It takes the pressure off your brain and puts it on your fingers.Įvil West manages to keep all its toys fresh for its relatively short runtime by doling them out one by one. The right trigger shoots the revolver by default, or the lever action if you’re aiming down sights. The way the buttons are mapped (on controller, at least) is intuitive and helps make the action fluid. Ammo recharges constantly, so you rarely worry about reloading. Later, you’re introduced to a double-barrel shotgun that effectively rounds out your main arsenal. Before long, you’re taught to use a rifle for long range, and quickly fan the revolver’s hammer to dispatch with enemies who get too close. Things start off simple you can punch, juggle, and hurl enemies cannonball-style toward conveniently placed TNT caches and spikes. It’s also the game’s most thought-out component, one that ramps up excitement and difficulty throughout. If you're only here for the combat, you'll have a good time.Įvil West’s redeeming quality – and the one thing that will make or break it for a lot of players – is combat. But those games allow you to “fail” they let you chase dead ends and end up somewhere you can’t access yet because you don’t have a certain upgrade.Įvil West railroads you too much for it to feel anything but a video game one hiding an archaic core underneath its modern visuals. Doom 2016 and its sequel share a similar approach to their level design you know when you’re going to be in a fight and when you’ll be left to your own devices. I don’t necessarily find it off-putting that Evil West’s levels are linear, it’s the way you’re allowed/not allowed to move through them that’s puzzling. It’s like the game doesn’t want you to spend too long poking around. Whether that’s due to a bug, or whether it’s the game’s intended behaviour makes going through missions frustrating. The same spot that let you mantle one way can decide you can’t mantle the other. I typically like to exhaust all possible routes in a level before heading to the main objective, but you rarely know which is which in Evil West. Worse still, the game doesn’t make clear which areas lock you in and which let you backtrack. With the exception of one mission, you’re never given freedom in how you want to explore the world. If they decide that you can airily hop between rocks to reach a dangling chain, your character will play the canned animation that does that. Like a game from the Xbox 360 generation, designers expect you to move around those levels in a specific way: if they say you can’t step over this log, you won’t be able to. Though level layouts aren’t always predictable, how you navigate through them is. When you finish watching a cutscene, you’re thrown into restrictive levels made up of clear encounter areas, quiet zones where you’re left to look for collectibles, and the occasional puzzle standing between you and getting to either of those two areas. This is where Evil West at its best, and worst. Evil West plays really well in short sessions, but bigger problems arise the longer you play it. If you’re okay with vampires existing, you’re probably going to be fine with electrical-infused gauntlets and railgun upgrades for your lever-action rifle. ![]() ![]() It also allows for a lot of liberty with the technology, in-world. That setup only really exists as a justification for introducing a range of monsters that you get to fight using era-appropriate weapons – it could have just easily been zombies or aliens. It’s a silly game, and it knows it, often revelling in its love for man-on-monster violence. ![]() Set in an alternate version of America’s wild west frontier lands, the story follows a secretive vampire-hunting order that has been dealing with an evolving threat for generations, while the government covers up their discoveries as viral outbreaks. Evil West is an old-school action game that blends melee combat with firearms a hybrid you don’t often see in the modern era. I thought about that interview as I played Evil West, the new game from the shooter masters at Polish studio, Flying Wild Hog. Their impassionate pleadings question the need for violence, but they’re met with a ridiculing, frustrated: “Because it’s so much fun, Jan. There’s an early 2000s interview with director Quentin Tarantino in which a conservative pundit berates him about the level of gruesome violence in his movies.
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