EVO Search for Eden (SNES) Review

If this is your first time seeing Evo The Search For Eden, well that’s because it’s one of the rarest Super Nintendo games that hasn’t gotten a release up until this point. Which is unfortunate since the premise is rather unique as you’re going from a fish to a land creature that grows legs and yes you get the point here. Evo SNES is an unique title that we'll cover in depth further below.

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I was at one of my friends' houses who had Evo since it was new and asked him about it recently. He mentioned how he got his copy by trading in a copy of Aero The Acrobat. If only I could go back and do that type of trade over and over again.

You have to fight off enemies and eat their meat in order to gain experience points to build up your current being. It’s an extremely ambitious title to come up with a game built around the premise of evolution, especially back in the 90’s on the Super Nintendo.

The story of the game will put you in the five areas of history that you have to explore and evolve in. After finishing off the ocean, you’ll become an amphibian fighting off insects. Then you’ll enter the dinosaur age where you’ve got to fight off more revolutionary mammals, trying to claim the world.

The graphics are really where EVO shines. Each of the enemies look different and the backgrounds offer some nice detail and special effects. It’s not the best looking game on the Super Nintendo but works well for what it is.

One thing I’ve noticed is the game is extremely grind heavy. You’ll go through a group of enemies in a stage and make it until a certain point where you’re just getting killed over and over again. This is usually a sign that your evolution is a little too weak and you’ll have to grind for experience points in order to upgrade your current form. You could easily spend a half an hour just grinding away at farming enemies to max out your current form.

There is a saving feature built in, it was just very tricky to find out how to at first. I kept trying to save my game while being inside one of the levels at a safe spot away from some of the enemies. Apparently this only saves your character data and not your progress. You have to be on the world map while pressing the select button in order to save your progress.

Each of the bosses are more than challenging. This was a common thing being said from some of the other reviewers on YouTube. Yes, they are a bit tough but if you’re able to upgrade anything during the boss battle, you magically get full health again. You can easily swap body forms if you’ve grinded enough and you’re quick with the select button.

One real downfall is that you don’t have any period of Iframes where an enemy could just hit you over and over again in a loop if you’re not careful. This can often lead to an extremely frustrating cheap death and end up losing half your experience points that you just spend an hour trying to get.

The soundtrack in EVO SNES is a bit inconsistent. Sometimes you’ll get an absolutely fitting track, other times you’ll be downright annoyed by the music, especially in a grind heavy area.

But still, EVO has to be one of the most unique and original experiences on the Super Nintendo. It’s not everyday you hear about games that follow the evolution path, let alone one on a 16 bit console. It takes a very specific audience to like what you see here and since there’s no other real way to play EVO other than on the Super Nintendo, you’ll have to resort to playing it any way possible.