EV.io beta Deep Dive
First NFT mint for the game is May 11th
Disclaimer:
I’m not a financial advisor, this isn’t financial advice and these opinions are my own. I’m just a dude that is a crypto gaming enthusiast and reads too many whitepapers. For disclosure, I’ve personally earned through playing EV.io, 16 epic and 1 legendary WL tokens and intend to mint some.
What is EV.io?
I’ve been hearing about this play and earn game for a while now but a recent Neo Tokyo AMA and 10k prize pool tournament on Community Gaming forced me take it off the to-do list and finally play/research it. TLDR at the bottom, as always, if your day is busy. EV.io is both the name of the game and the URL you should navigate to if you have any interest in trying it out. It is a browser based first person shooter (FPS) available to play on desktop systems. Players have the choice of a couple different abilities to enhance their character, it currently has 5 different game modes, 20 weapons and 9 servers across the globe. It has been playable since January but the NFT mint for the game is actually on May 11th. I don’t normally plan on writing reviews this frequently but wanted to get this one out in case any readers wanted to participate in the mint. The NFT mint is 3,000 weapon skins and 3,000 character skins which will be on Solana. It is not necessary to own an NFT to play EV.io, the game is free and you don’t even need a Solana wallet. However, I’d recommend creating a Phantom or Fractal Solana wallet if you don’t have one as that lets you create an account to track stats and potentially earn a whitelist token in game.
Who’s Behind EV.io?
Addicting Games are the developers and as someone not big on browser or casual games I hadn’t heard of them until this research. They have been around since 2002, making them veterans in the web2 space and they report to have 10 million visitors to the site monthly. The website itself is simple but functional much like the thousands of games hosted on the site. There’s really not a lot of front-facing information about the company or the core team, which is a little weird considering they’ve been around for many years. There are doxxed team members but there’s just not a lot of info on the website itself. At the end of the day the game is already published and running though so the lack of information on the team isn’t as concerning as a project just promising stuff. Secondly, we have Fractal, which is a Solana NFT marketplace specifically built to support in game assets. It’s got a heavy hitter behind it, which is Justin Kan, a co-founder of Twitch. EV.io is dropping their mint on Fractal.is and they are partnered in the form of a custom Fractal map in the game and they are the title sponsor of the 10k tournament running this weekend.
The Gameplay
It’s a lean and fast FPS that probably has a decently high skill ceiling. There aren't any specific movement animations so at first it feels a little stiff. However, there is a short teleport, triple jump and repulsor grenades that allow you to really cover a ton of ground quickly and reverse momentum instantly. I imagine with practice top players will be breaking ankles often. The gunplay isn’t really a standout but it’s solid. There isn’t much recoil and most of the recoil patterns are just up. There’s several pick up weapons scattered on the map, including 2 precision weapons that can one tap with a headshot. I found the reload times to be brutally slow compared to the pace of the rest of the game. If you got caught reloading it was basically guaranteed death but that could just be I was not moving well enough. If someone dropped from a match they were replaced by a bot, which are SOO bad. The bots are a different color than players and just free kills, hoping to see future improvement on those. This game doesn’t capture me to the point I’d want to grind it for 2+ hours but it’s good and I might make it my warm up for other FPS’s that I play and I don’t mean that as a slight. It’s constant action that forces you to aim track constantly. Lastly, the game ran at a steady 144 fps and wasn’t even using half my GPU power. My GPU is GeForce 2070 Super 6GB for reference so I imagine it runs well even on laptops and budget builds.
The NFTs and Play and Earn Mechanics
The character skin and weapon skin NFT mint is May 11th and you need these in order to earn Solana in the game. Their whitelist process is honestly amazing in my opinion. Play the game. The whitelist is tokenized, there are epic and legendary WL tokens, which are earned in game by finding them on weapon spawns or defeating randomly spawning NPC bosses. You must have a connected Solana wallet to pick these up so guest players can’t grief the drops. Holders of the legendary tokens get to mint for 0.6SOL while epic tokens get to mint for 1.0SOL. Public mint is 1.5SOL if it gets that far. Currently, there’s an in-game currency called “e” and the play to earn will be unlocked when the NFTs launch. This “e” will be converted directly to Solana. I couldn’t find the conversion rate or any information on the initial liquidity pool for these rewards. Higher rarity skins and higher leveled skins will earn more but again I couldn’t find any defined numbers for that statement. Notice there’s no “EV.io token” and the payout will be directly in SOL, which is certainly something that isn’t possible on Ethereum and I like once again the simplicity of it. Fast, simple and fun is clearly the MO for the entire game and ecosystem.
Where’s EV.io and Where’s It Going?
Well the game has been up and running for months now. There’s some cool integrations I haven’t mentioned like linking your Twitch channel, which allows other players to see your streaming the game. From the Neo Tokyo AMA I saw that the devs are able to modify parameters in the game like whitelist token drop rate, on the fly, which was awesome. They currently have in-game billboards for the tournament happening today and I can see a use case for paid advertisements that could then go into the reward liquidity pool. Their current roadmap extends to Q3 of this year and includes Team Luminosity (a top 50 all time earning esports org) events, new mini-games and a “social areas” launch. If you’ve read any of my other deep dives you’ll know I put a functional game over any promise a team has to make when it comes to staying power in this space. I think EV.io has some solid potential.
TLDR
The Good
Free to play with no Solana wallet required to play as a guest making it accessible to web2 gamers to try.
Solid, well optimized FPS that runs shockingly well for a browser game.
Esports ready with tournaments already happening.
Play-to-whitelist is a unique method over the usual Discord spamfest.
Strong NFT marketplace partner, Fractal.is.
The Neutral
Based on Solana both for NFTs and payout. I place this as neutral only because of blockchain popularity. SOL destroys ETH in txn fees.
No EV.io token: good for simple payouts, bad for branding.
Desktop only game. Current market is heavily skewed toward mobile users.
The Bad
Not much information on the dev team.
Simple roadmap and no tokenomics/play to earn technical details available.
Ozone’s Blockchain Games Reviews
I pushed this deep dive out faster than I normally would so if I missed anything or made a mistake drop a comment below. Always happy to edit to correct info.
If you liked this style of game review consider checking out my most recent deep dive on The Bornless, an upcoming horror FPS and/or follow the substack.
If you want to discuss any crypto or blockchain game related stuff, usually best to find me on Twitter @OzoneNFT or drop a comment below.
Ozone, you’re just an overinvested idiot, where can I research this myself?
Agreed, you should always do your own research. Here's a bunch of links from EV.io for you to do that.