Westin:

Jumping into Evolve with a 2560 x 1440 resolution and a graphics preset of high, I loved what I saw.  The crisp shadows, the glistening textures, and the contours of my weapon (and yes I’m talking about my laser cutter gun in-game).

Let me make clear that I have no shame in saying that I am a graphics whore.  Sorry, it’s the way God made me.  Luckily though, for all you non-graphics whores out there, you’ll be happy to know that my spirit was soon crushed by my terribly low frame rates.  It was somewhere in the low 10s and was utterly unplayable.  This is to no fault of the game, but rather my 2 year old laptop graphics card, which was high-end at one point.

After much tweaking, I found my optimal settings to be a resolution of 1366 x 768 on low settings.  Ugh, I know right?  Well believe it or not, I thought that Evolve still looked pretty damn good even after dumbing things down as much as I did.  Long story short, if you’re going to play this on PC with High settings, make sure you have a pretty good card cause you’ll need it!

In terms of pop-ins and other graphical glitches, Big Alpha functioned just fine on my rig.  I don’t recall a single problem on the graphical end, which I think is quite impressive!

Now, my cons are for the most part just nit-picky.  Overall, my connection was stable within most of the matches I played.  However, there was a scenario when my monster was fully evolved at Stage 3 and I was just about to destroy the Power Relay to win the match, when all of sudden my monster was unable to move.

Frozen in time like a giant, boulder holding monster statue.  Then all of sudden the screen went black and I see a message saying “Connection to the host has timed out”…  and I was so close to winning!  Why host, why?!  But thankfully, that was the one and only time that ever happened.  Watch the video below to see this whole thing happen in real time.

The only other thing I can think of was when I was the monster I tried climbing up a fixture that was definitely climbable, but for some reason I couldn’t and as I was trying to climb this stupid thing I was getting shot by all of the hunters.  So in other words, I had to go around the fixture getting shot the entire time.  Lame…

Other than that though my experience with Big Alpha was almost flawless.  A beautiful, well-made game that worked well on PC (at least on my rig).  Oh, if you didn’t read our first impressions of Evolve’s Big Alpha, click here to check it out!

Ethan:

Let’s start this off by saying this is easily one of the best looking games on the Xbox One.  There was little to no texture pop in, the environments are well detailed and the lighting is fantastic. Surprisingly the game runs at a solid 30 fps through my play time. No signs of slow down at all.

The slow down came when looking for a multiplayer match. It took forever to find games and when they would finally load in the team would only be half filled. It’s unfortunate, but if there was something to go wrong it would be the matchmaking. Hopefully it will be fixed by the time the game is released.

For a better picture of the Xbox One Evolve Alpha experience, check out the video above.