Review: The Evil Within

Not everybody will be thrilled to hear the title “ Evil within” but for those who are a fan of Resident Evil this game is a massive deal. Shinji Mikami, who first created Resident Evil and then followed up with Resident Evil 2, directs Bethesda’s horror game. There after he oversaw Resident Evil: code veronica and then transformed the troubled Resident Evil 4 into the masterpiece we know today.

Enough said about the pervious versions, now the new game Evil within is widely seen as a spiritual successor to the game Resident Evil, taking survival horror back to the good old days before the second rate Resident Evil 5 and the coherent Resident Evil 6 wrecked the leading brand.

The game evil is also seen as a return to slow burning tension and lurking fear after those more action oriented titles.

There is not much of a surprise if we say that the fans are expecting a continuation of Resident Evil 1 and 2 , and so here is a good news for them, They can find it all in the game Evil Within. But not everything will sum up to what you are expecting right now while reading this. There are elements of the early Resident Evil 4 and signs of more surprising influences, particularly the Dark souls, sony’s siren and Silent Hill.

And for those who are hoping for a straightforward mix of puzzle solving, combat, investigations and exploration, well, you are in for the big surprise.

In some ways The Evil Within is a loser and more experimental and shifts abruptly from one scene or setting to another like a vivid nightmare, and again shifting tone and style just as quickly.

Now the game seems pretty simple after the first plot. Three cops answer a distress call at a lunatic asylum in the middle of a city, and find it’s been torn apart by dark forces. Separated from his colleagues, down-at-heel detective, Sebastian Castellanos, finds himself in a desperate battle to survive. We won’t tell you more for fear of spoiling The Evil Within’s many curveballs, but it soon becomes clear that not all is what it seems.

Along the way we get a tour of horror idioms, ranging from slasher movies and the torture porn of Saw to the creepy hospital corridors and rusting barbed wire of Silent Hill. The action spans two distinct worlds, areas blur or warp suddenly from one to another, and the scenarios seem to reflect shifts in psychological state as much as any conventional chain of cause and effect.

In the early stages of the game you will be weak, consigned to hiding under beds and in lockers in order to survive. Running away can be a good option, but Castellanos seems to suffer from some respiratory malady, to the point that after two or three seconds of sprinting he has to stop and take a few deep breaths.

The big idea with Resi 4 was to mix survival horror with action. Here its to mix survival horror action with stealth. You’ll spend a lot of time sneaking around in The Evil Within, trying your best to sneak past or behind enemies and dispatch them quietly with sneak attacks. You can spend hours in some chapters scoping out the area, investigating houses and doing your best to pull some weaponry together.

Even your most basic rank-and-file zombie monster takes two shots to the head or more to the body to go down. Melee attacks aren’t so much a last ditch defense as an utter waste of time. Bigger boss enemies soak up damage like a luxury, super-sized sponge. The combination of our Seb’s all too human weakness and the toughness of the enemies can make for a fiendishly challenging proposition.

Now, there were moments where I hated The Evil Within. It can be terrible at giving you enough information to work with, and its attitude to ammo and monster numbers is a bit too ‘if you can’t take the heat…’ hardcore for comfort. Well, the player can stealth-kill, while they can craft bolts for the game’s signature Agony Crossbow from scavenged trap parts, but sometimes it’s still not enough. At one point I spent ninety minutes sweeping an area, dealing with every threat and scavenging everything I could, only to realize that I hadn’t preserved enough resources to wipe out the end-of-level boss. At another point, I threw everything I had at the end of level boss, only to discover that this chapter had its own epilogue. This is not what I call fun exactly.

But there were moments when I’ve loved The Evil Within. It can be incredibly tense and incredibly scary. It tries a little too hard on the gratuitous gore front, but it occasionally times its shocks just right. A handful of the boss battles are amazing, and while the game drifts back to familiar scenarios – Resident Evil 4’s crowd-control battles, Resident Evil 1’s taut resource-starved exploration – inevitably result in deja-vu, that doesn’t mean they’re not entertaining. And as the game goes on, and you upgrade your character (again, we won’t spoil how) the frustration eases off a little. Just as you get better at playing it, The Evil Within gives you an easier ride.

However, The end result is a game that’s frustrating on two counts: firstly because it can be a real chore to play, but secondly because you can see how with a little judicious editing here, a little oversight and criticism there, it could have been the best survival horror game since Dead Space 2. As it is, it comes just after Alien: Isolation – a game with its own share of minor irritants, but which works much better as an experience overall.

To conclude, the game Evil Within is what Resident evil fans have been waiting for but it just not that good enough ( to be honest). there are too many sections where it’s unbearably frustrating, repetitive or held back by technical issues and poor, dated games design.

It may just be another slight miss.