Hands-on With the New Evolve Hunters

When I played the Kraken from Evolve the other week, I also managed to get hands-on with each of the four new hunters that were revealed. While their roles may be the same – Medic, Assault, Trapper and Support, the way these hunters work feels entirely different from the first batch.

Maggie – The Trapper

Maggie has a hunting dog named Daisy. Well, a hunting creature. A trapjaw, if you must know. Set Daisy loose and she’ll run straight towards the monster, taking the shortest route possible. You need to stay close to her though, as she’ll stop and wait for you. Daisy will also resurrect fallen companions, making her very handy if your group has a tendency to split up.

When playing as Maggie, you’re still responsible for deploying the mobile arena that traps the monster. Rather than wielding a harpoon gun to keep the monster in place, you have three harpoon mines to lay inside the arena. These will trap even the Kraken if it flies overhead and give your team plenty of time to do some serious damage.

Since you have Daisy, you don’t have to worry about placing sound spikes as you do when playing Griffin. Instead, just run around like a loon and once the arena is up, lay your traps and wait. Playing Maggie is far less intense than Griffin, but no less critical to the team’s success.

Lazarus – The Medic

Don’t be fooled by his job title – Lazarus doesn’t do a whole lot of healing. It’s all in the name. If you’re down and out of health, Lazarus can bring you back up in an instant with his custom Lazarus device but he’s not gonna help you survive.

He does have a healing burst that will regenerate a small amount of health for him and anyone else caught in the gas cloud, but his primary role is getting you back on your feet. To that end, he has a personal cloak that lets him sneak around the battlefield, picking you up if the monster loses interest. Of course, if the monster decides to eat you instead, you’ll have to wait for the drop ship to bring your clone back into battle.

[Not officially, but it must be a clone. There’s no other way to explain an identical character dropping into battle 3 minutes after you die.]

This gives you plenty of time to ping dozens of holes in the monster’s armour with the sniper rifle. You won’t directly cause a lot of damage but it’ll be a great help to the others.

Bucket – The Support

I know, it feels like Turtle Rock had three very well-defined character roles and then needed one more. “What do we call it?” “Uh… support?” “Done. Beer O’clock, let’s go.” While I never really figured out what Hank was supposed to do, Bucket is great for tracking. You hunker him down in a nice safe position, pull his head off and let it fly. Pilot that floating head around until you see the monster and if you hold your aim steady, it’ll lock on and transmit the location back to the team.

Deployable sentry guns can help drive the monster where you want it to go, and do considerable damage during endgame if the it reaches the generator. He also has his own guided rockets that spew trails of smoke for extra carnage.

Hyde – The Assault

Much like Markov, Hyde is your big damage dealer. He soaks up damage and spits it back into the monster’s face. Your personal shield will keep you alive, which is pretty handy if you’re playing with Lazarus, and you can annoy the hell out of the monster with your flamethrower.

Hyde’s main damage dealer is the minigun, which doesn’t take long to spin up and spews a crazy amount of bullets. In place of Markov’s mines, he carries gas grenades. Combine them with the flamethrower and you can do a hell of a lot of damage over time.

I presume you’ll be able to mix and match the hunters to create loads of different team builds. This range of distinct styles combined with multiple types of monsters should keep the game fresh for a long time. Evolve has, sadly, been delayed until February 2015. I’ll be playing it on PC.

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