I'm playing Evolva on Windows 7 and I have this problem where the screen tears almost constantly and pauses up. I use an Nvidia 8200M G card for my laptop. Does anyone have any advice?

Does the game have a v-sync option you can turn on? If not you can try going to the nvidia control panel and forcing v-sync on in that for just this game.

If I change the option to anything besides "Use the 3D application setting" the game goes ballistic whenever I try and launch it, flickers even worse and I can't click on anything at all. If this can't be fixed then can I just exchange it for a game of equal price?

Yes.

Same problem here.. WIn7 64bit, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M
The problem as I see it is possible a Direct X 7 issue (maybe?) as I know a guy who is developing a game (adastra) and when he changed to DX9 from 7 it removed the problem.
Visually, its like shards of the graphics splash out over the screen and the screen freezes for a moment the returns to normal.. then it happens again.. with fragments of previous frames left on the screen.. repeat.
I have tried setting compatibility to Win95, XP and all in between, Its running as administrator and I have NVIDIA iether giving control the the app or setting everything to NO and it makes no difference.
Im just tried with VirtualBox with the DirectX .. and the evolva.exe crashes abnormally.. ah well.. I was looking forward to this game again.
All suggestions welcome.