Nothing says tough like coloured gems

We'll let you into a little secret: according to our traffic statistics, you lot don't care a great deal about forthcoming PlayStation 4 shooter Evolve. Nevertheless, while this article is destined to scrape a couple of hundred views at most, we simply had to share this hilarious little snippet: 2K Games has deployed a free-to-play match-three mobile game to tie in to the title. Hmm.

Imaginatively named Evolve: Hunters Quest, and available now on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, the release sees you combining coloured gems to kill monsters in a Puzzle & Dragons kind of way. Winning said battles earns you Mastery Points, which can then be converted into boosts in the full game.

"An example of this would be that you unlock Markov's Lightning Gun Mastery Boost via Hunters Quest," the publisher explained. "The next time that you fire up Evolve, the game will read the Mastery Boost unlock and will increase your Mastery progression by close to 50 per cent of its total amount. The maximum amount that you can boost your Hunter Mastery progress for an item is a total of 50 per cent."

There are, of course, microtransactions available in the smartphone release that will speed up your progress. However, we're just not convinced that Evolve is going to be a big enough deal on consoles to even warrant all of this extra investment. We guess that the publisher knows what it's doing – but we're not exactly confident that this is going to end well.

[source eurogamer.net, via youtube.com]