Evil West

Like Shadow Warrior 3, which I already played, was Evil West also a 2022 release from Flying Wild Hog. Evil West is a similar experience too: straightforward, linear entertainment.

Tick-ridden West

As its name suggests, Evil West's setting is weird west -- the genre of fiction quite a few video games titles have used in the recent years. Vampires, the Sanguisuge -- or ticks, as they're often called in-game -- terrorize the early United States but they're kept in check and largely a secret by the Rentier Institute that is funded by the government. You play as field agent Jesse Rentier whose father William is the head of the organization.

The story is clearly meant to be easy entertainment. The plot is predictable, offering no surprise twists. Like in Shadow Warrior 3, the cutscenes are unexpectedly long -- maybe unnecessarily so. The characters remain distant despite the screen time they get. They're a very typical cast for the genre too and the expected attempt at humor is almost a painful formality they have to go through. Shadow Warrior 3's jokes at least landed sometimes.

Evil, meet gauntlet

Whereas Shadow Warrior 3 is a first person shooter, Evil West is a third person action game. I feel calling the latter a shooter (like it's listed on Wikipedia) would be about as accurate as calling God of War (2018) as such. There are few guns but they're kind of anemic and it takes long to put down anything tougher than the lowliest minion. Mostly your killing power comes from beating stuff with an electrified gauntlet and different abilities launched from it.

I played Evil West on mere Normal difficulty yet found it to be quite sweaty. At first it appeared the game would offer a fun power fantasy but tougher enemies quickly became common place. How are you supposed to be able to focus on doing any of the intended combo attacks you're first taught when there's always something throwing projectiles and melee attacks at you. I was getting a quick repetition of Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning's stagger struggle.

Evil West's dodge move is so suspect too. I'm not even sure it has complete i-frames. Hitting the dodge button performs a short sidestep; hitting it twice continues the move into a combat roll. You can also hold down to button but the sidestep still happens first and to me it seemed you can take damage at some point during the unconventional maneuver.

Certain prompts to shoot at an enemy's weakpoint are impossible to succeed at unless you're already aiming. One big enemy type does a frontal area-of-effect while jumping backwards and then does another attack unless you then shoot at its weakpoint. I found that to not be doable outside few rare situations. Dodging the first attack means you will miss the window and not dodging means getting hit by it. Jesse is so damn slow at aiming down sights. Another tough enemy's web attack can be interrupted by shooting its weakpoint but the window is too short for that as well unless you're already aiming; waiting for the sound/visual cue won't do.

Also it should be noted that -- at least with the default keybindings -- using the electrified gauntlet attack against a weakened enemy to stun it is clunky on keyboard. The game seems to have trouble registering the Q + W/S keypress combination; I bet it's more responsive on a controller.

You're not meant to get every upgrade on your first run and the game frequently offers a chance to respec. I was considering doing it every time because I felt energy wasn't charging fast enough. But then looking at the perks I thought I already had many of the ones that would help with recharge. I couldn't tell what would make a better built and thus just continued with what I had. Surely Evil West would be beatable on Normal without an optimized build. And it indeed was. But at times, it was quite the challenge. I sure was happy the final boss fight had checkpoints between phases because I failed the last one way too many times. Doing the lengthy battle again and again only to die in the final phase would have been frustrating.

Evil West is another perfect Game Pass title. It would be even more perfect if its difficulty was slightly adjusted: I think Normal shouldn't be as demanding. With effort I would often beat an encounter without getting hit once. But then, failing to avoid just few attacks can get you killed. Most of the ticks are so spongy too: it would have been nice if it had more types had been effortless to kill instead of requiring long cooldowns and/or many charge bars spending abilities.