Evolve is a 4 player co-op shooter from Left 4 Dead creators Turtle Rock Studios. Left 4 Dead 3 you ask? No, not really. In the optimum situation Evolve's gameplay takes place in multiplayer with 5 people, 4 for the 'Hunters' and one for the big baddie that the hunters are trying to kill. The Hunters have 4 different classes that are unique and needed to actually kill the boss. Playing as the monster is a bit like playing as a Tank in Left 4 Dead but with a bunch more abilities and you get your own set of objectives that leaves you hunting ambient monsters in the world to level up so that you can become more powerful.

The four classes for the Hunters are Medic, Assault, Support, and the Trapper. The Medic obviously heals his team-mates and keeps them all not dead and smeared on the floor. The Assault does a lot of the big damage to take the monster down, the Support generates shields, and the Trapper has an assortment of abilities to stop the monster from moving around such as a giant dome that locks the monster in the same area as you. That kind of sounds like a bad idea when you get a look at that thing. Oh yeah, everyone also has jetpacks. You'll need 'em.

The Monster, which there will be multiple choices of when the game releases travels around the map killing random AI controlled monsters to level up so that it can have an easier time of killing either all 4 hunters to win, or by blowing up a generator and murdering a bunch of hapless scientists, because scientists suck. The Monster has to be the maximum level of 3 to blow up the generator and kill the scientists, so there's a bit of a race for the Hunters to track down the monster and kill him before he levels up enough. I should point out that this generator scientist business is only on the "Hunt" game-mode which is the only currently revealed game-mode, but Turtle Rock says that they're working on more.

I mentioned that there were AI controlled monsters, too. It's not quite Left 4 Dead zombie hordes or anything, but these monsters can be killed by the Hunters to deny the big baddie his XP, or the largest of the AI monsters can give your team a buff a'la Baron Nashor in League of Legends.

The game has full AI support just in case you don't have 4 friends or don't have an internet connection available. That's good, right?

I haven't been lucky enough to get my hands on Evolve, but it looks super good, especially with the reputation of Turtle Rock Studios. It seems like there's a lot of strategy behind the gameplay and if it all works as good as it looks in the gameplay video below then it probably has a pretty high skill ceiling. This is what I wanted Aliens: Colonial Marines to be.

The coolest part? It's coming out this year. Autumn 2014. We've got a trailer with a Danzig cover as well as a wonderfully informative 6 minute gameplay video by Kirk Hamilton at Kotaku. Cheers.