The Evil Within

The PC port is an absolute mess, requiring a variety of adjustments and fixes to even put the thing in a playable state. What's even worse are the awful and arbitrary mechanics that are nonsensical and contrived. For example, very early in the game you manage to escape the first enemy. He discovers this, chases you with a chainsaw, then slices your leg. Ok, now my character is limping along, there's obviously a gash on his leg, that's fine. Keep progressing, then the guy shows up again, chasing you around. You are required to stealth past him in a very specific room. For some reason up until this point, that chainsaw gash wasn't bleeding at all. As soon as this stealth section starts however, your chainsaw wound starts to randomly bleed, meaning it leaves behind a puddle trail for the guy to follow. I rolled my eyes at this contrived scenario, especially since my guy would've bled out from a chainsaw gash to the leg by now anyway. Look, it's a video game so suspension of disbelief is necessary, but consistency is as well. The stylistic visual effects - aka the awful, over-the-top post-processing effects require the in-game console to turn off. Thankfully you can actually see something once you do, instead of squinting everywhere and wondering what the hell is preventing your character from moving forward. What a joke.

The opening chapter is brutally awful. Lots of slow walking segments while the plot develops. My favorite was waiting a minute for the chainsaw guy to wander around a closed space so I could sneak by him....and then without making any noise, he somehow instantly gets alerted that I'm leaving the area and comes over to kill me. This game has a lot of stealth segments that aren't particularly interesting or well done. Once I actually got to an action segment, hardly any of the enemies dropped ammo. Even worse, when I went to aim, the camera perspective got all weird because I guess I also triggered an in-game, 'cinematic focus shift' or something because the reticle moved way off target. I'm fine with enemies that are tough to hit because they wiggle around or whatever. But when I have to fight the controls, too, I generally call it quits and just go play a better shooter; or something else in general. Lots of things TEW could have excelled at, but I wasn't particularly impressed by any. I would say the other biggest disappointment was the serious tone during the opening segment and then there's something like an anime villain teleporting around killing people shortly thereafter. I felt it really clashed with the gritty realism of about 10 minutes prior and what followed in the other chapters. I've heard the sequel is better, so just skip this one unless you are a masochist for a bad time.

The very beginning has you on the edge of your seat but after that, the game takes a nose dive. It left a lot to be desired and got boring for me very fast to the point I didn't even want to finish playing through the rest of the game. Enemies and followers get stuck inside the terrain quite frequently as well. Oh, and the mouse scrolling doesn't work at all so good luck reading any notes that are longer than half a page without a very specific workaround.

And when I said stupid, I refer to all part of it. This is standard survival horror with a over-the-top gory presentation. Graphics is not bad but the color palette is bloody tiring and repetitive. The inventory is stupidly limited at the beginning but finding some disgusting goo in ambiguous jars, you can increase (?) you inventory limits, melee and ranged damage. I know. I know. Is just stupid. 1. The story is completely non-sense. From the beginning, with the city that reminds me of inception. But worse. 2. All of a sudden you find yourself in a 1800 village a few km outside the shifting city 3. The monsters are non-sense even inside the game. 4. The combat is just awfully boring. With your main character borrowing his only attack move directly from a Bud Spencer movie. 5. Difficulty wise is a mixed bag. You can easily beat most enemies with melee but all of a sudden a monster you can't beat appears and you will die a few times trying to figure out how to escape. And the game is a sequence of useless, boring, inconclusive scenes where the only thing that makes me drag on is that I would like try the second game (as everyone says is better). The story is narrated in a poorly fashion. Disjointed and poorly amalgamated in what you actually do in the game. You find yourself immersed in bowels interiors all of a sudden and you don't know why. Why I got teleported from one place to the other. How it relates to story. Why I can kill a monster by shooting in the head, when the head is passed trough by a 10cm wide stick already? Is that supposed to be scary? You find bits of diary here and there with such cliche experts (E.g. "I hear screams in the night. I need to remain hidden") that are such a staple of the genre that just scream cheap. Then there is this hospital where you can access trough the mirrors that just... exist without a trace of why. Who is the nurse? Why helps you? Whatever.

They will eventually remove this review for sure. First of all you got slow @ss mouse movement on the menu and even in gameplay, because they decided to have fps limited 60 and vsync on. They don't know what higher frame rate is. To be able to play higher frame rate, need to lower down resolution, because why no? It's Bethesda who publish this game. And Tango don't know how to make camera angles more responsive. OK, first of all, you guns in the main story, but in the DLC, you can barely have any weapon to fight with, only flashlight and broken axe that can only do 1 kill. You crouch walk slow like a turtle and the enemies are faster than you, after you complete the game it will show the result of how bad you are. Stealth mechanics are so b*llsh*t that the enemie can sometime one shot you, because horror games with guns that are limited, because after you complete the chapter you will lose it anyway, because they want you to be a P*ssycat with no weapon and try to make you use some b*llsh*t stealth gameplay. So to summarize, Main story is ok and not that scary, but the DLC's S*ck @ss! Would I recommend it? When it's on sale yes, if not? Then don't bother buying it.