Really enjoyed playing this so I decided to use it for a blog assignment for uni. Hope you don't mind =)
Eatvolve is a game in progress by Indie developer Aladar. It's a basic 2D platformer with adorable pixelated graphics. It seems very kid friendly, until you start crushing the cute little animals and eating them. It has a very interesting mechanic where you must eat other creatures in order to evolve. You start off as a simple worm and depending on what you eat, your evolution can follow different paths, which in turn give you different abilities. Eating frogs lets you jump higher, eating sugar gliders lets you glide, and beetles let you smash through certain blocks. Each stage of an evolution changes the way you look, so after eating one frog, your worm becomes a tadpole and after the third you fully change into a frog yourself.
- Eat or be eaten!
At any time in your evolution, if you eat a creature of a different species you will change to become a combination of what you have consumed. This can create some interesting ability combos, and looks. My favourite so far would have to be having the higher jumping ability from eating the frogs crossed with the glider ability to glide around, making it much easier to cross the stage. There are also a couple of abilities that you gain from certain creatures that stack with any evolution. These are incredibly useful, such as wings from the butterflies that allow you to jump multiple times while in the air, and a shell from snails that protect you from a single hit, before falling off and needing to be replaced.
- Taking a hit with a shell protects you from death
Once you're at the final stage in the evolution, coming into contact with the same species no longer kills you and you are unable to kill and eat them, instead you can breed and lay an egg which then hatches into a cute little baby hybrid of a worm and whatever creature it was. This allows you to select what kind of creature to spawn as, letting you start the game with certain abilities and needing to eat less to reach the final evolution.
There seems to be a scoring system that tracks how far you travel in each run, with a little 'top score' display in the top left of the screen. Although there is no real end game at the moment, it's still nice to know if you've beaten your previous score and I'm sure there'll be many additions made to the game which will give it more meaning. The end of the game so far seems to be when you reach the top of the level. Here there are birds that will swoop you, giving you the greatest challenge yet. If you time your jump right, you can knock it out and eat it too which then gives you the ability to fly. From here, there isn't much else to do as there aren't any more enemies the higher up you go, but I'm sure the developer has some nice ideas to add to that experience.
- Just a few of the different evolutions
Remembering that this is still a work in progress, it is super addictive as the music, sound effects and graphical all compliment the feel of the game. Controls are very smooth and I'm really looking forward to seeing how this one is going to turn out. If you haven't given it a try yet, head over to https://papadar.itch.io/eatvolve and download it. Remember to support independent developers so they are able to continue putting out their amazing work.