Turtle Rock Studios' Evolve was one of those games that seemed destined for greatness when it was shown off in full during a Game Informer feature back in January 2014.
Released more than a year later in 2015, the game featured 4v1 competitive modes that had four players taking control of humans with their own set of abilities, while another player took control of an alien creature that could evolve and grow stronger by consuming local wildlife. Whoever you controlled, however, the goal was still the same in the end: eliminate the other side.
Unfortunately, the game didn't quite live up to the expectations. Yes, the game had a strong start and was heralded as a breath of fresh air for multiplayer games, but it didn't offer enough in the long run and quickly became repetitive and stale; and the game soon lost the majority of its audience.
Turtle Rock Studios picked up on this, and in a bid to increase its playerbase, relaunched the game as a free-to-play game called Evolve: Stage 2 - and quite honestly, this move was the best thing that has happened to the game since it launched if the the stats on Steam Charts are any indication.
Sporting new gameplay systems, characters and unlockables - all at no cost - the game has seen a huge turnaround, boasting a rather strong 24,856 peak players - representing a 643 percent gain over the previous month. This is a far cry from the stats recorded throughout its troubled history, with its peak players dropping as low as 234 just last month. In fact, it's a little under 3,000 peak players off from its all-time high of 27,403 peak players that was recorded back when Evolve first launched in February 2015.
So how well is the game doing in the grand scheme of things? Well, according to Steam's own metrics the game currently stands among the 20 top played games as of writing this. Granted, it's not even close to the 900,000 peak reached by DoTA 2 or the 600,000 reached by Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, but this is still a major reversal for a game that could be considered dead just a month ago.
Of course, whether going free-to-play will be the solution for Evolve: Stage 2 in the long run remains to be seen. The game has only been available on PC since July 7, and more importantly, it won't be coming to consoles for quite some time.
In the meantime, anyone interested in what Evolve: Stage Two has to offer can download it on Steam or from the game's official site.
