EVO - The Search for Eden

"This creature can evolve himself into a super-being without reproducing. Kinda like Doomsday..."

(For all those of you who haven't followed the Superman comic books, Doomsday was a maniacal killing machine who could evolve to meet any attack used against him.)

*rumble, rumble*

In case some of you haven't yet blindly walked into an Internet discussion board where the matter of origins is discussed, the issue raises some pretty high emotions among Biblical creationists, neo-Darwinists, panspermists(believe that aliens seeded the earth with life a long time ago), punctuated equilibrists (quite often lumped in with the neo-Darwinians, argue that much of evolution happens too fast to leave a good fossil record) and occasionally a variant of a pagan origins myth, which can go toward some or all of those already mentioned.

Get ready, because EVO is the result you get when you walk into a room full of these people, yell ''ALL OF YOU GUYS ARE RIGHT!'', leave them in stunned silence, and proceed to make a game based on the idea. Enix has mixed and matched multifarious myths before( think Actraiser or Soul Blazer ) but for sheer scope, this has to take the cake. We run into evolution, punctuated equilibrium, the sun god and Gaia, alien involvement, lots of crystals, voices in the air, and last but not least-the Garden of Eden. Oh yes, this looks like its gonna be a good little pan-mytheosynthesis.

''I'm smiling because my large, bloodstained teeth force me to.''

GRAphics: I'm not saying that they're BAD. They're just not even as good as...Joe and Mac, fer cryin' out loud! A style midway between Hanna-Barbera and late 80s cartoons is the order of the day for whatever form your creature happens to be in at the moment. Your creature and all the rest of 'em are drawn with simple, smooth shapes (at first-there's some nice detail when the sprites get covered in armor or scales) and fairly minimal animation. Since there are so many forms you can take (this IS a game about all the major stages of vertebrate evolution) it manages to be slightly less blah than the warmed-over, hand-me-down

Music, which is drab and repetitive even by Enix's standards. The first level started out promising and all, but we gradually sank down to the leftovers from Dragon Warrior 2's score.

''All the bouncy, up-tempo verve of waiting around for 2 million years to evolve a flashier tail.''

Yes, at least it fits the mood of the story quite nicely. The sounds are all as pedestrian as the ''bwooop!'' you hear each time you jump. The striking ordinariness of is all is palpable. Every level seems as interminable as an actual day devoted to doing nothing but struggling for survival. Occasionally large evolutionary events, such as the KT extinction (all those of you who know what that is, pat yourself on the back for getting the semi-spoiler) have themes that are almost..moving? But don't let your sentimentalism get in the way of the constant struggle for survival...

''If there's one thing this game proves, it's that Hitlerian philosophy might have had a point. Shortened: Genocide is good.''

GAMEplay: We don't call them Nintendo's FASCIST censors for nothing. Technically, Darwinian evolution is supposed to involve reproduction at some point, but there's about as little of it in this game as in Yoshi's Island. I'm not completely disappointed, though...removing the possibility of ''tentacle demon'' as the highest possible evolutionary step was a Good Thing. Don't inquire of my neo-Puritan tendencies in this regard, just be thankful I don't berate you like Dais would. Sans sex, how does one exactly evolve in this world? Simple. KILL ANYTHING THAT MOVES! Hence the fascism. Enix's innovative side(probably the only reason we keep buying and emulating these games) managed to squeeze its way back in. After killing something and eating its carcass, you gain ''Evo points'' which can be stockpiled and used for all of the swell improvements that would have impressed the ladies if you hadn't killed them all already. You also collect crystals that have various Mysterious Crystal Powers©, most of which are poorly explained within the game and require a manual or a FAQ. (You have at least one of the preceding items within clicking distance, if that helps.) So after kicking and biting your way to the top(99% of your attacks involve biting) of whatever time period you happen to be in, you get changed into a horribly weak form for the NEXT time period. And in comes the yang to Enix's yin:(or is it the other way around?)the incredibly tedious process of leveling up. Ayy-yup, even though they tried to disguise it, that's really what EVO's all about: Gaining lots and lots of experience. Kill, eat, lather, rinse, repeat. And while there's a heartwarming feeling that comes when you slaughter a bunch of nearly defenseless proto-amphibians to prepare for the next boss fight(bosses are huge evil SOBs in this game), playing Slobadon Milosovic just gets old after a while.

''So why do I keep playing again?''

For starters, there's the endless variability of the creatures you can end up as. Your smirking visage can look like many of the creatures that you fight, only with a slightly cooler smile(especially when you get that mouth full of highly-damaging teeth.) Late in the game, you can choose a set of branching paths that end up on different levels, such as mammal, bird, and human. And...despite the fact that you're one of the most insensitive, heartless killers of the epochs(you can quite often kill your ''friends'' as well as your ''enemies'' in this game, and even the ''enemies'' usually aren't so much opposing you as simply trying to survive on their own) the cute little story events (Dinosaur babies-think Land Before Time, only cuter) are enough to warrant a play-through for the sadistically minded. So go ahead and emulate it, sickos.

Nintendo Logic(some spoilers): I seem to recall that other games either wouldn't let you kill children, or if you did, you'd immediately be visited by an angry sorcerer who'd make you explode(Ultima 8.) In this game, the worst that happens is maybe losing a few HPs or EPs, if that.

Case in point: After killing a young yeti's father AND mother(seeing him running up crying his eyes out after each instance) you transport yourself to the future and kill HIM too. That'll teach you to survive extinction!

Next planned exhibit at the Smithsonian Institute of Natural History: Pictures of dinosaurs fighting by jumping on each other. Reports of an anthropoid plumber with being worshiped by the creatures in the background were not confirmed.

Oddly enough, the only thing that seems to qualify as ''morally wrong'' in this game is using magic crystals to accelerate your own evolution-of course, that makes the protagonist the equivalent of Idi Amin in a room full of jaywalkers.

BEFORE GENESIS 1: So, like, Adam was this highly evolved ape, and Eve was the incarnation of the Sun god's daughter, who had aided and abetted Adam through his whole history of slaughter. They apparently decided to stop killing things when they got to the garden, as Adam was ''really tired of swinging his axe,'' as he described himself.

This review dedicated to the memory of Dr. Duane Salmon(aka Pinky), who spent his last few posts at ARN trying to convince people that maybe the worldview they derived from evolutionary theory wasn't such a Good Thing after all, before a heart attack took his dry wit away from us.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 05/22/01, Updated 05/22/01