Just for the record, I'm not writing this article as someone who gave up on it and came to come rage. I played this festering pile all the way through just so I'd have more shit to say when I eventually came to my little blog to tear it a new asshole.
So let's start with the Story because it fucking sucks. You play as a dude called Sebastian, a cop who is called to come and investigate some fucked up shit going down at Beacon Mental Hospital. You arrive with your two idiot friends, Joseph and Kidman and you all immediately get jumped by some teleporting fuckwit in a white robe called Ruvik. He stabs you in the face and you wake up upside down in some kind of butcher with a crazy dude ready to hack you up and the game begins in earnest.
My problem with the story is that the whole point of what's going on is that you are basically inside the villains head. As a result of this you have no idea where you are, how you are or why you are where you are and there is no real sense of progress to beating a stage. It doesn't matter how far you traversed the evil village of zombie people or how many traps in the industrial looking place you managed to avoid because the next scene will probably have the world spazzing out and changing locale because Ruvik said so.
There is also some other side plot type thing with Sebastian losing his daughter and wife but the whole thing is told through documents and by the end of the game I didn't give enough of a shit to pay attention to it. Also Kidman is doing some bullshit and isn't actually a cop or something but none of that really matters because the whole game culminates in a boss fight where you blow Ruvik's brains out anyway.
The game spends so much time harping on about all this research that the villain and his shitty doctor friend was doing but none of it was engaging enough for me to care. You see, as bad as the plot is in games like Resident Evil, its still interesting enough for me to give a shit about the goings on at Umbrella. With The Evil Within I just don't give any fucks about what kind of dumb ass research was going on or why Ruvik was so upset, it's just dull.
Oh, there was also some shit about a woman in a hospital who went missing but ends up inside Ruviks head as the save point. No idea what was going on there, don't care.
So the story sucks, but what about the game play? Well that sucks too. It's kind of like Resident Evil 4 but really shitty. Sebastian just feels a bit....floaty and he's kind of hard to control when you need to do precise movements. Most of the guns you get are bollocks with the Shotgun being the only weapon that feels any kind of useful. The Agony Crossbow is cool at first but it's too fiddly when you're under a lot of pressure and you'll end up either missing shots or using the wrong bolt type.
That's just my opinion regarding the guns though, what REALLY sucks about the game play is that it tricks you into thinking you're playing a stealth game and then just totally changing after the third chapter. The first chapter you are trying to escape from a chainsaw man without being seen. The second chapter you are sneaking round a village then every chapter after that has ambush after ambush after ambush. Why establish all this sneaking and then just throwing it out of the window?! There are a few moments where it comes back but it's only short segments of certain chapters, most of it just turns into shooting monsters.
The game also goes fucking crazy with the whole "survival" aspect giving you very little ammo for anything. However once you get a feel for the game almost every encounter is completely piss easy and you'll have no trouble with anything after the 4th chapter or so. You still might die to a trap or a 1 hit kill enemy but the checkpoints are so forgiving and save points so frequent that it doesn't really matter.
Worst of all though, this game just isn't scary at all. It's trying SO VERY HARD to be scary but it's like whoever was in charge didn't really know how to do horror. They just seem to take a lot of horror imagery and ideas and just throw them all together but it doesn't really work. By the end of the game it's trying so damn hard that it comes off as just funny with giant eyeballs and walls covered in brain tissue. The traps that are supposed to be used to keep you on edge are Tom and Jerry levels of comical are some of the death animations are more hilarious that brutal.
I don't care how much you like horror games, just avoid this pile of shit. Save your money and wait for Silent Hills or something, maybe they'll get it right next time.
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