If you had asked me after half an hour with Evil West, I would have been thrilled. Full melee action, seasoned with crisp shooting, the whole thing looks pretty good too – what could go wrong?
However, if you had asked me half an hour later, I would have been almost disappointed. It’s always the same. Short levels, narrow corridors, always the same attack chains. How is that supposed to work for ten hours?
And then you could have repeated that at any given moment to find an answer somewhere on the spectrum between those extremes, depending on the game situation. Interestingly, Evil West is not at all dissimilar to The Callisto Protocol, which was also released recently: Both are pretty dull, especially in the long run, but at their core they deliver wonderfully energetic action that always contains a lot of explosives at the moment.
What is also common to both games is that their respective combat system is one that has not yet been seen in this form. Only the goals are different when you box undead asses into nirvana in Evil West and both werewolves and other mythical creatures enter the apparently not so eternal hunting grounds. The camera is always close, the sound gives the beating a full boom and maybe it was the brutal finishers that made the USK say: “Meh, let’s only do it for adults!”
But you don’t just beat your ankles sore. You can also paralyze the creatures with a kind of electric whip or pull them towards you. A powerful uppercut also knocks them out two meters high, from where you can bang them back onto the ground with electroshocks, so that the impact sizzles their colleagues.
You could also jump after them in order to thrash them across the room with a follow-up hit – practical if there are boxes filled with TNT on the opposite wall, which up to this point have not served the slightest purpose.
In all of this, firearms only set accents, albeit important ones, and work differently than in classic shooters anyway. For example, you don’t reload. This happens automatically via cooldowns. That being said, you don’t first select the projectile spreader you want and then fire it. Instead, various buttons trigger linked weapons directly.
Sounds weird? I thought so too. But ensures that the pistols and shotguns fit very harmoniously into the melee-focused action. It’s a cool principle. I like it!
Oh, yes: And by “man” I mean the vampire hunter in whose boots you traipse through this horror steampunk vest. His name is – I’m not making it up – Jesse Reintier, but is otherwise completely uninteresting. His story too…
The scenario in which vampires fight against a humanity that is about to gain the upper hand using powerful technology is great. However, the plot and characters of the concrete adventure are little more than boring explanatory texts as to why the next level looks one way or the other and is filled with this or that creatures.
And unfortunately this boredom also runs through the actual game. Because no matter how whimsical the smashing of dozens of baddies may be, it’s terribly monotonous. In any case, the narrow levels with their small arenas are just as pretty as they are playfully empty tubes. Hidden money rewards careful looking, but in combat, the only interesting points of interaction are usually the TNT boxes and chasms that are always on the edge. If they even exist.
I’m missing options like throwing objects or the ability to lure opponents under a scaffolding to bring it down with a clean shot. I would really like to experiment with the lasso and with bad guys who can be beaten all over the place – if only because Evil West reminds me of the famous Bulletstorm with his brute hand-to-hand combat. But there’s not more to it than stringing together manageable fist-face combinations.
Worse still, certain combos are so advantageous because they not only cause damage, but also quickly put Jesse out of danger and are therefore indispensable at the latest on the highest difficulty level. For long stretches I therefore unwound the same actions. Although there are quite different movements, the process is very similar over long stretches and these are the points at which the really cool game suddenly becomes boring.
Added to this is the annoyance that the creatures often get stuck in the environment. Even a small boss can be cheesed this way. Mr. Reindeer also sometimes gets stuck when he attacks an opponent who is at the edge of a level.
Now and then new enemies bring variety into the game, some boss fights are well done and there are sometimes special situations that loosen up the adventure. Last but not least, you not only expand the functionality of the weapons (for the money), but also Jesse’s abilities with every level up – well… or not.
If you ask me, most expansions are pretty dull upgrades, so I’ve saved some upgrade points so I can instantly activate later abilities (depending on level). That didn’t do much either, especially since you can completely reset the skills at some points. But it made it clear to me how little character development contributes to motivation.
Test to Evil West – conclusion
And so I’m constantly swaying back and forth: Letting off steam in the powerful punching action is fun, but in the long run it’s so uniform that the steam hammer quickly runs out of breath – until it’s started again by a short impulse. To put it bluntly, it’s a bit as if the developers (Shadow Warriors Studio Flying Wild Hog) had created an elaborate concept study, but not fully expanded it, which is why the unusual mixture of shooter and melee combat lacks a motivating level design and better coordinated groups of opponents. The bottom line is that I happily indulged in this martial Guilty Pleasure. In any case, I would welcome a heavily developed successor.
Evil West – Rating: 7/10
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Imaginative scenario with a mix of horror, western and steampunk
- Wonderfully energetic and effective action
- Equally catchy and unconventional mixture of close and long-range combat
- Campaign can be played online cooperatively
cons
- Certain actions are so powerful that you keep stringing them together
- Even limited environmental interaction in boring levels hardly allows for entertaining experimentation
- Uninteresting story and characters
- Opponents and alter egos are often stuck in surroundings or enemies
Developer: Flying Wild Hog – Publishers: focus entertainment Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One – release: 11/22/22 – Genre: Action-Adventure/Shooter – Price (RRP): just under 50 or 60 euros (PC or consoles)
