I haven’t been following Evil West since I first heard about it, but after checking out a few gameplay videos, I couldn’t help but be enticed. I mean, lugging around a massive gauntlet, punching beasties in the face while looking all fancy in my cowboy boots and hat? How could I not be enticed?! I was ferociously excited when I got the thumbs up to do the review on it when the opportunity arose.
The little intro, camera-moving, zoom-on weapon thing in the menu introduction really got me all giddy, but that’s sadly where it ended. To explain a little about Evil West, imagine Wild Wild West, the movie, except you’re Marcus Fenix from Gears of War, with an electrically charged punching machine strapped to your wrist, and there are vampires, lots and lots of them.
You, Jesse Rentier, work for the Rentier Institute, an organization dedicated to defeating the monsters, ghouls and vampiric dread that have haunted the United States since the 18th century. Now, you face something you’ve never seen before, your greatest enemy to date. Typical of an action game storyline, mostly.
Excited to punch the guts out of any beastie I could get close to in some epic combo fashion, I loaded into the game to find that it wasn’t AS epic looking as that fancy intro led me to believe, but fine, that tends to happen in games, sometimes the in-game graphics don’t match the menu graphics I guess. Still, I wasn’t bothered by that; I wanted to smash things.
After a bit of wandering around, I finally got to do so.
The fighting felt janky. Sadface. There was no lock on, meaning I was just swinging my fist around whenever I was close to an enemy, which feels weird. Later on, they just kept flooding you with more and more enemies to make it more difficult and, to be quite frank, a bit more annoying; I assumed that they probably did it because you can get a bit swamped if you don’t pick off your targets correctly. Maybe this was their intention, maybe it wasn’t, but it made the best part of the game feel weird, and from then on, I felt like I was forcing my way through.
The story wasn’t compelling enough for me to want to find out what was going to happen next, and I could pretty much see where it was going. And although I didn’t really mind the characters themselves, they didn’t warrant enough care from me to see what they had to offer for the storyline.
The game also has this “no turning back” method of exploration, where they hide a whole lot of things on the map, which you need to upgrade your character, but if you make one wrong move and move forward on the map, you’re not going to be able to get back and have a look at a spot you might’ve missed for a chest.
It seemed like another weird decision in the game design that, at first, didn’t bother me, but it made me feel like I was only getting through 70% of the mission each time.
I mean, it wasn’t always bad, there were times when I did enjoy smacking the snot out of a horde of enemies, but most of the time, the game just kept flooding you with more of the same enemies and instead of making the combat more appealing it just felt lazy.
The abilities, like your shotgun? It took way too long to load up for a game that kept throwing enemies at me. I felt like I wanted to pop a shotgun shell off, then beat up some guys, then maybe do another shotgun shell, but that was on cooldown, so I did something else, and it just wasn’t as satisfying as I was hoping it would be.
Overall, I’m just disappointed. I wanted to enjoy Evil West, it looked like a banger of a game, but it turned out to be a little repetitive and a little bit janky.