It’s funny how a game that a few years ago we would have dismissed as repetitive and not very innovative manages to feel so fresh today, providing very satisfying sensations of times gone by and offering an adventure in the old fashioned way, because Evil West is a game like the ones from before that drinks a lot from great current productions like God of War.
And mentioning the God of War from video games is not trivial, since it is evident that the Flying Wild Hog team has taken note of the latest iterations of Kratos at the hands of Santa Monica Studios to shape Evil West, although adapting it. to a much smaller budget (as is normal) and to some limitations that end up taking a toll on him over the hours, but he manages to establish his own path and be a very fun adventure that can be completed in just over 10 hours, with the possibility of doing it completely with a friend thanks to its online cooperative.
Evil West puts us in the shoes of Jesse Rentier, a vampire hunter in the Wild West who has been controlling these creatures in a secret institution run by his father. However, everything is going to hell and these dangerous abominations are more numerous, fierce and dangerous than ever, so you have to take action, take out your revolver, your rifle and, above all, your electric bracelet, to get involved in shots and battle with these creatures throughout 16 action-packed levels, a bit of exploration and the occasional simple puzzle.
when i say that Evil West feels like a game from beforeIt’s because it does. A linear progression, very corridor, divided into levels, where we complete a phase and move on to the next with some cinematic sequences in between, and little else. The story, although it gains interest as the phases go by, is simple and rather testimonial, which serves as an engine to be able to take us along with Jesse through different scenes of the Wild West in our confrontation with more and more demonic creatures.
In Evil West you advance, you come across some secondary paths that you can take to find chests with money, appearances for your outfit or your weapons, and collectibles that tell a little more about the history of your world, and fight against hordes of vampires and others creatures. There’s not much else, and this structure is repeated constantly throughout all phasesonly sprinkled with the addition of some typical puzzles for opening doors or bridges, or with some small sections that are out of the ordinary but still have that old flavor, like getting on a mine cart that moves at full speed automatically.
This formula would not work without a combat to match, and here Evil West se luce, and perhaps you like it too much. Again taking God of War as a great inspiration, with an almost traced rear camera, some very similar animations and a base combat system that is based a lot on what we have seen Kratos do in recent games, we will have to combine our different tricks to face the different enemies. Our best friends will be the fists and the electric bracelet, capable of doing more and more actions as we level up and unlock new functions, together with a shooting system designed for close combat and a rifle that is used for distant combat. Along with this, an electrical system that serves to paralyze enemies in different ways and a few combos that are very easy to execute that turn combat into a spectacle, very easy to perform despite the enormous number of options.
Fighting in Evil West is a lot of fun, and a great job has been done with the gradual addition of new features, weapons and abilities, to allow the player to gradually master each addition and implement it in their deck of options each time. run into a horde of enemies. Perhaps there are too effective options compared to others, which actually do the same thing and, for example, diving from a distance and landing a good hit turned out to be one of my favorite actions in the first hours of the game, until an electric option to immediately approach the enemy was presented, paralyze him and beat him to death unopposed, making encounters too easy for a good part of the adventure. How does the game make sure you’re going to get in trouble despite having so many powerful fighting options? Filling the confrontations with more and more enemies.
Forks one of the aspects in which Evil West has not managed to fully convince me with the passing of the hours. It is noticeable that Flying Wild Hog and Focus Home Interactive have put resources into a game that looks incredibly good (despite some very specific visual problems), but with a budget that gave for what it gave, so where there could have been more confrontations With different types of enemies or with more bosses, we are left with increasingly massive combats in which different types of enemies that we have seen before are mixed. The most powerful enemy that you will find in the first phases will become a very common enemy in the following ones, and so on until you reach the end. Also, the difficulty curve could have been a little tighter, since I went from having almost no trouble to dying quite numerously in its last phases. But lately we are used to going from cold to hot without spring and autumn existing, so it is still a nod to climate change.
The Evil West universe, although it cannot get rid of that patina that makes it a game that drinks a lot from other works, manages to establish its own personality with the passing of the hours, and we must applaud the fantastic work of visual design of phasesalso very old-fashioned, and it’s always worth waiting for the next step in Jess’s adventure to spend a few seconds taking in the sights before you start killing critters.
I haven’t been able to test Evil West’s co-op multiplayer feature, but its addition is welcome and makes perfect sense. It is still a game in which to embark on having a good time without too many complications and to destroy hordes and hordes of enemies, so doing it in company can multiply the fun. Yes, I think what would have been much better would be a local cooperative, hitting the absolute nail on the head with his attempt to transfer the essence of the games of years ago to television, inviting a friend to play the entire game sharing a sofa and screen. I hope he joins at some point.
And with everything, Evil West manages to shine, although it is a pity that the passing of the hours does not suit him at all well and, little by little, it loses the magic and the capacity for surprise. It reiterates too much in the same formulas constantly, and a greater variety of enemies and situations is missing. I lost a lot of interest when I fully realized that all I was doing was moving forward, detouring occasionally to find some secret, and finding the next big hollow with hordes of enemies to repeat the process again. The surprise is important and it would have come in handy to spice up that retro essence. His “return home” doesn’t work very well either, because on some occasions between levels we will return to the institution or other settings, and they can be explored again to find money or collectibles, but it’s not fun when you’ve already gone around it. site four or five times and there is no more incentive than some anodyne dialogues.
Evil West would have been an extraordinary game if it had been incorporated on the first day in a service like PlayStation Plus or Xbox Game Pass, and I only hope that its full price and its appearance at the most difficult time of the year in terms of releases does not bury it into oblivion, because raises a very different way of making games, to the old schooland it is difficult to find other works that look so good and that seem so worked with this format today.
