It’s been nearly a month since Evolve was released for Xbox One, PS4, and PC. I honestly haven’t touched it much. I think it’s a game that is much better when you have your full team together and you’re playing with your friends. We haven’t been able to get everyone together at one time to play a few games. We’re hard-working adults! Evolve is a lot of fun to play, but I think there’s a bit of a learning curve. There’s a long list of do’s and don’t’s for playing as the monster as well as the hunters that I won’t get into. The game itself seems to favor the hunters if you have a competent team, especially if you have the Trapper with the “dog” named Daisy that can sniff out the monster for you early on.

Here are the details for the upcoming patch. There’s no ETA on when it will go live. One problem we had when the game first came out was that we had six players. Well, you can only play with five players. So one of us sat out and waited a couple games for the next guy to call it quits for the night. Soon you’ll be able to spectate with Observer Mode while you wait without having to listen to party chat to try to piece together what is happening. Evolve encourages you to stream the game in Observer Mode and commentate on the game like a sport. Here’s some Observer Mode gameplay:

It seems like Evolve wants to get in on the e-sports action. Can 2K Games get Mike Tirico to call some games in Observer Mode? I’d watch the hell out of that. What I like the most about Observer Mode is the Survival Odds display. It’s interesting to see in this particular match the odds swing from the hunters’ favor to the monster in one encounter. After the game, there’s a new post-game stats screen. You can follow the discussion on that here.

Observer Mode post-game stats

Earlier I talked about how you can buy skins on skins on skins as DLC for Evolve. This weekend you can get some golden skins for free as long as you play between now and 9:00 PM PT on Sunday. Look at that, good guy game developer giving players a chance to earn some free content, plus a heartfelt message. Hopefully we see more content given away to players who are rewarded for getting online. It looks a lot better than nickel-and-diming them for skins.