Video Game / Evolution Battle For Utopia

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Evolution: Battle For Utopia is a Third-Person Shooter video game developed by the Moscow based My.com for Apple and Android systems.

Years ago, the planet of Utopia was discovered, with strange alien ruins found on its surface. Activating them turned the once barren world into a paradise, which was soon heavily colonized. One of the galaxy's first artificial intelligence was even created there. But when a great civil war on Earth cut off Utopia from the heart of humanity, tensions flared, and the ensuring conflict destroyed Utopia. Now, a group of scouts from Earth arrive to see what happened, only to find themselves stranded after an energy weapon destroys their ship. Faced with crazed bandits, a renegade army, monstrous creatures, and inscrutable robots, the small crew must survive and uncover the mysteries of Utopia.

Has a sequel, Evolution 2: Battle for Utopia.

• Action Bomb: Bombers and their stronger Acid Bomber cousins are little more than biological containers of volatile chemicals with two legs and a mouth. They're extremely fragile, but let a single one get close and it may be game over.
• Aggressive Play Incentive: Winning in PvP grants ranking points. Earn enough rank points and the PvE terror missions pay out more resources, encouraging you to attack players to earn more resources in the long run. Additionally, one enemy base per matchmaking refresh is designated as the enemy command center leader. Winning against this player grants you gems, with the amount of gems earned based off of your position in your command center bracket.
• Alien Kudzu: Purple growths litter Utopia, especially where there are hostile creatures. Turns out the purple growths act as a sort of amplifier for Xi's psionic influence, letting it manifest its creations and subvert anybody near it.
• Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: The hostile wildlife has all sorts of colors. Spiders in particular come in bright yellow, orange-red and vivid blue. Later on it's revealed that they're not real wildlife, but physical manifestations of Xi.
• Berserk Button: Some enemies will attempt to rush you down in melee if one of their comrades is killed before them.
• Big Bad Ensemble: There are four major factions of enemies in-game:
  • The various monster creatures, which are eventually revealed to serve the Cult of Xi.
  • The Red Face bandits, lead by Kingpin, who are crazed survivors trying to eek out a living amidst the insanity of Utopia.
  • The Black Legion, a force commanded by General Kurbatov, who are primarily interested in opposing...
  • Dominion, an Artificial Intelligence who is responsible for Utopia's present state.
• Brutal Bonus Level: While not exactly hidden, Operations are (for their level) extremely difficult levels that have special conditions that must be fulfilled to complete. Upon killing enemies or completing those conditions, you will be rewarded with Skill Points.
• Checkhovs Gun: A few chapters into the game, Dominator robots, who work on behalf of Dominion, will begin arriving in terraformed sectors, stating that they are present to study the terraforming process. This seems innocuous, until Elizabeth reveals that the decay of anomalies into collectible resources is happening at a greater rate than normal, indicating that Dominion is responsible for this and is actively encouraging the player to terraform sectors for its own ends.
• Combat Pragmatist: The Dominion. It is constantly re-designing its units to become more and more powerful, addressing weaknesses as they arise. The Technician Dominator for example was originally just a Mook Medic that repaired nearby friendlies, and didn't have any weapons. A later encounter has them ambush the Commander and explode at point blank, turning them into a combination of Mook Medic and Action Bomb. Synths are also a good example. Enemy humans that are felled in battle can be used as regenerative shells for mechanical components, and any kills they score can create more synths.
• Close-Range Combatant: Xi specializes in this, as all their minions (both cultist and creature) do poor damage and have bad accuracy at range, but have devastating close range attacks in the form of melee strikes from the creatures, or point black shotgun blasts from the cultists.
• Damage Over Time: Incindeary and Acid weapons inflict 30% extra damage to flesh and armored targets respectively. This damage is dealt periodically every second, and stacks with itself.
• Deadpan Snarker: The Commander initially starts off trying to negotiate peacefully and explain that he's here to help the whole Utopia situation to the bandits, but after repeated encounters always ending in hostilities escalating, his dialogue starts becoming this in response to them.

• Didn't Think This Through: When Utopia was in the grip of a civil war, Dominion's creator ordered him to end it all. He swiftly panicked when Dominion, being an artificial intelligence, carried out those orders.
• Dug Too Deep: The Dominion learned of Xi and tried to pre-emptively strike it down before it could break free from Utopia. It dug a massive hole into the ground to try and reach it, but Xi was able to overpower the Dominion and then breach from the newly created hole. This forced the Dominion to divert the Commander over there to deal with it.
• Dungeon Bypass: The Phoenix Missile System is an ICBM silo that is unlocked fairly early on in the game, and once armed can be used to instantly kill any combat encounter that isn't a story boss. Turret blocking a hackable object? Nuke it. Overlord about to hit your base and you don't want to deal with it? Nuke it. Research Dominator proving too hard to hack? Nuke it. It does have a very lengthy rearm time of six hours of maintenance once fired, plus an additional thirty minutes to construct a new missile.
• Elemental Weapon: The game has a total of five damage types, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
  • Ballistic is the base damage type, and is represented by most weapons in the game. It deals full damage against normal enemies but is completely nullified when attacking armored opponents unless they are doing a taunt.
  • Energy is the next step up in the elemental ladder, and does full damage against unarmored foes, but only half damage against armored opponents (unless they taunt you).
  • Incendiary weapons deal bonus damage against fleshy opponents and cause Damage Over Time to them, but arecompletely useless against armored enemies unless they taunt you.
  • Acid weapons do full damage against fleshy enemies and bonus damage against armored, including Damage Over Time.
  • Explosives deal full damage regardless of enemy type, but are usually restricted to grenades.
• Emotion Eater: Xi is able to influence and resonate with those that have a higher degree of empathy much easier than others. This is why Kingpin's gang and the Black Legion are able to resist its call, being murderous sociopaths, and emotionally stunted via brain surgery respectively.
• Energy Shield: Human enemies as well as the Commander utilize one to help mitigate incoming damage. It reduces damage by 70%, except for grenades. While the shield is up, it is impossible to attack, but reloading and weapon swapping is allowed.
• Fat Bastard: Kingpin runs an Army of Thieves and Whores, and is abnormally tall and even more abnormally wide. He visibly towers over the Commander in their fight, and his fat body can take a long time to whittle down. Roxy and Matryoshka both mention he was once a Wide-Eyed Idealist named Vincent Gold, doing everything in his power to help everyone after the Dominion began destroying everything, but something that was a Cynicism Catalyst caused him to turn into the man known as Kingpin
• Hacking Minigame: You may hack certain objects at storyline locations, or have to deal with random hacking missions in exchange for resources. They come in three flavors.
  • One is a Memory Match Mini-Game. You're given a small amount of time to memorize matching pictures, and then pair them up. The deeper into the story you go, the more pictures are added.
  • Two is a Connect the Same Color Dots game. You're given a grid with randomly placed matching pairs of colored nodes, and must connect one color to its matching counterpart, without crossing a different color.
  • Three is a Sequential Memory game. You are given 5 random numbers to remember, and must repeat the sequence after the numbers shuffle themselves. This one has more difficult version in Dominion hacks. Instead of numbers, hacks related to the Dominion replace the numbers with glyphs.
• Heavily Armored Mook: Armored enemies are completely invulnerable to regular and incindeary based weapons. They'll resist shock weapons, but take full damage from frag and PSI damage. Acid damage will quickly melt them however.
• Infinity +1 Element: Acid type damage does bonus damage to armored enemies, and normal damage to unarmored enemies. Once you unlock it, it's very likely you'll keep the Acid Pistol around until the end game, as it can be used to quickly dispatch armored enemies and turrets. The Acid Cannon is a machine gun that has a low fire rate but does ludicrous acid damage, letting it shred through anything in the game.
• I Shall Taunt You: Enemies frequently taunt, letting you do double damage to them while they taunt. If they're armored, they'll also be vulnerable to non frag and acid type damage.
• Kryptonite Factor: Xi is weakened by vegetation of all things. The aliens weaponized a technological variant of Green Thumb with terraformers, and once they were able to lock Xi inside the planet that would become known as Utopia, they began spreading flora all over the place.
• Made of Evil: Magmatite is a resource found only on utopia. It's actually the physical byproduct of Xi's influence on the planet
• Mook Chivalry: You'll only ever have to deal with three enemies at a time at most. Even if there are 60+ enemies you have to defeat, they will only ever send three at a time to deal with you.
• Mook Commander: Enemy leaders (notated by a star above their healthbar) buff enemy damage output, making them a priority target to kill quickly.
• Optional Boss: You aren't required to fight certain bosses, but each one offers special rewards.
  • Most Cult of Xi bosses do not need to be killed to complete the story, but they do award research for acid weapons, which can be very useful against armored foes.
  • Itinerant Merchants are perfectly willing to trade with you, and robbing them not only tanks your reputation with them, but forces you to face an extrememly powerful foe that can easily kill you early on. However, robbing them and looting their corpses is the only way to unlock the incendiary grenade for production.
  • Turrets are lethal enemies at the point where you encounter them. They're armored, hit hard, and may also come with guards. However they usually only guard optional side objectives and resources.
• Poor Communication Kills: Hoo boy, where to start?
  • The whole situation on Utopia started because Adam Cruise told the Dominion to "Destroy Everything!". He only intended to destroy Green City to erase evidence of his crimes, but being an AI, the Dominion interpreted this as literally destroying everything on Utopia, as well as anything that would come to it. This makes it nuke the planet, causing tsunamis to destroy what the nukes did not. It also began construction of the Annihilator to shoot down anything incoming.
  • Matryoshka refuses to hear the Commander out upon their initial meeting. This forces the Commander to kill all her men to get information on Kingpin, and also drains Matryoshka's amulet that rewinds time to prevent her death. This is what prevents her from taking on the Black Legion effectively.
  • General Kurbatov tore down the terraformars to construct the ZEVS, a massive walker the size of a skyscraper with a main cannon that could obliterate the Commander's base with a single shot. However, instead of simply explaining why dismantling the terraformars to Kurbatov was a really bad idea, Matryoshka fought against the Black Legion, while the Commander was extremely vague about what could be more dangerous than an AI hellbent on killing everything.
  • Due to lacking critical information and the Commander not being specific, General Kurbatov comes to the conclusion that the Commander must be a Dominion spy, and engages in combat with him.
• Recurring Boss: The Overlord is a giant creation of Xi that begins to harass your base once a day when you reach level 12. Defeating it for the first time lets you unlock the acid pistol, and subsequent defeats nets you a gem and some crystalite. As you continue to level up, the Overlord and its parasites get stronger.
  • Brother Thorius, The Hand of Xi is initially mortal, and was killed by the Commander with conventional bullets. Xi was not done with him however, and resurrected Brother Thorius to battle the Commander two more times.
  • Matryoshka seemingly returns to life every time the Commander kills her. [[Spoiler: This is because of an amulet that aliens gave to Matryoshka rewinds time to prevent her death.]]
• Sinister Scythe: Chosen of Xi wield these, and can potentially One-Hit Kill the Commander.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Utopia is Xi's prison. The alien terraformers on it produce a utopian, lush landscape which weakens and suppresses Xi. However due to extensive damage done by human actions, Xi began to break free.
• Sniper Pistol: Every pistol except the starting Shocker can use the Aimed Shot ability. This puts you in a Quick Time Event to snipe the enemy's head when the crosshair turns red. You can freely cancel it by letting time run out with no consequence, but if you miss, the ability goes on cooldown.
• The Slow Walk: Executioners and Chosen of Xi walk slowly towards the Commander, stopping to taunt part way through. Once they reach him, they unleash a brutal melee attack.
• Walking Tank: When the Commander begins blowing his way through the Black Legion Checkpoint, they send a Mammoth Tank to block him. When that fails to stop the Commander and he begins destroying everything in the Black Legion Base, they deploy the Maximus Turret. It is a quadrupedal walker armed with two machine guns that are bigger than a human, a massive railgun, and releases Boom Birds upon its destruction.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: General Kurbatov. He was initially sent as an operative disguised as a refugee from Earth to neutralize Adam Cruise and Vincent Gold to prevent them from creating advanced weapons and a WMD that would let him take over Earth. However, when Adam Cruise told the Dominion to destroy everything, Kurbatov created the Black Legion out of some of the survivors from Green City's destruction. While Kurbatov claims that "I was doing everything I could to save the planet and the inhabitants after the disaster. I gave people weapons, morale and faith! I united them in front of the greatest danger!", he also had his soldiers undergo invasive surgery to install controlling cybernetics in their brains, filled their bodies with a regenerative emulsion that would literally burn them from the inside out after a few years, implanted a helmet that increases your field of view at the cost of intense pain, and putting fallen soldiers' brains inside Terminators. The Commander himself initially thought Kurbatov to be another gang leader like Kingpin, then a dictatorial mad man, but when he finally kills Kurbatov, he considers Kurbatov to be more nuanced than a simple power hungry warlord.

• You Require More Vespene Gas: There are several different sorts of resources, with each fulfilling their own purpose.
  • Biofuel is the most ubiquitous resource, used in everything, from producing ammunition, upgrading buildings, training your companions, trading with itinerant merchants, and more.
  • Steel is used primarily for producing ammo, especially grenades, enhancing assault rifles and shotguns, and upgrading buildings.
  • Magmatite is used mostly for medpacks, but is also consumed in ammo production, upgrading pistols and machineguns, and building upgrades.
  • Crystalite is needed for mid to late game. It's primarily used to research exotic technologies as well as upgrading high tech weapons. It has a secondary but very important use as a catalyst/fuel for the Commander's psionic powers.
  • Data Disks are required for every research option, and are used to hack objects and Dominion devices.
  • Medallions are used in the construction of the Phoenix ICB Ms, upgrading your weapons, training partners, and activating shield mode for PVP.
  • Skill Points are used to purchase Tactical, Strategic and Special technologies, upgrading special weapons and researching enemy vulnerabilities.
  • Gems are the premium resource, and can be converted into any of the above resources except biofuel, are used to buy special technologies and weapons, or instantly complete timers at rate of one gem to one minute, up to two hours.