Stealth games tread a fine line. To create true tension without completely disempowering the player is no small feat. It requires finesse—an understanding of what brings complication without frustration, and a willingness to let the player experiment. From developer Spikewave Games, Evotinction accomplishes… absolutely none of the above.
Evotinction simply does nothing notable. Throughout its roughly five hour runtime, it is a mishmash of aggressively rudimentary mechanics and ideas. Encounters feature enemy placement and variety that ranges from dull to downright nonsensical. This is to say nothing of the uninteresting world we’re made to traipse through. All of this results in stealth that is, at best, uninspiring. At its worst? Evotinction’s core loop is clunky to the point of almost being broken.
First, the uninspiring. Evotinction’s stealth is incredibly bland. There are various things to hide behind in any given room, but more often than not these are positioned in such a way that it’s clear which way the game wants you to go. Later upgrades give less flexibility than they do mildly different options to follow the same path. Enemies follow mostly strict paths—despite some abilities actively distracting them, they rarely stray or feel genuinely affected by your presence. The banality of it all is only accentuated by occasionally colourful yet overly sanitised-feeling environments.
Then there’s the broken. Throughout my playthrough, I encountered multiple glitches that caused a screen blackout. All of these came from using actions I’d spent upgrade points on. The blackout kept UI elements on screen and nothing else—I was entirely lost without restarting from my last checkpoint. Being forced to do so was especially aggravating, as the checkpoints in Evotinction are terrible. I had to redo massive sections through no fault of my own.
Perhaps the most dire crisis in Evotinction, however, isn’t its stability, but the game’s harrowing lack of identity. Though presented as a stealth game, Evotinction often flails around trying to be anything but. Sometimes you end up in a boss fight that randomly gives you a super dash and turns your little electric zapper into a full on grenade launcher. Other times, you’ll receive unlimited ammo for a random shooter segment. Every genie has one-shot kills and pixel-perfect aim, but your reticle is just a tad off. At the worst of times, you’re thrown into a fight against a massive genie that has all the horrors of that first boss I mentioned, but gifts you none of the unlimited ammo or enhanced movement.
Every so often and with absolutely no warning, Evotinction tries to be another thing it simply isn’t. I was left wondering what the point was of touting this as a stealth game when these moments feel like it doesn’t want to be. It’s only made worse by the severe lack of signposting for any of these gimmick segments. The game tosses you in with no instruction or indication of what to do.
This lack of clarity extends to the upgrade UI, which is so terribly cluttered that past a certain point I simply didn’t bother. I figured out ammo capacity upgrades, and just brute-forced my way through Evotinction with unmissable story upgrades and the gun. As best I could, anyway, with enemy paths eventually becoming entirely sporadic to the point of being annoying.
Speaking of story, Evotinction doesn’t quite get that right either. The game puts players in the shoes of Dr. Thomas Liu, a scientist in a top secret organisation working to save the world from… something. Unfortunately, their work turned on them. A RED virus has taken over and now we must liberate the facility, lest the virus escape the facility’s network and infect every last computer in the world. Societal collapse and all that. It’s a very run-of-the-mill premise that doesn’t really do enough with either flair or intrigue to encourage me to delve deeper.
I tried, though. I wanted to engage with Evotinction in some meaningful way, so I read abandoned notes and other flavour-text lore drops. I actually enjoyed some of the more experimental flashback sections, and appreciated the in-context speedrun incentives. Alas, even these were not enough to get me invested. About halfway through the game, I gave up on investment entirely. The story devolves into unearned plot twists en masse, with contrivance after contrivance to make up for the utter lack of narrative. It’d be funny if so much of it didn’t also render half our efforts by that point moot.
A portmanteau of the words evolution and extinction, Evotinction left me wishing it would undergo a little more of the former and focus a little less on the latter. I’m all for a grand stakes story with big ideas. In committing to exactly none of its own, however, Evotinction falls flatter than a stealth section insta-fail.
Sarim played Evotinction on PlayStation 5 with a review code.
