![]() ![]() Harrow, meanwhile, is a highly entertaining internal antagonist, representing the kind of unapologetic greed you'd like to think is a caricature of old-timey politics before realising that it's probably just as applicable today.Įvil West's characters make for a rick-rolling yarn, doing the whole Deadwood thing of modern-day swearing in an Old West setting to great effect. There's your macho pal Edgar (y'know, the kind of 'real man' who knocks you over with a punch to the face then offers you a hand to get you back on your feet), the grouchy lady scientist, the derpy engineer, and the oddly likeable vampiric arms dealer Chester, who acts as a kind of weaselly but charming informant. While you do pretty much all of the fighting by yourself (or alongside a friend in a simple but welcome co-op mode), Rentier rubs shoulders with a colourful band of misfits throughout the story. You soon uncover that a certain subsect of vampires are conspiring to overthrow humanity, and it's up to you to quell their revolution. ![]() You play as Jesse Rentier, a Van Helsing-style vampire hunter for the Rentier Institute, an affluent organisation on the American frontier that protects the burgeoning United States from all kinds of ghoulish threats. Suffice to say, you'll have plenty on your plate, and the game is hard enough as is. They also let you shoot enemy weak spots, dealing extra damage to enemies in short windows of opportunity (usually before the enemy delivers a particularly powerful attack of their own). ![]() You can change this to manual if you like, but you'll quickly realise that Evil West isn't really about the sharp-shooting guns are mainly used to deliver damage-over-time before figuring out which enemies to dismember using your next combo. The game defaults to assisted snap aiming. If you find yourself low on health and waiting for your healing function to recharge, with a bit of skill you can pepper enemies from a distance before charging back into the fray with your sparky blue gauntlets.ĪLSO READ: The PS1 Mouse Unlocked A World Of Gaming Possibilities In The 90s There are a couple of weapons assigned to the same buttons that you'll need to toggle between, but they're all implemented in a way that you can unload all of them in a matter of moments. In a sticky spot up close? Just hit 'X' to blast your way out with a shotgun. Hold Right Trigger to unload your revolve with fanning, hold Left Trigger to aim down the sights of your revolver. One of the best design decisions from Flying Wild Hog was to effectively treat the guns as individual cooldown-based moves rather than selecting them from a radial menu and forcing you to think about ammo. It's a game that wants you to get stuck in there. While there are guns aplenty, they're all secondary to your electrically charged gauntlet, which you use to uppercut enemies into the air before slamming them back down, insta-rappel yourself towards enemies then deliver a hyperspeed electric punch combo, and pull off DOOM-style finishers that yield precious health pickups. So what kind of game is Evil West? Well, it's more God of War than Gears of War. It's a hell of a ride for a while, but it struggles to sustain that momentum once it starts bogging you down in repetitive enemy encounters that show up its mechanical shortcomings. And for a while, it really got me thinking: if it's OK for today's games to model themselves on, say, late 90s shooters, or early 90s SNES games, then why the hell not should a game have that somewhat trashy 2012 flavour?īut eight, ten hours into its campaign, Evil West began to answer that question for me. With its butch story, lumpy character models, ardent linearity, and transparently arena-based combat, the cowboys-vs-vampires game from Shadow Warrior developer Flying Wild Hog has all the feel of a very good game from 2012. Imaginative grindhouse-western setting, plenty of variety in character builds (and the option to rest your skills any time)īy the late game, combat encounters start to feel repetitive and tiresome.įor my first few hours of Evil West, I was all-in on the no-nonsense grindhouse crunchiness of it all.
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