Taking a bite out of the old West.
When you combine the likes of vampires and the old west, it’s hard not to think of the 2005 PS2 gem, Darkwatch. So, when Evil West was first shown off, I was eager to check it out as Darkwatch is a game that I absolutely adored. While it certainly shares in some aesthetics, Evil West brings the chaotic chops of its developer, Flying Wild Hog, to the forefront with their own take on a similar subject matter. Across sixteen blood-soaked missions, Evil West is bombastic, energetic, and a return to that style of action game.
Evil West takes place at the end of the 19th century in an alternative take on the Wild West. Vampires have run amock, and it is up to the Rentier Institute to put an end to their bloodsucking plans. This family-run organization has the latest cutting-edge hardware to take the vampire menace head-on, and its lead field agent, Jesse Rentier, is the one tasked with stopping a threat so large that it may destroy the Institute and all of America with it.
While its main story isn’t going to truly captivate you with what happens next or have you obsessed in its lore, with much of it detailed throughout voiced journal entries that you’ll find scattered about, it provided just enough engagement to keep the missions flowing one into the next. While one part of the story can be seen coming a mile away, its resolution was handled decently, if a bit too abruptly in how quickly it all sort of went down.
Jesse won’t be alone in his mission as while there is co-op throughout the entire adventure, he will come to rely on a few folks to provide him the necessary tools needed to stop a pair of vampires; Peter D'Abano, and his adoptive daughter, Felicity, from their diabolical and bloodthirsty plans. Throughout the bulk of the game, you’ll retreat back to the basement of a saloon, acting as a secret impromptu headquarters for the Institute, hidden behind the rotating lid of an oversized wine barrel.
The central cast is fairly small but it allows the game to really focus on making these characters shine, especially that of Emilia Blackwell, an expert in the Medical Arts. Her vocal performance and character design fuse perfectly together with a few scenes that nearly stole the game for me, especially the “Potty-Mouthed” conversation a ways into the adventure. Apart from the good doctor are a pair of characters you’ll occasionally take with you into the field, although they don’t join you in the fight. First is Edgar Gravenor, an old acquaintance of Jesse’s who has had their own fair share of vampire battles over the years, and Vergil Olney, an enthusiastic engineer that works out of the basement back at HQ and is fascinated with the gauntlet that Jesse had equipped to his arm. While the pair are not terribly memorable and come across as fairly cliche from time to time, I still found a few moments for them to really stand out, if only briefly.
Apart from a few detours, the central focus of stopping the D’Abano family from infecting all of America is where the bulk of the game takes Jesse. You’ll visit pretty much every type of environment imaginable, from swamps, mountains, and wild west towns, to underground crypts and abandoned factories. Each environment is loaded with detail, even if the abundance of invisible walls and linear pathing can often get in the way of taking in several of these visually striking locales.
Each location has numerous off-the-beaten paths that reward you with the needed cash to upgrade your kit, skill perks, and additional costume pieces, even if you’ll only ever see some pieces in cutscenes, such as Jesse’s left hand or the skin on the gun that is pretty much obscured by the character model. Still, tracking these down does feel rewarding, especially the skill perks that help flesh out Jesse’s various skills and passive buffs like additional health, or a larger blast radius on his explosives.
Evil West is a successful mix of being both a third-person shooter and a melee brawler. Jesse will be equipped with a lightning-infused gauntlet that can systematically brutalize whatever gets in its way. He is also equipped throughout the game with a variety of guns and explosives, each packing a fairly decent punch in their own right. However, it is how these weapons are used in tandem with one another that the real highlight of what Evil West brings comes to the surface. Case in point, this game is a blast.
Apart from the bizarre idea of placing the on-screen buttons for the D-pad on the right and the face buttons on the left, Jesse will have access to his entire kit all at once. There is no weapon equipment screen for picking and choosing a customized loadout as you will have everything equipped on Jesse at any given time. While some weapons are unlocked considerably far into the game, newgame+ allows you to have your whole kit available right from the start, allowing you to get the most out of weapons that you wouldn't have had the time to really make a standard part of your arsenal. Still, each weapon packs a satisfying crunch of blasting vampires and the various other threats into a gooey mess that consistently delivers.
The first weapon you’ll unlock is the Rentier revolver which has a hip-fire auto aim that automatically locks on to whatever is in front of you. It can be upgraded to spread an electrical charge to multiple foes and is great for a bit of crowd control. You’ll soon after unlock the Rentier rifle that allows you to manually aim, and it too has upgrades that make it sing even more. Much like the revolver, a soon-to-procure shotgun is another hip-fire solution to crowd control that is perfect for blasting up close and personal or destroying the shields of some rampaging beasts. While the shotgun and a few later weapons all benefit from a cooldown to use again, not a single gun requires any sort of ammo reserve, so you are never running out of ammo and forced to use something else, you merely need to reload the gun or wait for the assigned cooldown to expire.
Eventually, you will find a crossbow, explosives bundle, flame thrower, and gatling-gun, although the latter is given to you so late that you won’t really benefit from it until you load up newgame+, which allows you to keep all weapons and progress, even if the story contradicts how you have those things already. Still, every weapon feels useful once you start to spend “bucks” to purchase upgrades for it, from allowing the rifle to build up a massive charge to the shotgun creating floating anomalies that cling to enemies along their path. Bucks are easy to come by, and I had well over half of all upgrades in a single playthrough, tricking out my arsenal with a wealth of powerful additions.
Additional tools provided are the crippling rod and an energized shield that can block projectiles and stun enemies with a well-timed button press. The crippling rod is an electrical AOE that acts off a cooldown, stunning every foe in their place for a few crucial seconds, even mini-bosses. This allows you to get in close with a rapid series of punches or catch your breath while you wait for your healing item to finish its cooldown. The gauntlet also offers up its own energy gauge that can have you performing a variety of different attacks such as the Quake Punch, or its follow-up attack in the Aftershock, each having you slam your electrically charged fist into the ground. Once it has been fully charged, Jesse has access to a powerful electrical combo that can decimate anything he pounds his fists into.
Your gauntlet can also lasso enemies towards you or pull you towards them, allowing you to get in close and punch them into the air, allowing for a whole other set of perks and skills to benefit from damaging an airborne foe, such as using an electrical lasso to slam them into the ground, shattering anything that is nearby. The sheer variety in your weapons and melee options really start to come together when you start sinking points into your skill tree and the abundance of weapon upgrades offered to you.
Other means of surviving in combat come down to a few other systems. You can tap A to dodge or double-tap to roll out of the way. You can use the left stick in different directions to change how your punch lands, such as launching a foe into the air or performing a running downward punch. If you hold the left stick up and press RB, you will perform what is called the Cannonball punch, which allows you to hit enemies so hard they fly into other enemies and a few environmental hazards that are occasionally nearby. Enemies that flash can have their attacks interrupted with a kick, whereas enemies that have a glowing circle around them can be shot to not only interrupt their projectile attack, but a successful hit on their weakness acts as a critical shot, causing significantly more damage to them. Lastly, enemies that pulse yellow can be finished off with the coup de grace, a finisher attack that has its own animation based on the enemy. If you have played 2018’s God of War or Doom/Doom Eternal, then you should know what to expect here.
Traversing environments is done by interacting with parts of the level that have some sort of flashing signposting. This is anything from a shimmering chain to torn-up fragments of a rope bridge. Each level has the same exact signposting, so you’ll never struggle to find out how or where to move on. While there is no way to check a map or know if you are going in the right direction, most arenas are signposted well enough to know if the path to the left is going to be a dead end or if the path to the right is where you actually need to go. It doesn’t always follow that design, but you’ll easily be able to point out where a combat scenario is about to take place and what is likely a dead end, possibly containing a chest. I’ll also point out that while there are several other nods to the way in which the new God of War series has influenced this game, Jesse tends to open the smaller chests in the same fist-crunching way of dear ol’ Dad of War.
Evil West’s non-combative elements involve plenty of switch flipping to charging Jesse up as something of a portable generator to have him run from one switch to the next. These moments are more or less fine but several of them do feel like they break the pacing of the action, especially in one location where you are trying to flip nearly four or five switches in a pretty sizable location to then rotate a train track to progress forwards. You also have a few mine cart sections that have you shooting switches and dynamite in order to safely make your way down, including one section where Jesse makes a comment I was literally thinking to myself when he sees his companion already down at the bottom of the mountain, despite refusing to take the mine cart path that appeared to be the only way down.
While there are a decent variety of enemies, from standard fodder to those that pack shields or tunnel underground, there comes a point in the game where the enemy variety stops, and instead of new situations requiring you to analyze new attack patterns and come to grips with what is newly in front of you, the game then simply shuffles all existing enemies together, often resulting in an artificial difficulty spike of making you fight enemies that were once mechanically driven mini-boss encounters alongside a mixture of everything the game has tossed at you thus far, even other bosses. This isn’t something new to what most action games offer, but it is a shame that that sort of design is present, given how great the game had been up to a certain point in rolling out new enemies and organic difficulty increases in those designs.
These specialty foes each have tricks that must be avoided or dealt with before you can really handle everything else the game is throwing at you. The Hive Crone, for example, has a series of floating hives that must be dealt with before you can damage them, but they also shield every other foe nearby while those hives are operational. While dealing with the Crone and some underlings is one thing, it becomes a different thing entirely while surrounded by these other creatures that also were also once mini-bosses, each with their own mechanics that can deal serious damage when you are not paying direct attention to them. It simply feels like all the ideas that the game had were dried up and throwing these mixtures of foes together felt like a way to raise the stakes in the challenge rather than being something designed around fun. Don’t get me wrong, these encounters are still enjoyable due to the abilities and weapons you can wield, but I would have preferred something new than three of the same mini-boss all coming at me at once while also dealing with the Hive Crone or some other larger and agile threat.
While few, the game does have a few actual large-scale boss encounters. While I won’t talk about a few of them due to spoilers, the Parasiter was likely my favorite of the four. This fight has you watching out for a pair of mouthed tendrils that can strike at you while dodging a series of projectile attacks. It follows the same repeated pattern throughout the entire battle, but the fight itself was mechanically sound and was nonetheless enjoyable. However, the second to last fight felt fine until one phase has you dodging a glowing red AOE that felt just big enough that my dodge roll didn’t quite exit it in time, causing a few cheap hits that resulted in several deaths that felt like they were not earned.
While Evil West does a lot to keep its focus on its high-energy encounters and some solid gun and melee combat, it does have a few smaller issues that I could see people not really taking to or feeling that the game is a tad unpolished. Again, these are small nit-pick issues that don’t really affect the game in any significant way, but are certainly noticeable. These include objects in the environment, such as bottles or spiders to not react to your bullets or even crunch under your feet. Spiders, which can be turned off if you suffer from arachnophobia, often climb a solid foot away from any wall, as if they are simply walking up nothing. There are countless boxes that you shatter to find cash, but any other box or barrel is apparently bulletproof. Also, the levels each load with a bit of text to convey the story, but the SSD on the Series X only offered up maybe a second or two at most to read these entries, making whatever information they contained to feel wasteful due to the speed of the hardware. And lastly, it seems that no one can seem to pronounce “Glamour” the same way, but that is just me being extremely picky.
While the game has a quality and performance mode, with the latter dropping the resolution to 1080p from 4K in favor of 60fps, at least on Series X and PS5, I didn’t really seem to notice the drop in resolution or the boosted framerate, at least to where it was dramatically noticeable. Nonetheless, the game is pretty decent looking despite some areas where its illumination seemed to be more built upon coloring a texture than any actual lighting source. The only issue I had from a technical point of view was an odd sound that was likely meant to be a quick one-second instance that then proceeded to continue throughout the entire level, as seen in the included clip below. I had to turn off sound effects for the remainder of the level as it just didn’t want to go away.
Evil West, when it is deep in its action, is an absolute blast. The entire game can play host to two-player co-op where the host saves their progress and the encounters are boosted in their challenge to support the extra player. But apart from a single moment where I had to operate two valves one after another, the game felt perfectly fine as just a solo experience. Flying Wild Hog has exciting franchise potential here in Evil West as its world and opposition feel ripe for a continuation, filled with countless weapon concepts and abilities that truly make each combat encounter deeply satisfying. I think with some better ways to increase the challenge than just throwing the whole kitchen sink at its player and more detail built around its level design and the ways you can interact with it, that this could be a damn impressive series with just a little fine-tuning.
Developer - Flying Wild Hog. Publisher - Focus Entertainment. Released - November 22nd, 2022. Available On - PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One/Series X/S, Windows. Rated - (M) Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language. Platform Reviewed - Xbox Series X. Combination of Quality and Performance mode. Review Access - A review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.