online team-based experiences we've played in quite some time. However, from a technical standpoint, what draws us to this title is the fact that it's the first triple-A multi-platform rollout for Crytek's stunning CryEngine across PS4, PC and Xbox One. Unfortunately, our initial excitement was tempered somewhat by the somewhat mundane - but extremely annoying - networking problems we encountered.Connection issues, excessively slow matchmaking, and the appearance of occasional game-breaking bugs were frequent bugbears across all platforms during our test, putting a downer on the experience. Indeed, on the opening night, we spent around two hours with the game on the Xbox One and only managed to get a single match under our belt. In comparison, the PC version gave us a little less trouble after an update was installed, although we still encountered connection issues and matches where our character model and abilities failed to load when playing as either monster available in the alpha - the Goliath and Kraken. Things improved for us as the alpha phase progressed, but the problems were never too far away.
The situation didn't improve on PlayStation 4. Due to unforeseen incompatibilities with the recent 2.0 firmware, the PS4 alpha was delayed by a few days while an update was quickly developed - the game would crash and boot players back to the PS4 dashboard when connecting to servers or searching for a match. But even after the patch was deployed the matchmaking and unstable connections continued to a much greater extent compared to on other platforms - we only experienced between eight gameplay sessions across a 12 hour period, with most of the time spent stuck in menu screens or reloading the game after it crashed.
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