Cowboy, Vampires, Doom, Dark Souls | Evil West - Full Review

🟩Pros

+fluid and snappy combat

+focused linear map design

+keeps it fresh from start to end

+unlimited ammo, so you can focus on the action

+full of personality, with its mixing of different genres

🟥Cons

-no manual saves

-underwhelming story

Evil West is a newly released third person twisted mashup of all the gritty genres that we all hate to love. Steampunk, Western, Supernatural Horror, Gothic, Souls-like, Shooter, and the like.

You play as a vampire hunter in the 18th century, set in an alternate extreme version of Old Wild West America. Vampires and monsters exist in this reality while the world is a bit more advanced technologically, with heavy use of steampunk and electropunk elements. This makes the forces of good and evil still evenly balanced despite the additional extremities of the world.

A Badass Larger Than Life Main Character

You control Jesse Rentier, a relatively established Vampire Slayer and heir apparent to the Rentier Institute, a secret monster hunting organization founded and since been led by his forefathers up to now his father, in their quest to eradicate the land of monsters. Along with him are Edgar, senior agent, veteran hunter, and right hand man to his father, and Emilia Blackwell, a medical doctor and researcher.

The linear campaign — which can be played ni either Solo or Coop — can keep you busy for roughly 10 to 15 hours. It starts off right away with a typical wild west scenario of stopping a train with dynamites and It doesn’t waste its time by immediately establishing itself as the high octane game it described itself to be with the introduction of its combat mechanics.

Not really the narrative driven experience they make it out to be

The story is a bit generic, and bears many similarities to the story “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” showered with heavy western influences. The story is not one of the strongest points of Evil West, as characters are two dimensional and unmemorable, with the story at best only serves to move the game forward into the various different levels, environments, and enemies. Without much interaction with NPCs nor choices to make. At the end of the day, it gets you invested enough to play the game and experience the fun combat, where Evil West really shines.

Linear doesn't always mean bad

The campaign design is not for everyone, but it's a nice nod back to the more classic days of map design. Evil West is mission based and in between them you visit the hub / headquarters to roam around and do stuff like buy upgrades and customize your setup. This is something I dearly missed in games and would like to see more often. The environment variety is surprising and exceeded my expectations for a western game; as I saw more than just a bland desert in the levels.

Evil West is pretty much linear with slight detours on the way for additional lootables, for those who like to explore in which you can find cosmetics, money, and collectibles. Money that can be used for upgrades and cosmetics to change the look of your character without any stats or gameplay changes. One personal gripe I have though is the inability to save manually, as checkpoints aren't always the best mechanic to save player progress.

There are simple puzzle elements in this Evil West which adds a little bit of complexity in it. They’re not too hard to be frustrating, mostly just straightforward to be mildly interesting and give a little bit of satisfaction to the player solving it. There are also different difficulty options as well as the option to enable permadeath, for those looking for that extra challenge.

Go Guns Blazing, focus entirely on the action

My favorite aspect of the Evil West is the Unlimited Ammo. Every weapon in the game has unlimited ammo capacity. Each weapon still has their own magazine capacity to deplete, easily determined from your targeting reticle, but reloading is free and doesn’t need any kind of overarching ammo requirement. This way you can completely focus on the action and not worry about conserving or finding ammo or not having to use your most powerful weapon to save it for a difficult encounter.

As you go along the game, you are introduced to the various moves, weapons, and equipment available at your arsenal. As well as the different combat approaches you can take and play with. You can focus on melee combat, or ranged, or even a mix of both.

Interesting progression from start to end

Every weapon and equipment in the game has its own skill tree for additional customization to unlock new effects or bonuses, ranging from simple passive bonuses to a more active upgrade that changes how the game plays, for example by adding an additional move like a dash forward. It’s commendable that it maintains this same pace of introducing interesting new unlocks, keeping it always fresh throughout the playthrough.

Different weapon types are available from close range shotguns, high powered revolvers, to long range rifles. In addition, you also have the state of the art signature melee weapon: The Rentier Gauntlet. Which is basically a Wolverine Gauntlet powered by Electricity / Lightning.

if it ain't broke, don't fix it

Evil West suffers from its own freedom of customization however, because you’re likely to stick to what works and what’s already leveled up and powerful instead of trying out every weapon that you find. You also might find some abilities or skills pretty overpowered than others, and that can be easily used to cheese your way into defeating enemies.

Full of Personality

Evil West doesn’t take itself too seriously and doubles down on its absurd setting and genre to the gameplay’s benefit. You can dodge, block, parry attacks as well as mix and match melee and ranged combat on the fly along with your other gadgets such as bombs and shields. Enemies stay in the air when fired or damaged upon so you can continue your momentous combo and do additional damage. Explosions of blood splatter around everywhere even for the smallest hits that you do, making everything more visceral and gory.  This is reminiscent of games like Doom and Remnant: From the Ashes.

The animations are fluid while still being snappy and the character is a delight to control; very responsive, especially in combat. You have total control over your guns as your pistols are fired via hip-fire while your rifle can be fired while aiming. This system makes for quick combos between the two (in addition to the inherent melee combat) without the need to manually switch weapons. Tools are also activated quickly and don't care much about long wind up times or annoying channeling animations to succeed.

The monster enemies in Evil West are challenging, feral, and mostly swarm-like in its behavior. Numerous enemy types are present in Evil West; from the mindless zombie-like Boo-Hags, to the Werewolf-like Nagals, up to the higher level bosses that you can fight . Each type has their own sets of movements and behaviors and they perfectly compliment the combat system provided to us. Boss fights on the other hand defaults to a more Souls-like approach, where telegraphing and careful strategy triumphs over style. You also encounter human enemies occasionally and combat can revert to a more of a traditional third person action shooter.

Technical Performance

Performance wise, Evil West is smooth as butter and runs well on my 6 core 12 thread CPU with an RTX 3080. Further testing on my older system with 4 cores 8 threads and RX 580, it can easily run at a stable 60fps on a mixed medium/high settings. I dare say that it is an old hardware friendly game to run and should be no problem for most gaming PCs built in the last 6-7 years. The performance is as impressive as the game's gritty and dark visuals, having no business being as good looking as it is. Yes, it can be a bit too dark at times, but I suppose this is just part of the games art style.

Conclusion:

Evil West is a game full of personality, action packed and is one of the best examples of power fantasies I’ve seen in a while. The gameplay feels gratifying, empowering, and exhilarating. Despite some minor shortcomings in the narrative department. The combat system, customization, and the campaign design are all what makes it fun. A must have for any third person action fans out there.