Evil West is a game by the devs of the recent Shadow Warrior reboot series, Flying Wild Hog. I sorta liked Shadow Warrior 1 remake, 2 was this weird Borderlands clone, but atleast it had Co-op campaign, and apparently in 3 they dropped the co-op so I didnt pay as much attention to it. Since then, they've released Evil West, which to the naked eye , to me, just seemed like some typical third person shooter, maybe like Gears of War style game, and its advertised as having campaign co-op, so thats all I really needed to know to buy it when it became on sale at a decent discount. I pretty much had no expectations or information about what the game really was before I bought it, I just let the cover of the book give me a first impression.
Starting up the game for the first time we could join a co-op lobby easy enough, then it asks us which difficulty. Thinking it would just be a standard third person shooter, we went with Hard (so something like 3/4 difficulty). Strangely enough, it gives this big warning on the side of the screen about how the co-op client wont be able to save their progress, and their skill tree gets reset each time you join back the game. This alone almost made us refund the game and not even bother, like they half assed the co-op this much? But we passed on, and started playing anyway to see how much of a gimped experience the co-op guy would have. Thankfully it didnt seem that impactful, because unlike the game explains, everytime I (the co-op client) joined back, I was able to choose "use skill tree from last time" -- contradicting this supposed warning. After beating the game, I still dont know what that was all about. Maybe they patched it later? Who knows.
After a brief introduction setting up the games concept as some sort of two wild west Cowboy type men, I figured one of us would play as each individual character from the cutscenes - But bizarrely, in co-op mode, you each play as the same character...even though all the cutscenes and game plot seem to be perfectly set up to have each you you playing one of the two main characters in the story. Because of this, the co-op feels like it was developed and shoved in at last moment, rather than something revolved around the whole design process. First disappointment.
It didnt take long to realize the game isn't what I'd expected. Its not just a typical third person shooter. Its some weird mix of Souls-like combat, rolling around, and Beat 'em up arenas instead of level design, a bunch of random elements stolen from Doom Eternal, and then some very uninspired third person shooting ontop of it. You have this melee combat system that uses small bottom combos to pull off different moves and abilities, blocking, punching them up in the air, this overcharged supercharge mode that you barely get to use for half of the game, and so on. Ontop of it you have this magical gauntlet glove thing that gives you extra special magical powers and electric abilities. Mixed ontop of it is this third person shooter mechanism where, admittedly has a sort of unique control scheme where instead of sort of equipping different weapons you just tap different buttons to use the weapon abilties - and they each usually have cooldowns. Like the Shotgun you can only use once every 30 seconds or so, then it goes on cooldown. The Gatling gun you get much later, same thing, huge cooldown after you use it for a bit. Even the healing ability is on a cooldown, and the ability to stun all enemies. Each gun has infinite ammo, but its balanced around these cooldowns. The only guns you can freely use is the Starter pistol, which quickly becomes useless, and then the Crossbow machine gun, and the Rifle. The crossbow machine gun is OK, but it has this annoying quirk where, while you can hold the trigger to keep shooting, after each reload you have to remember to tap the trigger again to start firing again or else it does nothing. It feels clunky and janky. The rifle is OK, working as expected. The problem is the enemies are such insane sponges that nothing feels good in this game. A single generic enemy could take 15+ bullets, or hits to kill. It makes every gun feel like pea shooters or useless brainless spam. The melee is not any better, the techincal design and polish of the game is terrible. Hits dont feel impactful, theres no crunch to anything, I can barely tell if I'm hitting the enemy most of the time. Nothing really feels satisfying or fun. The game feels like a mess of random trendy mechanics, like the developer just looked at the modern gaming scene, saw Doom Eternal being successful, saw the success of Souls games, and just stole random mechanics from whatever games are most trendy at the time and shoved them into their own game. It doesn't work, nothing is cohesive or makes sense.
The game gradually introduces new enemy types, but under the guise as they are one off boss fights. Only to find out these "bosses" keep showing up for the rest of the game from then on, as regular enemies. It feels like the devs dumped money into the assets, and realized its a "waste" to have them as one off boss fights, so they just keep reusing the same fights and scenarios over and over "to get the most of their investment". The game would of had many more memorable moments if they actually had unique encounters instead of endlessly resuing assets, copy pasting scenarios, and doing these lame arena fights where they just spawn random waves of enemies at the player...
Let's talk about the stupid level design. Well there arent really any levels. You just walk through very linear essentially corridors (with a sky roof) with maybe one or two extra path that give a chest with some gold for perk allocation, then you get to these dumb little logs you have to climb over, and climbing over the logs then locks you into a square arena where the game spawns enemies at you. Thats every level in the game. Theres no enemy placement or carefully choreographed level sequences, its just this same stupid formula. Its like they took the worst aspects of Doom Eternal that I didn't like, and put them into this game. Yes, this game even has Glory kills. These devs are creatively bankrupt. Not only is the "level design" just stupid with its lack of creativity, the game also looks terrible. The graphics suck and arent appealing to look at. Frequently you will get these baffling choices of color pallettes. like one level will be nothing but yellow piss filter, then the next will be nothing but overly saturated red filter, then the next will be puke green. Its like they dont understand nuance. Its all or nothing, and quickly becomes an eyesore. Even the levels that dont have these extremely oversaturated color tones don't look good. The game looks like an Xbox 360 game, actually no, even a bunch of 360 games look more impressive than this. The artstyle is terrible, too, at first I was like "Ok yeah, Wild west thing, Lever action rifles, mixed in with some evil demons, kinda cool yeah I can dig it" but no, like I said earlier, its this gaudy mix of everything under the sun. Devs must be like: Crazy magical spell effects? Yep. Demons, insects, all sorts of horror monsters? OK sure, Wild west? Yeah why not. Magical gauntlet that turns you into a magical Beat 'em up warrior? Cool! A plot that both tries to be overly serious, then comedic, then incorporate random cliche hor ror elements (like a possessed little girl) Yeah! Fantasy-inspired magical multi-colored crystal wonderland areas where you have to find the "Glamour" crystals? Ok. Like what the hell, man? The devs just threw the whole kitchen sink at is, because of it the game is an incoherent mess.
Here and there I could tolerate the lazy arena level design, the clunky unimpactful combat, and at times it got sorta entertaining. Like at one point I was wondering "Maybe this game could be a 7/10, I could see potential. Lets see where it goes" because yeah, early on you're not sure what they're gonna throw at you, and it looks like it plausibly could be a pretty good game. Some of the fights are sorta intense, like youre rolling around dodging attacks trying to get your hits in because its quick to die (Thankfully it has a typical co-op revive system where you just tap a button to bring you buddy back up at no cost) so at times you can get a rush of intensity. But it all falls apart once you feel how tedious, and downright exhausting some of the fights are, due to the spongy enemy health, and unimpactful combat and lame abilities. I dont want to play a beat 'em up game using my fists, I dont want to do button combos to do melee abilities, I dont want to roll around constantly like I'm playing some dollar store Souls game. Since we chose Hard difficulty, I couldnt even do melee combat for half of the game, because its so punishing. So most of the game I just stood far away slowly chipping away at enemy health using my rifle or shit crossbow, it just was not a fun or satisfying experience.
And the plot...where do I even start. My eyes were glazing over everytime a cutscene played. The most contrived, boring, senseless bullshit I've ever sat through. Nothig exciting ever happens. Every single cutscene is just a handful of these cliche, boring, dull characters standing around in a room yapping about some uninteresting trash. Every once in awhile you'll have that comically overly-dramatic angry old man show up that calls everyone a cocksucker, or this or that, using rediculous rhetoric that finally makes the cutscenes sorta entertaining, but its few and far between. Frankly, often times I'd just alt+tab whenever a cutscene would play I gave that little of a shit. The plot is just inane. I cant tell you what its about. Something like these two progatonist cowboy men are the chosen ones that must use their crazy magical gauntlet to take down the evil vampire child girl? Who the fuck knows. The characters are hideous, too, like you have this one female character thats always angry or snotty with a stupid look on her face, the game is all around just unappealinga as hell. Like I said before, its even mroe baffling because they've set it up in such a way where you'd expect by playing in Co-op, one player would play as each of the main progatonists, but no, you just copy paste one guy twice. Its so fucking lazy and half assed, all of this game is.
So the combat sucks, the story sucks, the graphics suck, what more can be said? Oh yeah, the controls are pretty bad too. I touched on this a bit earlier with the awkward shooting trigger behaviour, but it gets worse. The game seems to have button responsiveness issues, like youll press a button but it doesnt respond or just flatout drops the input. The control scheme also isnt good, I appreciate the fact they were trying to come up with at least one thing original, by tapping buttons to use different weapons instead of actively equipping them - but it becomes a cumbersome mess. Youre tapping Dpad left for instance, to equip the flamethrower , but then you instinctively press Lt to aim, and it puts the flamethrower away and goes back to the rifle or whatever. Theres such a specific way you have to give inputs, that the whole control scheme falls apart and becomes more of a hinderance than something interesting.
And of course it has skill trees. Its got a Perks tab, where you get to pick various upgrades using skill points you get just by playing through the game. These are really nothing exciting, in fact most of it is melee beat 'em up stuff, like "if you do this and this button combination, at this specific time, this thing happens!" ...I dont really care. It doesnt let you play how you want, it doesnt let you just be a ranged gun guy, it always is encouraging you to interact with this fist fighting combat. The only really notable upgrades on the Perk tab was the things related to More health, Health regen, and some of the Energy things. There is a few upgrades for the Super power mode (whatever the hell its called) but other than that I really couldnt give a shit.
Then you have another tab, where you spend your "Bucks". This is where you upgrade your weapons, the shotgun, rifle, and crossbow. Im not even sure you can upgrade the Gatling gun, as you get it so late in the game I didnt even notice to check for it. Likewise, these are lackluster and uninteresting. So much so I cant even remember really what they did. Mostly its just turning your normal guns into Electric versions, making them look even more tacky and stupid. Now your rifle shoots electric bullets and if you hold the button you can charge it up (holding the button funny enough seemed like worse DPS cause it took so long).. Thats really about it. Theres an upgrade for flamethrower that "makes melee hits do 30% more damage when enemies are on fire" further showing how much they are trying to incentivize you to interact with the 'beat em up gameplay as much as possible, cause they know this game doesnt have shooting mechanics worth a shit. Well the melee mechanics arent fun either, so ya got me!
Now the biggest sore spot - the game is buggy as fuck. Really, one of the buggiest, glitchiest games ive seen in many years. The co-op partner has insane bugs such as: HEALING BUTTON not working, he will just throw his arms up into the air, and not heal, randomly, sometimes I would be playing for 30+ minutes without the ability to heal. This also goes for all the rest of special abilties such as the freezing enemies ability. Animation glitches where you cant tell whats happening on screen just multiple animations playing at the same time especially when you do enemy takedowns. Ugly visual glitches such as the HUD damage display being shifted up the screen and cut off, the co-op partner having this weird rope floating around them, visual glitches on the gun where youre holding like 3 guns at once, glitches where you're shooting your gun but hes not even holding the gun. Glitches that break the stage where you cant jump over obstacles to progress the level, glitches involvig co-op progression where one player cant enter an arena...the list is endless. Not beimg able to heal is worse enough, but ontop of it almost every aspect of the game feels broken, unpolished, or just a mess.
This game truly is terrible, and by the halfway point I was almost begging for it to be over, I had enough. And infact we even decided to turn the difficulty back down from Hard to Normal just because I didn't want to put up with it, Hell, I would of been fine to drop it down to Easy and just speedrun the rest of the game, achievements be damned. It still barely made much of a difference for enemy sponginess, it was still exhausting, tedious, and annoying. We just died a bit less.
There are a handful of actual boss fights, maybe 3? by actual I mean has a health bar on the screen. I cant even really remember them. Towards the end of the game you have this old frail guy that floats around doing magical spells or some shit, then the last boss is that little horror girl that turns into a laughably stupid looking demon monster that was actually the easiest boss in the game that we killed second try. Other than that there was another boss or two, actually the first boss I remember we said "Yeah that was kinda fun, if the game keeps having fun moments like that it could be pretty good!" - Well it was only downhill from there, and it took like another 6 hours before we saw another boss. The game has a habit of using these enemies that regenerate health, like youll be in an arena fighting 15 different enemies, and one of them will do this move where they float into the air and start regenerating health, undoing all your progress. Thats just one example of many of the tedious, exhausting gameplay mechanics. It also makes the controls feel worse cause youre aiming down your gun and shooting, but since theres no cover, and youre stuck in this stupid square arena, your field of vision is so small so it doesnt really work and you cant see what the hells going on around you. Even the devs knew this was a problem, and they tried to mitigate it by putting these dumb little arrows on the screen to try to show incoming damage, but it just does nothing but add to more of the visual spam.
This game is bad, I'm so disappointed. Actually for months I was eyeballing this game like "Oh man, I cant wait until we play Evil West, theres no way it can suck! It looks cool, right?" so it was like the light at the end of the tunnel. But when I got there, it was more like the shite at the end of the tunnel
4/10