The Evil Within 2

Ya know everyone was really excited 3 years ago when we’d first heard that the RE4 director Shinji Mikami was finally returning to revitalise classic survival horror with The Evil Within. That game certainly brought back some nostalgia and had some creative horror elements to showcase; but with a horrendous story, disjointed design, and occasionally unfair difficulty that game ended up being an unflattering experience for a lot of fans including myself. So now with The Evil Within 2 director John Johanas has essentially stepped in to pick up the pieces and I’d say that he succeeded in making a much more cohesive horror game.

There are a lot of key design changes here that I liked; for starters there seems to be more appropriate difficulty options, one of the more humorous things is that the “hard” difficulty setting is essentially described as being the first game’s regular difficulty. There’s also an auto-aim feature but I’d recommend turning that off just for a more fitting horror experience. The game continues the story of Sebastian Castellanos who’s now left the police department and is haunted by the memories of losing his daughter in a house fire many years back (something the first game never cared to elaborate on…). But suddenly the elusive Juli Kidman shows up out of the blue to feed you a conspiracy about how your daughter was actually kidnapped by a menacing corporation called Mobius and is being used to stabilise a brand new STEM system (the idea in these games is that people are trying to scientifically merge consciousness’s to create a Utopian world of the “collective mind”). You actually get hired by this Mobius group because apparently this new STEM system is going berserk just like the last time and your goal in the game is to enter this STEM system and rescue your daughter Lily as well as some trapped Mobius staff.

Obviously things aren’t so simple since this is only what’s revealed to you in like the first 15 minutes of the game, but overall I found the narrative here to be a bit better than in the first game, it’s just got more of a focus and purpose. Still the characters, writing, and voice work are all pretty terrible. Plus there are plenty of plot points that you could consider contrived, confusing, ridiculous, or just straight up don’t make sense. One character I actually did find amusing was the psychotic serial killer Stephano who has been wreaking havoc within STEM. He reminded me a lot of Deidara from Naruto with that obsessive artist psyche and the contempt for disrespect people have for his “art”. He has the interesting ability to manipulate time within STEM by using his cameras and there’s this ginormous floating camera Goliath that seems to be connected to his right eye. Sadly; the game basically tosses him aside halfway through the game in favour of less interesting villains.

They really change things for the better by introducing Union; a fictional town the game uses to create a few – much needed – open world environments to explore. What’s great is that they pepper in some side missions throughout the town and you can stumble upon some really crazy optional content through sheer exploration. And trust me you’re gonna want to do this optional stuff because not only does some of it add to the main story but this is also how you acquire a lot of key weapons (like the sniper rifle, shotgun, flamethrower, etc.). That said the game is still fairly linear; you rarely revisit open areas through the main story and travelling back to areas you previously visited is a hassle. There’s some hefty weapon variety in this game and my best friend was the crossbow since it has a variety of different bolt types; from harpoons to explosive bolts, and my personal favourite the freeze bolts that stop enemies in their place momentarily. The game also has a pretty commendable upgrade economy with weapon parts you find hidden throughout the environment and the returning green gel you receive from killing enemies. You can use weapon parts to either upgrade your weapons or craft bullets (which is pretty essential in the late game) and the green gel will upgrade your physical attributes.

I like how this forces you to really search every environment diligently for hidden goodies because upgrading is the name of the game here, a lot of the monsters they introduce in the mid to late game are no joke. The boss fights were generally good in this game as well, with the exception of one late game boss that’s essentially a messy compilation of first game bosses. Union itself was a delight to explore, everything from the rundown houses to the theatre and city hall were bursting with creative visual horror. A lot of the enemies were designed well too with REALLY creepy sound effects and erratic movement patterns. There were some slight gameplay rough spots like how you’d have to sometimes wait for enemies to finish certain animations before you can damage them, and my character glitched out and got stuck in the environment a couple of times. But this occurrence was rare and I was actually able to escape each time. I wasn’t a huge fan of the "Marrow" area that connects the fractured sections of Union together, it was a visually bland environment and had few interesting moments in it other than one really great monster encounter that was short lived.

Overall this was a positive experience for me, the story still kinda sucks and it’s still a little inconsistent and disjointed at times but not to the extent of the previous game. The open world environments filled with side content and cool discoveries was the best possible direction for this game, the stealth elements here were handled pretty well, weapons/upgrades were solid, the spooks and visuals were generally tasteful and I gotta give a shout out to ma boi Stephano who pretty much steals the show through the first half of the game. If Tango Gameworks can make one more positive step forward like this for The Evil Within 3 they’ll finally be in greatness territory.