The Evil Within

game

Sebastian Castellanos Must Die...Five Stars if not...

Camera shake is aweful with no way to disable it. makes me feel sick making the game unplayable.

Playable on Win 10 with Intel HD 520, with low quality graphics and resolution. Turning down screen grain improves visuals a lot. I have played on console RE 4, 5, and a few of the earlier ones (I think 1 and 3) and they are nothing like this. I played a bit of the original Silent Hill and somehow finished SH 2. As a RE 4 fan, I hate this. As someone who got intrigued by Silent Hill but thought it was too mysterious for its own good, I think Evil Within is overdone and not worth the effort. The Evil Within is for people who thought Silent Hill was too straightforward and tame, carefully explaining every plot point and background detail to the player. I played EW for 2-3 hrs before deciding it's just not worth my time. Stealth is critical -you will lose most direct confrontations and die a lot. But EW does weird things. At the very beginning, I correctly guessed what I had to do to escape from danger but for some reason it took several tries to pull it off without getting caught, and I never understood why my last attempt worked. You character is terribly sluggish -in RE you can run circles around most enemies, here running feels like a power walk. RE is action, SH is survival with some action, EW is an old man in crutches escaping from his own grandson suddenly trying to kill him -the horror is real but is the horror from the non-sensical, like a nightmare. Some people like "unexplained" horror, but still EW is not RE, despite what the trailer shows. (EW is no Metal Gear Solid either and fails at being Silent Hill). The first bit of the game is an effective (if unforgiving and a bit too scripted) flee-from-the-invincible-monster scenario and I might have given EW three stars if it kept that way, but later it tries to do RE and SH at the same time and fails due to lacking controls, MIA plot and a late-beta feel. Maybe things are explained in the end -but nothing in the plot nor gameplay motivates you to get there. Play Silent Hill instead.

1 star for the diverse, gory, brutal, bizarre and abstract level design and the unique world the game generates. I felt like I was in a fever dream and really enjoyed this part of the game. 1 star for the story and how it unfolds over time. In the first half I was just confused and nothing really made sense, but I liked how the game throws you bread crumbs to follow and keep you interested. - 1 star for the generic weaponry, except maybe the crossbow, and for the many useless upgrade options and for the frequent use of instakill-trial and error-boss encounters. Also, apparently the Microsoft Store version of this game got upgrades that the Gog or Steam version never got..... - 1 for lack of direction in ~10 areas, where the game gave no hint of what to do, so I went on YT. Some sections of level felt really out of place and/or half-baked. Character movement is too sluggish, like playing with a 70 y.o. gramps. Terrible reverse camera chase sequences and too many cutscenes and forced slow walks. 0 stamina means your character stands still for ~10 seconds to catch his breath, WTF? - 1 star for despawning ammo pickups after loading a save filer or dying, grab attacks are sometimes not telegraphed at all and almost all of the main characters are uninteresting clichés. On the normal difficulty the game is quite challenging but almost always fair, atleast in the beginning. As soon as you have mastered the basic gameplay loop and upgraded your stats, the game gets quite easy. One reviewer said: "You will be replaying chapters at least twice anyway, because you need the Gel for upgrades and you need to plan ahead with balancing damage and resources". I never felt the need to do that. If you have decent aim and utilize stealth or environmental kills, you will never need to that, atleast on normal mode. After 75% of the game I didn´t have any stats worth investing into and just upgraded auxiliary stats (ammo capacity or crossbow effects).