It's not a good story. Nor is it self-aware,
lacking any trace of that cheeky, almost-a-Jill-sandwich charm of early
survival horror games. It is genuinely, earnestly bad. Castellanos is a
wooden and thoroughly uninteresting protagonist, a gruff cop with a dark
past whose in-game journal actually contains the line, "I have to stay
strong, but it's so easy to drown my thoughts in whiskey." Then there's
the overarching plot, so meandering and slipshod with its constant jumps
in and out Castellanos' tormented visions that this narrative trickery
becomes routine, even numbing in a way. It's a saw whose teeth have been
worn down by overuse.
So the world lacks
context, but it doesn't lack impact. The Evil Within is a horror
experience built on such an outstanding foundation--the chilling use of
light and shadow, the menacing audio flourishes--that merely traversing
its environments is enough to make your heart skip a few beats. Whether
it has you exploring a derelict hospital ward splattered with blood and
overturned wheelchairs, a ravaged urban center where aquatic monsters
patrol its flooded streets, or even that most weathered of survival
horror settings, the creepy mansion, The Evil Within transports you
through a diverse assortment of places with one theme tying them all
together: an absolutely terrifying sense of atmosphere.
There's
more to contend with than eerie sights and sounds, of course. The Evil
Within is full of grotesque creatures who relish every opportunity to
rend you limb from limb. There are the vaguely human monsters that
populate early chapters, wielding hatchets and hurling sticks of
dynamite like super-charged zombies, but as the game wears on you're
pitted against increasingly nasty and challenging foes. But no matter
where you are in the game's lengthy story, death is never far around the
corner. The Evil Within is a brutal experience where the slightest
lapse in concentration can turn you into a pool of viscera on the
ground.
As a result, caution and patience are
your greatest allies in this fight for survival. Every handgun round
feels precious, every healing syringe feels like it could be your last.
But for as stingy as the game is with its resources, it's also rich in
choices. Do you use that one remaining bullet to go for a headshot, or
shoot your foe in the leg before rushing up and burning it with a match?
Do you throw a bottle to lure that creature toward a trip wire booby
trap, or risk dismantling the trap yourself and using those parts to
craft a new crossbow bolt? The whole game is littered with these tense
moment-to-moment decisions, always forcing you to be creative and
resourceful with the way you approach each fight. But when your
craftiness pays off and you manage to scrape through an encounter with
your body intact, the payoff is immense.
That
challenge scales well, too. Part of the enjoyment of slowly searching
through each environment is the allure of finding green gel, which
functions as currency for the game's extensive upgrade system. It's here
that you can choose from options like increasing your sprint time,
carrying more shotgun shells, or even reducing the sway on your handgun
reticule. It's a great system that allows you to feel like you're
adequately prepared for the ferocious monsters waiting for you in the
game's later stages, but on your own terms and with your own strategy in
mind. (Green gel isn't so abundant that you can upgrade everything; you
really need to pick a path and stick with it.)
The
Evil Within does a remarkable job of pushing you to your limit, but
there are moments when it crosses that line and the experience suffers
for it. One of the biggest culprits is the autosave system, a finicky
and unpredictable thing that doesn't seem to behave by any consistent
logic. It generally records your progress after major encounters, but
there are times it saves your game mid-battle for no apparent reason,
and others when it's been so long since you saw that little icon on the
screen that you feel as though you're crawling through the desert in
search of water, cursing the sun for its abject cruelty. You often find
yourself playing through certain stretches again and again for no clear
reason, the game's striking atmosphere becoming a little less impressive
each time through . (Note: there is a manual save system, but it's
generally only accessible at the start of each chapter, meaning the
further you proceed, the more you surrender yourself to the whims of the
autosave gods.)
A
similar issue plagues some of the boss battles. The bosses are suitably
terrifying, twisted monsters capable of making you shiver at the mere
sight of them. And some of them make for great encounters, forcing you
to take the same wits and creativity you've been refining in basic
combat and dial them up to a whole new level. But others require you to
perform these very specific, very obtuse secondary goals hidden
somewhere in the environment. It's these fights that you need to plow
through over and over and over until you figure out the right process, a
chore made even more tedious by the game's glacial load times and habit
of repeating the same boss introduction cinematic.
Other
moments of frustration pop up throughout the campaign--invisible
enemies, a recurring character who appears from nowhere to kill you
instantly--which feel like clumsy missteps in an otherwise satisfying
fight for survival. But it's a fight that anyone with a tough stomach
should take on. Because for as much as The Evil Within does stumble, it
always seems to recover. What it does at its core it does so well that
all those issues floating on the periphery eventually fade away to
reveal a satisfying if slightly blemished return to classic survival
horror.
Courtesy of Gamespot.com
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