Shinji Mikami – genius, Japanese, and possibly philanthropist. And all this without a suit. And with the suit, he is also the chief game designer of the Tango Gameworks studio, who gave life to such a title as Resident Evil and created the entire survival-horror genre. The genre developed slowly, by mixing different gameplay elements. And thanks to the derived formula, the masterpiece Resident Evil 4 was released in 2005. I expressed the importance of this game and my attitude towards it earlier, if you are interested, you can read it on my blog. And now, 9 years later, the maestro returns to his formula to give us his new project – The Evil Within.
We will have to play as Sebastian, a detective working in a city full of crime. The narrative begins with Sebastian and his partners going to a call about mass brutal murders in a local mental hospital. Upon arrival, the heroes find themselves in the thick of things. Sebastian sees a mystical force killing the police one by one and then attacking him. The hero loses consciousness. When he wakes up, he finds himself in an alternate reality filled with monsters. Sebastian needs to find out what’s going on while battling the creatures and his own madness. Frankly, at first the game smacked of deja vu, think for yourself – a mental hospital, a challenge, mysticism. I began to worry that I would have to spend a good portion of the game getting out of the hospital again, but my fears were dispelled quite quickly. A few minutes later you are already rushing in an ambulance away from the mental hospital through a city that is collapsing before your eyes.
I would like to talk about the https://gucci9casino.co.uk/ heroes of the game, and, unfortunately, I can’t say anything good. Sebastian is a rude, stern and seasoned detective, whose story opens as you progress through the game. And you know she’s not impressive. In principle, his story is easily predicted in the first hours of the game. Sebastian is accompanied by his partner Joseph and a new recruit, the pretty girl Kidman. Joseph is not developed at all as a character in the entire game, all you learn about him is "he’s a good detective". The situation with Kidman is different, it is clear that she has some kind of important role, but nothing is told in the original story, apparently the developers decided to leave all the sweet stuff for the already announced DLC, with Kidman in the title role. In general, as you progress through the game, you meet with this bunch, then separate, then save them, then they run away from you, it seems like something is happening, but they forget to notify you about it.
The Evil Within was conceived as a scary game, and only then as a third-person shooter. So, the game is not scary at all. And I want to note that I am not a fan of “boo” moments or “screamers”, this has never scared me, and in general, I think that if a developer or director uses such an easy and simple tool as a “screamer”, it means that he suffers from creative impotence, he simply does not know how to scare you. A little off topic, in general, there are almost no jump scares in The Evil Within. Yes, there are a couple of good moments and atmospheric tense scenes that are created by flickering lighting and grainy images, but after the first hours of the game, and understanding how they work, you will already be able to easily distinguish between scenes in which your life is in danger and scenes in which you just need to move forward.
But the shooter part turned out better, and all thanks to the Resident Evil 4 formula. The game provides a rather limited arsenal. For the first half of the game you will only have a pistol, a shotgun and a crossbow, but over time there will be more weapons for killing evil spirits. Each of these weapons is useful for certain situations, and the lack of ammo forces you to use every shot wisely. A few words about the crossbow, this is the most interesting weapon in the game. By dismantling traps and collecting spare parts, you can make bolts of different types – freezing, blinding, electric, etc. d. But probably the most damaging and tasty ones are ordinary bolts. Having pumped them up, you will demolish bosses and mini-bosses with a couple of shots, and you will throw simple “zombies” across the entire room and even pin them to the walls. And since I already mentioned leveling, it’s terrible. During the game you will collect a certain green gel, which is needed to improve your character and his weapons. You can upgrade your weapon by adding damage or reducing reload time, you can also increase the maximum level of health and stamina. In my opinion, pumping is done poorly, because it does not bring anything vital and you can easily do without it. Well, since it already exists, I can advise you to be one of the first to raise your stamina level, since you will have to run a lot from bosses. Secondly, I think it’s worth raising the maximum amount of ammo you can carry for each weapon, so you can collect everything and not leave anything behind. Well, the last thing, as I said above, is to bleed a regular bolt, since it is the most damaging.
Bosses, by the way, are not such a rare beast in this game. You have to mess with them and they are incredibly annoying. There are very specific bosses and mini-bosses that you need to hide from and move behind them, but in most cases you just need a lot of ammo. There is also an unpleasant moment. Many bosses kill with one touch, they just need to catch up with you and an animation starts as the hero is torn to pieces until his health runs out. Personally, every meeting with a boss follows the same pattern: the boss appears, I die, I analyze what needs to be done to kill him, I die again, now having put together the experience of the first two deaths, I try to overcome him, dying again and again until I do everything without mistakes. You will have to die a lot, and the situation is aggravated by long loading times and inconvenient saves.
You know, I don’t suffer from the “inflated expectations” syndrome, although I love Resident Evil 4 very much, I also understand that our world is not ideal. And the likelihood of releasing another hit in the survival-horror genre, even from the father of the genre, is extremely low. After completing the game, the game politely informed me that I had died 82 times. After sitting and thinking about this figure, I realized that I didn’t want to go through the game again. I can’t stand this anymore. There are a lot of annoying and bad things in the game. It has a terrible intelligence of enemies, they get stuck, run into the wall, see with their backs. Unintelligible and faceless characters who don’t even wonder "what the hell is going on here"?». An abundance of game design errors, from an inconvenient camera to a deliberately stupid idea with letterboxes (for those who don’t know, these are black bars). I understand that I criticize the game more, and it seems to you that I didn’t like the game at all. But in reality it’s not like that. This is really the same survival-horror that I missed so much, with a strong atmosphere, with really good and memorable moments, although there are few of them. With an amazing and stylish intro. The game deserves attention if you are not indifferent to the genre and the Japanese game dev. And in general, the Resident Evil 4 formula is very cool, but Miakami, when applying it, forgot one important point – this is not 2005.