What's Good About Evil West

Welcome to 2024, I hope you all had a quiet and restful holiday. I mainly just hung out with my brothers and caught up on sleep I missed because the back half of 2023 just decided to test me on a conceptual level. Unlike last year, where the bangers started in Early January and just would not stop until December, the first few weeks of 2024 have been mercifully quiet, possibly to make up for the fact that we’re getting a remake of Persona 3, a new Yakuza game, and a new Tekken game within a few days of each other. And that’s to say nothing of the new Prince of Persia game dropping yesterday and being a banger if the news is anything to go by. But this week, we’re going to be looking at a game that was overlooked in 2022, Evil West. 

Evil West is part of the January PlayStation Plus offerings at the time of writing. So I figured “What the heck, might as well try it”. What I got was probably the most video game ass video game I’ve played in a while. Published by Focus Entertainment and developed by Flying Wild Hog, developers of the rebooted Shadow Warriors, Hard Reset and the interesting but mechanically flawed Trek to Yomi, Evil West is a third-person melee action game/third-person shooter. The main setup is that you play as Jesse Rentier, an agent of the Rentier Institute, a secret branch of the Department of Defence that specializes in the fighting of supernatural creatures, specifically the Sanguisuge, which is this game’s vernacular for vampires. After uncovering murmurs of a vampire clan attempting to go to war with humanity to prevent them from getting technologically advanced enough to wipe them out, Jesse and retired agent Edgar Gravenor lead a raid on the perpetrators, Peter D’Abano and his daughter Felicity. What follows is Jesse going around parts of the United States fighting off these vampires before they can accomplish their goals. I’m not gonna lie to you, a lot of Evil West uses its own vernacular to describe its setting. Sangisuge, Foulbloods, the Gift of Change, it’s all very ridiculous, but it’s ridiculous in a way that I can sort of get behind because of how thoroughly committed to the bit it is. Does it always land? No, but it’s committed, so I gotta respect it. It’s got real big Xbox 360 energy and I mean that in the best way.

I will say that the art style on a lot of Evil West shows that Flying Wild Hog is clearly punching above its weight. It has some of the sickest environment designs I’ve seen in a video game in literal years. A burning mansion, flooded oil fields, train yards that serve as bat breeding grounds, electrified frozen peaks and literal inverted underground blood pyramids are some of the places you can go to off the top of my head. Except for that last one, they all evoke the images of a late 19th century United States through a Weird West lens, with stuff like the last area I mentioned being an example of the darkness that lurks beneath. The use of saturated primary colours gives each area a unique feel while also laying Western-style grit thick. The enemies you fight are similarly well-designed. Zombie-like foulbloods that lurch and creep before you, cowboy familiars that do their master’s bidding like men possessed, skinless vampires that rush in with their claws, familiars that turn into werewolves, and highborne vampires that appear as giant humanoid bat monsters, as opposed to good looking aristocrats, are some of the more tame enemies that you encounter. I’m not getting to the more exotic stuff because that deserves to go unspoiled. I also appreciated how there’s a lot of insect imagery to denote as a visual pun that vampires are more akin to pests and parasites than anything, that was pretty funny to see. But there was also a sense of wetness to everything that highlights how disgusting these creatures are. It's in the same way that Prodeus was really wet. Just oodles of blood everywhere.

 I will say this, be mindful if you have Trypophobia or Arachnophobia. A lot of the later areas and enemies rely on evoking those images, so be aware. In the case of arachnophobia, there’s an accessibility option to turn it off, which is a nice touch.  Those aside, Evil West put a lot of muscle behind making the game look good. There are a lot of exaggerated proportions to the faces in particular that make them come off as more stylized than hyperrealistic, which I appreciate. It goes along well with the game’s other visual motifs. But looking pretty isn’t all Evil West does. It’s also a pretty damn good video game.

Evil West is a third-person action game with some light shooting mechanics and lighter puzzles sprinkled in. The main structure of the game takes place throughout sixteen main missions with cutscenes serving as bookends. The main objective is to kill as many vampires as humanly possible. That’s it. You start with just your fists and a revolver, but get a respectable arsenal by the end of the game. You get a service rifle for longer ranges, a shotgun for AoE damage of small enemies/dealing damage to big enemies, an electrified Cross that’s an area of effect stun, dynamite for some explosions, a repeating crossbow for quick damage, a flamethrower for dealing with crowds and lastly a Gatling Gun. Because why not, right? All of them are useful in their own right and can be upgraded with each one having a capstone ability that changes how it works. Case in point, the shotgun fires off lightning orbs that attach to enemies and the Gatling Gun becomes a goddamn Death Ray. Have I mentioned that this game is ridiculous? 

All of these are great options for some rootin’, tootin’, and shooting’, but you’re mainly gonna be using Jesse’s fists to do all of your vampire slaying. The reason for this is that Evil West is more of a character action game than it is a third-person shooter. I know that sounds weird in and out of context but stick with me. You get access to an electrified gauntlet that’s made specifically for punching vampire faces in and it’s the method that deals the bulk of Jesse’s damage. You can also parry enemy strikes for an E-combo, which is a series of rapid-fire punches (You’re gonna see that one a lot), you can uppercut fools for either sick air juggles or to Superman Punch them into bigger enemies or conveniently placed pieces of terrain, pull guys in with lightning, zap dash towards them (both of which stun, so more E-Combos), slam them into the ground with lighting, pull off lightning-quakes, and enter a super mode that has you dash all over the place and just punch the shit out of guys.

All of that sounds like a lot and it kind of is on paper. But in practice, it’s remarkably simple and intuitive. They mesh together with the enemies well and make for a decently challenging combat system, especially in the last quarter of the game, when it starts throwing higher tiers enemies at you in groups with lower tiers more and more. However, it does lead to some end-game fights getting more and more stacked against you and not in a fun way, to the point where I had to lower the difficulty so I could finish it, I rarely have to do that in games, so that kind of annoys me. Semi-related but fuck the Vampire Highborne and the higher tiers of familiars, they are assholes. There is also a mechanic where enemies can produce weak points that you can snap fire to with your rifle. I love that mechanic. It sells Jesse being a fast-as-heck gunslinger, which helps because it’s also the interrupt mechanic.  Balancing gripes aside, Flying Wild Hog made a damn fine combat system that really sells being a monster-slaying cowboy, which is ultimately what you want from this sort of thing. 

While I will admit that it can be a bit rough around the edges at times, Evil West is the quintessential “7/10” video game. It’s the kind of video game that you would randomly see in a video rental store, rent it because the box art looked cool, play through it once over the weekend and then return it when it’s over. It is the kind of game that doesn't get made these days outside of possibly the indie space, one where a smaller studio goes all in on a premise, punching above its weight in the process. While Evil West could be a bit more tightly tuned and better written, it’s still a damn good video game. It’s also really short, my final save clocked in at about 9 hours, so if you’re looking as an in-between for the big stuff, I recommend giving Evil West a try, it’s a bloody good time.