The Evil Within Review

No one is........Safe.

    The Evil Within is a horror game by famed horror director Shinji Mikami who is known for his work on the Resident evil franchise and his new studio Tango Gameworks. The Evil Within attempts to redefine and expand the horror genre with a game that tests your sanity not just in the story but the gameplay, and not in a good way.

Kill it with fire!

 

   By the time I had reached the end of the 15 chapter campaign, the game told me that I had died a whopping 53 times playing survivor difficulty. All I could do was breathe a sigh of relief and be thankful it was over. Sadly, The Evil Within has some interesting ideas but the game design, which seems contradictory at times, masks the survival horror game as another over the shoulder "scary" action game and not a fantastic one at that. You assume the role of detective Sebastian Castillanos, a gruff veteran detective responding to an emergency call from a psychiatric hospital with his partners Joseph and Kidman. 

   

Responding to the call

   A madman called Ruvik, voiced by Jackie Earle Haley, is causing havoc at the psychiatric hospital. Right away the story sucks you in with a terrifying opening and a close shave with a chainsaw wielding maniac. The story starts to fall apart from there. To put it bluntly, the game doesn't have a concept that's really interesting or hard to figure out a few chapters into the game. This wouldn't be a huge deal except Sebastian has to be one of the worst written characters in recent memory next to Aiden Pierce. He's boring, uninteresting, his dialogue is poor and accompany that with awful voice acting and you have a recipe for the audience not giving a shit what happens to this guy. One of the most interesting parts of the story is actually Sebastian's journals but sadly the plot is never resolved and we are treated to yet another game with an unsatisfying ending. 

      GOOOOOOOO

   The gameplay itself is very reminiscent of Resident Evil 4. However this time around there is less ammunition and more punishing enemies. The game does allow you to move and shoot at the same time but with the small amount of ammo you find in the game, there really isn't much room for error. While the stealth mechanics are shoddy, the game has some decent action and new game mechanics that are pretty interesting. Sebastian can interact with a few of the enemies weapons and use them to his advantage. Sometimes enemies will drop an axe or a torch and he can use them as one use instant kill weapons. These come in handy since ammo is very scarce throughout the game. The agony crossbow is also a very useful tool throughout the game since you can use disabled traps to craft various types of bolts/proximity mines to use against the nightmarish hoards. This comes as a bit of a cost to the game and ties into some of the  frustration I had with this game. I'm not too shabby with horror games however this game suffers a bit of an identity crisis and as a result some of the game mechanics are finicky or just plain aren't reliable. I'm not just talking about the game being hard, but broken in some aspects, mainly the stealth.

      Ruvik

   The Evil Within introduces a stealth mechanic so you can dispatch enemies from behind if you can get close enough without them seeing you. The problem is that the A.I. seems to be hyper sensitive to Sebastian's presence. At times I was able to easily sneak up on enemies while at other times I was discovered even though I was crouched and in the dark. The enemies can SEE you even at a distance and even in the dark if you break their cone of vision. This makes stealth extremely difficult and I would not recommend trying to do most of the game stealthily, it just isn't viable. To make stealth worse, Sebastian has a very slow crouching movement speed which at times made sneaking up on enemies impossible either because they walked away too quickly or they turned around before I was able to get behind them. Seriously, this game doesn't have much to offer stealth players, this is a run and gun game.

   

Eat This!

   Overall, The Evil within is a decent action game but after a while the terror becomes irritation and the upgrades and unlockables just isn't enough to hold up this mediocre horror game with bad characters and an unfinished story. I'd recommend Resident Evil 4 or Shadows of the Damned if you are looking for a better Shinji Mikami game. Alien Isolation I would say is the better of the two horror games to come out in October but hopefully the DLC can fix some of the issues. 

6/10