Review by: Pete Hines
Published: February 13, 1997

In Evolution, you control a clade of species with the intent of evolving into the first intelligent species, and becoming the most dominant clade. In order to be successful, you must ensure that your species are kept safe, in areas where food is abundant and they are able to grow and multiply. You must also choose wisely in how you decide to move up the evolutionary tree. The road to success isn’t always a straight line, and one has to consider changes in the climate and the shifting continents when deciding on what species you want to evolve into next.

Each player in the game has a clade, which is essentially a group of different types of species. The game can be played against up to five other clades, and the other clades are named after famous scientists, like Charles Darwin. Each player starts off on a map of Earth with a number of assigned species. These species have special characteristics that determine their preferred habitat, what type of climate they thrive in, how well they can defend themselves against predators, and other such information. The clade list for each player tracks the current species that player has living, as well as the how the creatures have evolved into their current form.

In Evolution, evolution is the name of the game. Each species has a number of choices as to which creature they can evolve into. Subsequent species have similar options. The game comes with a large poster that displays the possibilities, as well as in-game information on the options for each creature. What creature you choose isn’t always a choice of the biggest or strongest, but will also be influenced by changing climate conditions and what type of environment the species will be living in. If the world is getting colder and there are lots of predators out there, then evolving into a creature that thrives in warm swamps and is weak in the face of the predators roaming around is probably not the best idea.

If you decide to have one of your species evolve into another, you can make your choice from the evolution information screen. Once you’ve made your choice, you’ll need to allot points towards achieving this goal. Each species in your clade has the ability to make improvements in three areas: combat, feeding, and evolution. A sliding bar represents the percent of total ability that will be dedicated to each of the three goals. For example, if you feel it’s important that a certain species improve its ability to defend against a particularly worrisome type of predator, then dedicate most of its efforts to that area. If you do choose to have that species evolve into something else, then the speed at which it will achieve that evolution is directly related to how many of that species you have. Think of it as research, where the members of that species are your scientists. The more you have, the quicker the work will be done. In this game quick is a relative term, since time is measured in how many millions of years it takes.