The Evil Within
I was disappointed and dropped by ch5. The cover art always made me think of the movie Saw. This game suffers from a severe identity crisis. They couldn't decide on what game they were trying to make. It draws a lot of inspiration from Silent Hill 2, but sadly fails to deliver. Alan Wake and Silent Hill 2 are better. The negative reviews in steam pretty much say it all. It has great environments and art. However, certain design decisions made me quit. I watched the rest of the game in video and that confirmed my impression. It was made with id tech 5, the same engine that powers Rage and Wolfenstein The New Order. The plot draws some elements from The Matrix and Inception with a dream world and invasion of memories. In regards to its plot, Alan Wake is better at tightly integrating the story and the environments.
The opening scene gave me high expectations and reminded me of Heavy Rain. Police investigation, rain and cinematics. The player is quickly taken down and wakes up in a dark room with a maniac killer. In between chapters 2 and 3 I began feeling that the game was a let down. They couldn't decide on what type of game they wanted to make. They seem to have copied the same concept of hiding and running away from Amnesia. Some monsters have one hit kill attacks that you can't defend from, much like in Amnesia. The invisible monster didn't feel scary. It felt an annoyance because I was forced to throw punches in every direction in hopes of hitting it. It seems to have been copied from Amnesia as well. Amnesia didn't perform well in creating meaningful encounters. The Evil Within didn't perform well because they couldn't decide between Splinter Cell, Amnesia, Resident Evil and even The Last of Us if you see ch11. Adding a sniper rifle and a weapon that can freeze or set up enemies on fire fells very off for an horror game like The Evil Within.
To disarm bombs aligns with Splinter Cell games. At the end of ch13 you have to escape and dodge buzzsaws and other traps. In the middle of such scene they placed bear traps and bombs for the player to disarm. WTF? The saint statues that hold keys give a reason to explore the environment, but when you go in the hospital all the vaults hold ammo and, sometimes, credits to buy upgrades. The reward is too low. The hospital place that is accessed via mirrors is a nuisance because it forces the player to waste time going back and forth just to buy upgrades and find ammo. That place plays some role in the narrative, but the constant travels that are hiding loading screens just makes it annoying over time.
The doors can be opened in two ways. Slowly or kicking it. Slowly ends up being annoying because there are a lot of doors to be opened. Kicking it and you kill the terror in the game. This game suffers from the same action game x horror game dilema of Alan Wake, but worse. Alan Wake at least has a strong narrative component that offsets the repetitive combat.
Many of the negative reviews criticize the confusion between stealth and combat. The game never makes it clear when to hide or run away and when to fire at will. The same enemy can fall into both of the previous scenarios and this creates a confusion about what to do. Some of the beds, wardrobes and lockers were seemingly placed at random, with no reason to hide there.
Many of the deaths seem to be forced. Traps with no warnings and that you can't escape. Enemies that have one hit kills. I don't know if this was caused by id tech 5 limits, but the lack of animations to shift between states harms the gameplay. If your stamina goes down to zero while running away from monsters, you are locked in a stance with no chance to defend yourself. The reload animation can also lock the player into certain death situations. The checkpoint locations often are located in places that in case of death you are forced to replay a lot of the same section of the game.
Bugs that contributed to the bad experience
I want to walk one step forward, the character slides over the debris, activates the trap and dies.
Flawed AI pathfinding causes zombies to run towards you with a fence blocking their way
To open a wardrobe or drawer the char must be facing it. If not I want to turn and the turn is 180º, making it hard to open the damn thing sometimes...
Sometimes the matches fail to set something on fire because it depends on your relative position. Sometimes the prompt doesn't even show up
Goofs (who wrote this game' script??)
Throw a glass bottle to distract zombies in the middle of the street, at day time?
You have a torch in your hands and you have to spend a match to set a zombie corpse on fire?
The punches are strong enough to destroy boxes, crates, barrels, even locks. But you need many punches to take down a zombie.
This game has a strange habit of presenting puzzles and giving you the answer, killing the purpose of the puzzle. For ex: when you have to save the woman from drowning (clearly inspired by the Saw franchise), the answer is given by the NPC.
When you kill the first boss of the game you grab its chainsaw to cut the chains to open up the gate. The char then throws away the chainsaw for whatever reason. WTF? Why not keep it??
Before fighting said boss you can clearly see it and fire at it because there is no ceiling to protect the boss from fires. However, you can't kill it before the fight is triggered.
Zombies that are headshot proof by means of a bulletproof mask. I've never seen this before. Couldn't they employ something else to balance this game?
In the last boss the player get impaled by a giant barbed wire and, miraculously, a rocket launcher falls from the sky right onto his hands. This moment was so cliche...
In Matrix they can upload to your brain certain skills. In this game the same idea happens to upgrade weapons. It doesn't feel right.
The boss fight at the end of ch 6 is split into two parts. Finish the first part and you escape the boss, then you have to go back because the idiot NPC dropped his glasses. Couldn't they've written something better than this?
PS: I don't remember how many hours of this game I've played.
