Resident Evil 2 (2019) {PS4}: What's Old is New.

This one was one of those E3 megaton's that developers drop to bait older gamers like myself.  And while the fourth installment of this game is the one that is a lot of peoples favorites and probably (rightfully) the most important one of the series, the original version of this one is probably my favorite because my introduction to the series. 

Remakes like these are always a roll of the dice because its difficult to please everyone. Do you produce a new experience and risk having fanboys complain that everything is different? Or do you keep it faithful to the original and risk having people complain that its the same game they've already played. It's a fine line to walk, so let's see how Capcom did with.....

RESIDENT EVIL 2 (2019){PS4}

Resident Evil 2 takes place two months after the events of the original in 1998, where Raccoon City police S.T.A.R.S unit members Jill Valentine, Chris Redfield, Rebecca Chambers, and Barry Burton escaped the mansion outside of the city limits where Umbrella Pharmaceuticals had a secret facility to create the zombie producing bio-weapon, the G-virus. The mansion was destroyed but the it did not halt the outbreak of the virus.

It's Leon Kennedy's first day on the police force, and he's driving into Raccoon City to meet his new team and department. But on at a fuel fill-up just outside the city he notices the station to be surprisingly desolate. Investigating the gas station, he sees an attendant nursing a nasty wound and the man weakly points into the back. Another police officer is restraining a zombie, but as the officer tells Leon to stay back, the zombie lurches forward and kills him. Leon begins to work his way out of the station, but just before getting out the door, he covers the back of a young woman with a zombie encroaching behind her.

Her name is Claire Redfield, she is driving into Raccoon City in search of her older brother Chris. They decide to escape together and that heading to the police station would be a lot safer than staying out side. But they quickly learn that city is just overrun with these things as their car is quickly surrounded. They try to back out, but an injured truck driver tailing them is about to ram their car, forcing them to bail out. The resulting wreck and explosion separate the two, but they agree to meet up at the police station and get out of this mess.

Alright, I tend to find myself when it comes to remakes like this wanting to see the core tenets of what made the original good stay the same, but not delivering them in the exact same way, thus allowing us to have a new experience with the game, even if I know how the story might play out. The introduction of this version of the game provides a pretty excellent example of this. 

Right out of the gate the story managed to hit all the major points of the original one in a pretty faithful 1-to-1 recreation. There is some minor differences to how the events play out, but all the of the major beats are there, and they call back to the original animatics first meeting where Leon shoots over Claire's shoulder to cover her back. The dialog and delivery is different, but it doesn't feel alien. The objective is the same, but the starting map is not. Good start so far.

Credit where its due, Capcom has really been upping their game on the graphical front. After the the stellar looking Resident Evil 7: Biohazard the graphics are just pushed even further to where video games are literally just motion captured movie roles. Using mo-cap for both body motion and facial reactions, the characters are so lifelike its getting pretty difficult to distinguish if they are actual a real person or not. It's crazy, but we are getting closer and closer to producing CGI live action.

This burger looks so gross, but also delicious?

The character design is appropriately modernized as well. While the game is still set in 1998 (around when the original version came out) the clothing worn by the characters actually looks realistic and reasonable for the time. Hilariously, Leon and Claire's original outfits are unlockable and if you didn't think their old looks weren't stupid just wait till you seem them in realistic textures.

Resident Evil 2 does feel like this one borrows a number of elements from various different games in the series. The inventory system in this game is a blending of 2 and 7. It uses the familiar over the shoulder camera angle that made Resident Evil 4 famous, but I would say that it controls more like a traditional 3rd person shooter does like you would see in the less popular Resident Evil 6.  Fans just need to come to terms already: The tank controls are a thing of the past, and probably should have been since the advent of the analog control. I tried using them again in Resident Evil: Revelations and they were awful. It's a relic of a time when controls were D-pad directional.

They did a pretty good job with the map layout as well. It's core layout is almost exactly how I remember the original Resident Evil 2 but when you start to actually navigate around the map, you will find doors or stairs in different places. Major rooms right where they should be, but new or different rooms scattered around on the way there. For example if I said to go to the dark room, you would know to go right where the safe room at the bottom of the stairs is. But along the way, you would find a new weapons locker room that you will need to make several trips back to get all the contents of.

via Gfycat

More importantly, despite taking inspiration from the blueprint of the previous iteration, the game still manages to keeps it focuses tight and scary. Even though I have a general idea of where I want to move in the map, the surroundings are still unfamiliar and it does an excellent job of building tension from relentless enemies and jump scares. And boy is there tension, because zombies in this one don't feel like as harmless a threat as they used to be. They have much more sporadic movements, they can move much quicker on you, and worst of all they seem almost impossible to put down. I don't feel like I was every lacking in ammo, but trying to kill everything will certainly make it feel like it.

Cutscenes play out similar but differently as well. Most notably when Leon meets officer Marvin. Again like the main introduction it hits a lot of the same points but is completely different and new dialog. He mentions the party, at one point pulls his gun to get Leon to leave him. But this doesn't happen in the first and only scene he was in like in the original. A lot of these characters actually get a couple more scenes than I remember from the original. It's nice to see because any longtime fan of  this franchise knows that the lore of this one can get confusing.

via Gfycat

Additionally they also kept the "side" system you might remember from the old PS1 version. How it worked before was there was really no disc 1 or disc 2. If you started the game from the Leon or Claire disc you would start a new game with them as the primary lead. It affected how the game played a bit and how some of the items dropped. This more or less returns as you can choose who will lead off in the main story first, and who will follow in the supplemental chapter. So essentially each selection has 2 parts each.

Speaking of things that they kept, completing the game will also unlock the "4th Survivor" mode.  You may remember this as where you play as faceless umbrella operative Hunk with a set amount of equipment, and essentially need to run a gauntlet of all the baddies you encountered during the game to try to set the best possible time you can. Complete this, and you unlock the ridiculous Tofu mode, which is more or less the same thing, but the equipment changes. There are multiple versions of Tofu to unlock as well.

via Gfycat

And I can't believe I am saying this, but kudos to Capcom for the free DLC update. This is the store of thing I fully expected them to charge and additional 5 bucks a pop for but they released 3 additional mini chapters called the "Ghost Survivors" that give smaller but similar tight experiences with some of the smaller nobody characters from the game. They are a welcome edition and stretch my dollar with this game out a little more, which is nice because by credit roll I already had felt like I had gotten my money's worth already.

If I have any complaints about this one, there are very few of them or there are nitpicks at best. Like I said prior, the most baffling part of how the story is delivered is the fact that after Claire and Leon part ways for the first time, they basically don't talk to each other again from that point forward. There is one short scene in the early game, one scene in the late game, and then not again till the ending of the game. It's strange because I remember there being more interaction between the two of them in the PS1 version.

There is also a bit of inconsistency if you play both quests, both ways. Both G Berkin and the Tyrant appeared in the previous version of the game, but they were separated by who's quest you played. That way each character is resolved by another. But in this one, they are both in both quests. So while in one path one of them might be a difficult ending boss, in other they might be dispatched early and not relevant to the true ending. It's a weird way to deliver it. Not a huge issue, but it is noticeable.

via Gfycat

No bowgun in this installment of the game. Which is simultaneously disappointing and a relief, because if you played the old game its about as effectively damaging as trying to spit snot at a baddie through a drinking straw. Sure, it's become somewhat iconic to the game and the concept of zombie killing at this point in zombie culture, but ultimately I really don't mind that its gone.

Going through Hunk, Tofu, and trying to S+ rank is incredibly frustrating for me because I can't get the knack of properly side stepping zombies not matter how many speedruns I watch, but that's more of a "git gud" problem than it is a complaint about the actual game, but I will say the frustration in trying to do so was enough for me to put the game down and move on to something else.

via Gfycat

A number of people complained about how the character models looked for both Leon and Claire in this one but honestly, if they were to shoot a new (actual) Resident Evil 2 movie in the coming year, this is exactly the type of look Hollywood directors would cast for said role, it really feels like a complete modernization of the concept in every aspect.

I fizzled out pretty quickly on this one too after I played it. Which is strange because I was very excited to dive into this one. I powered through both variants of both campaigns, beat 4th survivor once, and after a few attempts at Tofu mode, that was it. I was kinda done with it. These modes don't seem to scratch my itch like the Mercenaries mode does, so I did find this one very easy to put down.

via Gfycat

But like I said, half of these barely register a complaint. The short and skinny of it is that if you are going to do a remake of an timeless old game that everyone loves? This is exactly how you to do it. There ARE ways to stay true to the original without changing the core of what it is. The graphics are new but familiar, the maps are the same but different, the monsters are acting the same but behave differently. It completely felt like I was playing Resident Evil 2 while still completely feeling like a brand new experience to me.

In the very early stages of my playing, I had said that the was the some possible game of the year potential out of this one. And I suppose technically this is still true, but I do have the tendency to get really excited with some early of the year games (see Tales of Berseria). It's entirely possible that it can be game of the year, but there is a LOT of games to look forward to this year. But even if its not, I can say with certainty that I felt Resident Evil 2 absolutely delivered on what it needed to be. It was a solid pick up, worth every bit of time I spent on it, and is a must have for 2019. Highly recommended.

Hey SquareEnix! Pay Attention!
This is how you need Final Fantasy 7 to go!

Evil Within 2 (PS4): Learning from one's mistakes.

Over three years ago, I wrote a bout a game I was very excited to play that ended up being very difficult and very dumb. I played it to finish, but I did not much enjoy myself. That game was The Evil Within and I consider it to be one of the biggest flops and disappointments of 2014. It came from the mind of Shinji Makami (who gave us Resident Evil 4, btw) who I usually expect much better from. I blamed Bethesda getting their dirty hands on it.

So naturally, as you might imagine, I was not exactly rushing to reserve or pick up the the next installment of this game. I did throw it on my Amazon wishlist though and promptly forgot about it. But occasionally Amazon will occasionally let know when a game is on sale, and it eventually dropped to 20. Ok, I'd bite on 20 bucks. So after sitting through my pile while I worked through games I actually wanted to play, I did eventually make time for....

THE EVIL WITHIN 2 (PS4)

Three years have passed since Sebastian Castellanos narrowly escaped the incident at Beacon Mental Hospital and has left the Krimson City Police force. Times have become hard on him as Sebastian as become an embittered alcoholic. He is haunted by dreams of his past, of a house fire that destroyed his home, the life of his daughter Lily, and the departure of his wife Myra. 

After being jarred awake from a drunken stupor by another nightmare, Sebastian awakens to find his former partner and betrayer from the previous title, Juli Kidman seated across from him. He furiously exclaims he's been after her to try to get some answers about the Beacon incident of the prior game but she shuts him down by telling him that his daughter is alive, and that she is currently in the hands of MOBIUS, the shadowy corporation that Kidman is a part of. Lily is in danger, and they want Sebastian's help. After a small scuffle with MOBIUS agents, Sebastian is subdued and taken.

When Sebastian comes to, he learns from Kidman and a MOBIUS administrator that Lily as currently being used as a Core for another STEM device, the machine that allows people to share consciousness. But she has disconnected and has not responded to them. They have sent in teams to fix the problem, but they have gone silent. So despite not trusting MOBIUS or Kidman, Sebastian again plunges into the STEM for a chance to get his daughter back.

Ok, well that is a step in the right direction. Right from the onset of the story we are given a pretty clear and concise storyline, even if a little overused in video games: Broken father's chance at redemption by saving his daughter/wife/girlfriend. That is very easy to follow and gives me a clear and direct goal to achieve. Way better than the previous games "go investigate this murder, and then all this random shit happens."

It's also furthered by slipping in just enough story to remember the last game without dwelling on it. Oh I have to go back into that fucked up machine again that shares consciousness, but it's going to look like a small community of everyday America. Ok, that's a setting that makes more sense, and now the characters can explain the shifts as they happen. We are essentially able to play with settings because we are in a dreamscape. The continuation of the last game's stupid story is indeed still stupid, but we off in the right direction to start.

But what as a nice surprise is that after a brief linear set (basically used to reteach you the game controls) where we meet one of our antagonists, we are then dropped into the town and free to explore. We have a set goal to reach, but we also can find trace memories that open new quests from other people. So as I was wandering towards one of these checkpoints, I saw a woman running and screaming across my path being chased by three Lost (the zombie like standard baddie of this game) and Sebastian narrates "Man she's gonna die if I don't help her, but I really need to save some ammo."

That's when it hit me. Is this actually an open world horror game? I don't think I've actually played an open world horror game before. You could argue that the classic Silent Hill games are open world but there is not really questing to do, just set pieces to find. In the Evil Within 2 I am able to wander the town, and sometimes when I go to investigate a house to find ammo, I might get swept into a survival mission where waves of baddies are coming in, or I get shifted to a new area and have stealth around a very grudge like ghost to get back to the reality I was in.

Some of the behaviors show that the Lost aren't just zombies. This scene is tough to watch.

Giving me the freedom to explore opened the world up and didn't make me feel like the game was linear. I liked that. It felt like the next logical step from how some of Shingi Mikami's previous games like Resident Evil 4 and Shadows of the Damned are designed. We have larger sprawling maps, now we have more options for things to do in them.

So with the previous Evil Within game, I had a lot of complain about with the combat mechanics and stat upgrade systems. It again uses the very familiar 3rd person shooter controls we are all familiar with at this point, and next to useless melee attack, d-pad quick menu options, a stealthy crouch and a loud run with stamina mechanic. If you have played any modern 3rd person shooter I shouldn't need to explain the majority of the buttons. They did add an aim assist feature which I used because I wanted to blow through the game, and to its credit it does help hold your headshots, but you still have to be pretty on point with your aim for it actually lock on. So I don't feel it made the game too easy.

I foolishly ignored my bow gun, but its different arrow types will be super useful later because of the various effects.

But my big complaints were lack of ammo with steep difficulty, and relatively useless stat upgrades. Well, Tango Gameworks and Bethesda addressed the first by introducing a new crafting mechanic to the game. It's small and uncluttered basically with 10 items to use, and almost all of them require gunpowder. You can use this at workbenches to make new ammo or healing items if you are running short, or if you are out in the field and need some in a pinch you can craft from you menu and get some at an increased supply cost. Supplies are found and dropped all over, but It never felt like I was getting too much of it. You can also improve your weapons from the work benches to boost their damage, capacity, reload speed, etc.

So now it feels like I have the ammo to get into some gunfights with the baddies, but not enough that I can run in guns blazing. Which forces me to use the game's stealth mechanic more strategically because if I don't I'd be wasting more ammo than intended. The enemies have really twitchy motions, so you really need to make use the environment to slink around and stay hidden and moving slowly so you can get your instant kill stabs off and as many as you can before needing to resort to the gun. This makes for incredibly tense situations where you are desperately trying to take down enemies as quickly and quietly as possible to stretch your ammo a little further.

It works even better in new maps with tight corridors, because you just know something is going to pop out and rattle you. Yes, it manages to actually raise horror tension in a open world game which did way the hell better than the first installment of Evil Within did. Sometimes you are presented with situations where you HAVE to stealth so it makes use of the mechanic well. The one hit kill axes make a return as well, but you really should consider these a last ditch effort to save you from a tough group of baddies, or botched stealth attempt. Thankfully on the normal difficulty the stealth is pretty forgiving even with bosses so if a fight is not going well you can retreat and regroup while baddies lose sight of you.

Holy shit, the game has boss fights! Remember boss fights? Periodic appearing unique enemies that require you to use all your learned skills and abilities to find an effective way to beat them? I keep starting to think that video games in general have moved away from this, but Evil Within 2 boasts a reasonable amount of unique enemies as you play through to test your mettle. Many of them become regular baddies by game end but it was still greatly appreciated. I love a good boss fight and it feels like there are fewer and fewer games putting them in.

Then we have the skill mechanic. Like the last game, beating up enemies makes them drop "green ooze" which can be used at your safe house (or room) where our mysteriously friendly yet stoic nurse returns to strap you to a chair and pump juice into your skull. They overhauled the skills this time so now they make sense and are actually useful. No more of the shitty Fallout accuracy stat that makes you miss even though you have a perfectly lined up reticle. Now the skills affect you stamina, health, recover rates and so on.

But they also added reaction abilities depending on what skill tree you are working. Like if I am increasing my stealth I can do a quick scurry to chase after an enemy for a stealth kill. Or a reaction to where if I get grabbed by an enemy, I will instantly use a bottle that is typically used to distract enemies to knock them off of me to save me from damage. Or a speedy reaction that will allow my character to automatically dodge attacks from lesser enemies. They are useful and actually worth unlocking, so now I'm more willing to hunt enemies because the skills actually help me out.

Who the nurse is, is still never really explained, but I find her to be less abrasive this time around.
She manages to squeeze in a pop culture joke or two if you are listening.

Graphically the game has made major improvements too. I complained last time that they tried to do the grindhouse film grain look and it just made the graphics look shitty, washed out, and last gen. All the mouth animations were off and it overall looked sloppy. That just doesn't feel like the case in this one. There is no grindhouse washout so now despite the dark settings and tones, there are splashes of color around, and the world generally feels more alive. It makes the shifts to more demonic settings that much more jarring because the Everytown America setting sets a control line to shift from. Animations are synced up nicely and voice acting (while still hokey and goofy) is much improved this time as well.

And perhaps as a nod to Resident Evil 4, they added a shooting gallery mini game. I would spend rather insulting amounts of time trying to complete every level of difficulty on two shooting gallery game types. One bites into the addictive need for color matching puzzlers so shame on you Bethesda, you clever pricks for knowing about my penchant for Bejeweled Blitz.

Honestly as I run through the list of things from the previous game, I find myself with very little to complain about. I'll say that the barrier to entry is still a little bit steep as you learn your controls and nuances to enemy behavior. It's got a pretty generous autosave so there where more than a number of times where I felt it was just better to die and get my ammo and healing back than it was to win the fight and be left shorthanded. That sort of impacts the horror aspect when you aren't afraid of dying and losing progress.

Bethesda hid little nicknacks all over the game from the other games they worked on.
They don't do anything, but they are fun little nods to other games.

There is a tiny down pointing arrow or v on your screen for a majority of the game, and I had no idea if it was a waypoint marker or what and I found it very confusing. It wasn't till the very late game that at one point it was red and I realized it was indicating that I could use my stealth dash, which I had unlocked before but had no idea how to use. Some of the game's mechanics could be better explained. Like the game tells you that you can drink coffee in safe houses to recover, but doesn't ell you that coffee recharges over time so you can't keep using it.

In a later portion of the game it actually rehashes a gauntlet of enemies of the last game for you to fight again. It felt like a filler segment to raise the tension but I had been playing it for like 12 hours at that point so honestly it doesn't feel like it needed to be there. Not problematic I guess but felt kinda thrown in.

Some Spoiler Warning here, so skip these next three paragraphs if you want: the game still occasionally feels like it is dangling out plot threads from both versions of the game that never end up getting explained or resolved. I still have no idea why Sebastian almost zombied out last game, and they bring up that his partner isn't actually dead but then that plot point is never actually followed up on. Honestly I had forgotten that character even existed, he could have been left out and it wouldn't have impacted the game at all.

Anita Sarkeesian is certainly not going to like this game, so don't be surprised to see it on Feminist Frequency. Like I said above the general theme of the plot line is a pretty tired trope to begin with, with the damsel in the distress variant. But the story goes out of the way to make all these interesting and strong female characters with different skill sets, and you can bet your ass that things to do not go well for a lot of them. But to be fair, for a horror game of this nature, a significant number of them men are going to die too. It's a horror game. How many horror games and movies end with almost everyone surviving?

Esmeralda Torres is confident, strong, deep, and a hell of a fighter.
So I bet you'll never guess how her story unfolds.

Really my biggest beef with the game is it does the annoying trope of the constantly changing primary antagonist. For a large portion of the game you pursing a psycho who is clearly after your daughter too. But after a challenging fight with him the story pulls the "oh you've killed me, but now have to go after the REAL villain who you've never met yet!" More annoyingly is it actually pulls this shit twice!

Lastly I made the big complaint that The Evil Within was not scary. I could argue that the Evil Within 2 was not scary either, but in this case I don't think it was really trying to be. You can go to a horror movie and not be scared, but what it did very well was make you tense. Especially in the stealth sections of the game with tight environments. It did actually manage to get me with one jump-scare so that's an improvement over the last game. But honestly, some of my favorite horror movies aren't ones that jump-scare the shit out of you, but the ones that kick up your heart rate and have you leaning out of your chair because the tension just has you rigid. Evil Within 2 nails it there.

Anima is not technically a boss. You can't fight her and you have to stealth to get away.
She appears at scripted points, but can also just appear at random to send you hiding.

I walked into Evil Within 2 with a very lukewarm mindset, even as the story played out I felt that it was a stupid plot line. I didn't care about Sebastian or Kidman in the last game, so I was hard sell going into this one. But I think somewhere around the six hour mark, I realized I was completely fucking riveted by the story. I was genuinely loving my experience in this ride I was on, the development of the characters were logical and making sense. I was interested to see how the story was going to play out for the parties involved. The combat was fun, the stealth was tense. I was having a great time playing this game, and when I was at work I'd constantly be thinking about playing it when I got home.

I'll just say it: The Evil Within 2 was great. Not just ok, not good, great. It's like they took my review, handed it to Shinji Mikami and it personally pissed him off. So he remade the game specifically so I would like it. It addressed almost every complaint I had for it and it provided me an exciting and fun experience that I would rank as one of my betters during the PS4 life cycle. Some reviews said the same but they wouldn't go back to it, but I am already playing new game plus, which says even more that I am not ready to put it down. Easily an 8 or 9 and I would highly recommend The Evil Within 2 to those who like the horror/action genre. Color me genuinely surprised.

Seriously, a few more survivors at the game end couldn't have hurt.

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (PS4) - All Shook Up

So one of the big swings since the advent of this current generation of consoles is we've kind of veered away from the modern shooter and developers have taken a renewed look at the horror genre and when games like Outlast and P.T. got released people really started to focus on the the first person horror game. With the development and releases of VR headsets this seemed like a natural progression of the genre.

Which is what makes this newest installment of this series so interesting. Now this is a mainstay of the survival horror genre dating back to the early stages of the playstation one. It practically invented the entire genre, the problem is when you get to this high of a number of sequels to the game things have to change to keep it fresh. They didn't with the sixth game, and it was roundly bashed for it. This demo was released and displayed that Capcom was going to indeed change everything up and take the series in a new direction. So after months of waiting, its time to dive back into the world of.....

RESIDENT EVIL 7: BIOHAZARD(PS4)

We start off with a completely new story. We open of from the perspective of someone watching videos on a laptop, we are introduced to a somewhat bubbly woman named Mia sending a message to her husband Ethan. She is on a work trip and apparently has been away for a while, all she leads on is that she is on some kind of babysitting project and can't wait to get home. After the video ends, our POV opens up another video. Mia is clearly panicked, exhausted, and scared. She exclaims to Ethan that she lied, and that she's sorry. But if he manages to receive this video to stay away.

Three years pass, and we take perspective of Ethan. He's driving from Texas to Louisiana. During the drive he takes a call and explains that he received an email from Mia telling him to come get her at this farm. Ethan doesn't know if its true, but he hasn't seen his wife in 3 years. He has to go and find out the truth, why Mia was gone for so long. And as Ethan approaches where the farmhouse is, that's where we take control of the game. (Outside of these characters, I am going to avoid mentioning other characters to avoid spoilers).

Not the most optimistic start to our adventure.

So I have to give Capcom some credit here. Not only did they completely shake up how we play Resident Evil but they also went out of the way to give us a completely original and new story. when you start playing you have none of the established characters, locations, or back lore to worry about. For a new player this would be an inviting change because you don't need to feel lost trying to learn Resident Evil's ridiculous and convoluted story structure.

Resident Evil has always been a series that managed to produce fear and tension because of a combination of things that kept you at a disadvantage. Namely its a relatively slow rate of movement, minimal weaponry to use against relentless enemies, scarce ammo for said weapons to use, and tight claustrophobic environments. Since Resident Evil 4 the areas started to widen out, the game got faster, and you had weapons to keep up a frenetic pace. For the initial shake up it was great but after 4 they became to feel cookie cutter and generic, hence the lambasting of 6 by most gamers.

Meet Lucas, Jack, and Marguerite Baker. The friendly southern family who will host our adventure.

Resident Evil 7 has decided to re-embrace these core roots, and felt the best way to shake up the dynamic is to take away the established 3rd person convention and go first person. The demo, Resident Evil: Beginning Hour, was indicative of this change. This from a control perspective feels like a blend of the horror walking simulators a la Outlast and Layers of Fear but unlike most of those there is some mild first person shooter mechanics which allow you to defend yourself.... Somewhat.

Basic controls are simple and natural at this point. Right trigger to shoot, Left trigger to aim. Analog controls to move and spin the camera. Click in the analogs to run and crouch. Triangle for the menu, Dpad for the hot keys. If you have a played a video game at all in the past 20 something years nothing about this control scheme should throw you a curve ball. 

I will say that there was one mistake I consistently made, and continue to make every time I play the game is that the right bumper is a hotkey to use one of your medical bottles. And without fail, every time while scrambling around for the menu or something I will tap that damn button and waste a healing item at full health. Can game developers please just put in a mechanic where you can't use health items at max heath for idiots like me?

While the melee combat feels loose and wild, it certainly adds a visceral aesthetic.

The game tries to strike a balance of creating tension while at the same time being fair in its regards to item use. Most of the time, you would be wandering around the house looking for items to break open or find. Bullets rarely come in groups bigger than 5 or so and there are not very many easy to kill enemies. So as you play through its a matter of making every shot count. You are given a melee weapon in the early stages of the game, but its just a pocket knife. This weapon is beyond useless. Its really meant for breaking open boxes and nothing else, because fighting with this thing in this game is a death wish.

While we are on the subject of fighting, There is a new mechanic I wasn't used to and that is the addition of a block button. While you have firearms to use, most of your enemies are all melee attackers and getting hit by them will deal massive damage. So with a quick press of the left bumper Ethan throws his arms up to absorb the brunt of the blow. Not getting used to using this is probably why I struggled at the early stages of this game. There are some points and enemies where using this ability is absolutely critical to get down or you will find yourself repeating the same fight over any over again.

I struggled at the onset because I grossly underestimated the importance of blocking.

Another nod to the traditional Resident Evil convention is the crafting mechanic returns as well. As you search around the house you will find items that by themselves are not particularly useful but when combined with chemical packs you find around the house you can create more ammo or healing items. As a chicken shit, I erred on the side of safety and made sure that I always had 3 health bottles in my inventory at all times.

It's also worth noting that there are a handful of weapons that you just cannot make ammo for, so be sure to make a note of that because those are the weapons that you need to hang on to to get you through some of the tougher scrapes of the game. This is primarily for two weapons specifically: The shotgun which is going to be your primary heavy for group fights. If you are fending off more than one enemy or something you are sure you can't take down with a pistol, and M44 Handgun which basically replaces the magnum. Ammo is next to non-existent so I'd hang onto this for the final boss like I did.

Fuckin'..... No thank you.

On the other hand though, if you use up all your ammo in every encounter you are going to find yourself without a bullet left to spend when you really need it. So sometimes it is better to just run and hide. A lot of the enemies won't open doors so you have that working to your advantage, and some enemies are nearly impossible to put down, so if you would want to survive, you'll need to pick your battles and use your environment to your advantage. 

So again, credit where it is due to Capcom on this one. This has completely shaken up the Resident Evil formula. Is it a new experience? Not as such but, but I do applaud the company for looking at what people didn't like about the last game, and decided to make some drastic changes to the formula to try to breathe new life into the franchise. It's a bold gambit to make but after Resident Evil 6 it looks like it was the smart play. Reviews of this one have been generally positive.

Interestingly though, while there are a few little nods to the Resident Evil franchise as a whole throughout the whole game, such as some sound effects and the saving/storage system, this game honestly could have been delivered as a new property entirely. There is very little connection to the Resident Evil as a whole. Like for example, if they just decided that this was going to be the first new installment of the Beginning Hour series or whatever, It might have actually been better received because it didn't have to contend with the lineage before it.

Backpacks are super important in this game so don't miss them.
Even with them you will be shuffling your inventory a lot.

Graphically this game is fairly impressive at points and sometimes less impressive in others. The whole game runs at a seamless 60fps so everything is smooth. It is clear this is a well motion captured game because all the movement and reactions of the characters feel realistic and natural. But inversely, and I don't know why this is, Any motion captured game always seems to have really awkward fake looking teeth. If you played through Until Dawn or Heavy Rain you know exactly what I am talking about. I also feel that some of the background elements don't seem as detailed as the could be, but its a dark dirty dingy house so I don't know what I really am asking for here. Nothing of it was jarring or so poor that it took me out of the game.

The sound design of this game is your pretty typical horror fanfare. Droning horror noises sparsed out by footsteps and uncomfortable silences. The voice action is pretty on point where none of dialogue feels hokey or cheesy. It definitely has the proper horror movie style score to set the scenes or kick in in moments of tension or battle. The tutorial boss fight is actually one of the best examples of this which I actually don't want to get into, because it was one of the best parts of the game. But the pièce de résistance is the opening song from the trailer, which is a modified cover of the folk song "Go Tell Aunt Rhody" by Burl Ives. It's just perfect and makes the intro movie perfectly haunting.

The tension aspect that they really wanted to push in this one is reminiscent of Resident Evil 3, because while the monsters won't open doors, that's not going to stop the family that is in the house and actively looking to hurt you.  They are relentless pursuers and will absolutely mess you up if they get their hands on you and you don't have that block mechanic down.

Unfortunately, this leads to my biggest problems with the game and surprisingly its because of the Auto-save, but not for the reasons that you might think. At the start of the game after a brief bit of walking around the farmhouse we actually step right back into the Beginning Hour demo. Everything felt familiar but since it was this was the actual game I knew something had to be different. What followed was a tense creeping through the house jumping at every sound effect which was followed by a terrifying close quarters fight defending only with a hand axe vs a chainsaw. Totally on the edge of my seat, this was great.

You will find Jack to be somewhat of a stubborn individual.

But in a later segment, I had some bullets and keep trying to progress through the underside of the house and I came to this hallway where I would have fight 3 monsters. I didn't have the block just down yet and I was getting destroyed. I would back up, fire my gun, take my lumps, take a few steps forward and get trashed by the next one. But after I while, I realized that the auto-save was keeping me pretty much right in front of the door where these fights started, so I could just let myself get killed and I'd be right back in the fray with all my health and ammo.

And that's the problem. Now I wasn't playing to survive, I was playing to get past this part. Now I wasn't getting tense or scared, I was getting frustrated. This was the issue I had with games like Bioshock and Outlast. When you have an auto-save system that holds your hand and gives you a minor slap on the wrist, you basically have taken away any sense of risk. Sure, the jump scares would still get me, but now I would approach new areas with much more reckless abandon because now I understood there was little penalty for failure. 

In the older Resident Evils at least up to the first 4, if you were down to critical health, knew you hadn't saved in an hour or two, and only had one first aid spray back in the safe room? That slow trek back would be fucking terrifying because you knew if you blew it you had to make all that progress all over again if a zombie or hunter took you. Sure, it might be easier the 2nd time around but not getting your save in time is what added a tangible penalty to your progress. So the tension would be through the roof. Even more so if you were slogging through a new area and didn't know if a safe room or healing item was on the way.

That's sadly what Resident Evil 7 lacks. It's not scary. It can be intense and it has jump scares, but its not the same thing. I sort of realized this when I played Beginning Hour earlier last year. They tried to do the cerebral horror thing but I found just not getting scared by the demo. So much like when I played Outlast, the moment I realized I wasn't set back I wasn't scared anymore. I know that Auto save to a degree is something we all enjoy and something feel we need to have, but in games like this it undermines the very theme its based around.

Now originally I had written some ideas to perhaps address these issues, but from what I'm being told is that if you beat the game, when you play it on the "Madhouse" difficulty it really goes back to some of the series more notable roots. Namely, saving your game becomes limited by collecting cassette tapes (much like the old ink ribbons of older Resident Evils), the auto-save triggers less, less ammo to find, and its shuffles the items and adds more monsters on top of them being harder. This is all great and probably exactly what this game needed, I just don't like that you have to beat through the game once to do it. It should be an available option from the onset, RE classic mode or something.

Cassette Tapes replace Ink Ribbons for save points. So another dated piece of
technology kids don't know what the hell it is. RE 8 will save with 3.5 Floppies.

I was happy to see when I beat it I would be getting free DLC later. Saw it and was like "Well that's good news, good on you Capcom," and then quite literally within the week of its release they released at DLC pack for an additional 10 dollars for a survival mode, and two other mini modes. Immediately then I was like. "Oh, right. Capcom." They've fucking pulled this shit before, so I don't know why it surprised me now.

The last issue I can think of really, is something that eluded to above and it's that this game could simply not be a Resident Evil game. There are a bunch of little homages and some story nods to the classic series, but outside of one real critical story moment it could have been called literally anything else and been a starting point for a brand new property. Honestly, if was called something else entirely I would have probably looked upon it even more favorably because I would be judging it completely on its own merit, without having to compare to what came before. Bravely Default did this: it's clearly a classic Final Fantasy but they didn't call it that, and it felt new a different because of it.

But while these problems exist, I wouldn't go as far to say that makes Resident Evil 7 a bad experience. Actually, pretty far from it. While the intensity and scariness definitely dissipates after the first hour of the game, there is certainly a fun factor to it that made it incredibly hard to put down. I had it finished in almost two sittings at just under 10 hours, and that first night I ended up going to bed 3 hours after I wanted to because I wanted to see what was behind that door now that I had the key to open it. Or solve this one last puzzle. It kept me engaged and that ultimately is the sign of a good game.

And Resident Evil 7 is a good game. In fact its probably a great game. I went through my initial play-through in about 10 hours or so, and now I learning there are more unlockables if you get it under 4 hours so I'm playing it again on easy. This is something I haven't done since like Resident Evil 3. I won't go as far to say its the greatest of the series, and I certainly won't back off saying the game is not scary because I don't feel it is. But this shake up was exactly what the series needed to breathe new life into it, and they managed to keep some of the aspects that make it FEEL like a  Resident Evil game without it aping off the convoluted lore it set before it.

In my review of Resident Evil 6 I lamented that I felt Capcom lost their way with this franchise. This feels like an attempt to find it, or at the very least make it something new. I would play another game like this one. I think with a few tweaks it could be even better. Resident Evil 7 is absolutely worth a play.

This game honestly could have been directed by Rob Zombie.

Until Dawn (PS4): Making Wrong Decisions Right

*Blows dust off the blog* Oh hey old girl, how you been doing? No, No I haven't forgotten about you. What Laya? No, were just doing a video thing for Youtube is all.. No we're fine, seriously. Come on, quit being like this. It hasn't been that long, know how the summer months are for games. Baby quit being so crazy, can we just do the review please? Thank you.

So as its well documented, I love a good horror game. And as I have said recently, horror games have been on the uptick. Not all of them have been spectacular (See: The Evil Within) but at the very least its a trend I am happy to see. This game got teased at E3 last year, and it immediately grabbed my attention because it looked straight up like horror movie trailer. Needless to say I was excited. But then I watched a game play trailer and it reminded me of games I had less strong feelings for and kinda brought me back to earth. Still, the premise got me going so that was worth the purchase....

UNTIL DAWN (PS4)

Our tale begins with a group of 10 (Josh, Hannah, Beth, Sam, Mike, Jess, Emily, Matt, Ashley, and Chris) friends enjoying their winter getaway at Blackwood Mountain Ski Lodge. During a night of the revelry some of the group drinks to excess and are incapacitated (Chris and Josh). The others get together and decide to use Hannah's crush on Mike to prank her. Mike leaves a note to invite her up to his room, when she meets him, he talks her into taking off some of her clothes to which she willingly complies.

Sam, Hannah's best friend, didn't approve of the prank and tried to find her, but too late as she enters the room as the rest of them show they were hiding, cameras recording and giggling. Humiliated, Hannah rushes out of the lodge into the snowy mountain alone. Beth, Hannah and Josh's sister, catches only the aftermath of the group trying to find her, and infuriated by their prank sets off into the winter to try to find her sister alone.  Neither of them return.

One year later, Josh tries to rally everyone together to continue their tradition and bring everyone back to the lodge. This time meant to be a means of recovery, to try to give themselves a memorable trip and to help (him) get some closure to the tragedy of his sisters' disappearance. There is a great deal of reluctance, but the group gathers again to try to continue their winter fun. But it's very clear that this is uncomfortable for everyone.

Not a great start for me. The group of preps picking on the nerd at her own party?
Seriously, I was ready to make sure all of them died.

So alright, this seems to be pretty typical horror movie fanfare. A group of kids alone on a snowy mountain away from the rest of civilization? Sure, bet NOTHING is going to go wrong with that scenario. As you might imagine, some of the initial story I gave is probably leaving some information out. This is because the prologue to the game is basically the tutorial for the mechanics you need to know to play the game. So there are things you can do with success and failure, but I am not 100% sure if the prologue can affect the rest of the game or not, or if that is held to a single path until the meat of the game starts.

Until Dawn's biggest selling point is that this is a game that focuses strongly on the decisions you make and that path the story unfolds hinges strongly on every little decision you make. Alright, well I have heard that promise before with games like Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, Dragon Age, Fable, Infamous and the list continues to go on. But basically what they mean is moral choice: do you want to be the good guy, or the bad guy. That isn't as much the case in Until Dawn.

Sam can loosely be considered the game's protagonist as she seems to be portrayed as an
important character. But she does share screen time pretty evenly with the cast.

As you play through the game you are constantly confronted with little decisions as the narrative rolls on. Some of them are simply conversational decisions that affect your relationships to the other characters, some of the are decisions on what path you take, or how difficult the terrain might be, some of them are timed events where if you don't make a choice an alternative option plays out, and sometimes you have to keep the controller perfectly still. But what I like about Until Dawn is that these come up fairly often, so it didn't really afford me the opportunity to set the controller down and watch something play out. I had to be ready to make a choice.

In the examples I used above, I mentioned both Beyond: Two Souls and Heavy Rain. If I had to decide on a game that this title most felt like, those two come to mind immediately. When I saw the gameplay video released before the game came out, it looked like it controlled in a very similar fashion to these interactive storytelling games that have come before it. I'd say it was an accurate assumption because its pretty much how these games control. Move your character around, interact with the interactables, make your choices, quick time events.

Sometimes you are faced with choices where you have to make a quick decision.
Sometimes there is no right answer, sometimes doing nothing is the way to go.
But it forces you to make instinctual decisions, and I appreciated that.

Yes, there are quick time events. It is annoying and has become somewhat a of a red flag on games. These will be the most common in scenes where you are climbing or being chased. But they also added a nifty one with the light bar which requires to you stay completely still. These I found to be the most difficult to do because even breathing too heavy made my fat belly move the controller enough to get caught. And sometimes when making a decision and there is a timer, you can chose to let it go for a 3rd option

And much like the two games mentioned before that, the controls still somehow manage to be shit. Seriously, is this just some kind of video game rule that I am not aware of that when you make a game that is motion captured by professional actors that the controls need to eat a bag of soggy dildos? This isn't a breakneck paced game, and its not even fast as the Last of Us which had some fantastic motion capture work. But if I am trying to walk down a dimly lit hallway while trying to control my flashlight in Until Dawn, then you can expect me to bang into the walls every step of the way because holding one direction is so finicky I've never been able to walk a straight line the whole game.

God, Jessica. Jessica is SO easy to hate in this game, but god damn it she has
probably the hands down best line in the entire game. You'll know when you hear it.

Thankfully, because of the nature of how you play the game, this isn't a game breaking factor. It's a mild annoyance at best and you can learn to ignore it if you get wrapped up in the story. And thankfully, the story is the best part. Unlike other "interactive storytelling experiences" that I have already mentioned before, this game does a very very good job of making sure its pacing and atmosphere keep pace like how you would expect it to in a traditional horror movie. Considering that this game runs anywhere from 7-10 hours that is actually pretty impressive. Horror movies need to feel oppressive to keep you on the edge of your seat, and to do that for that length of time is not easy.

What I didn't like, is they do they Alan Wake thing between chapters. "Previously on Until Dawn: here's some shit you did literally a few minutes ago". Its annoying because this game isn't long enough to need to remind me what shit that I literally just did. It worked in Final Fantasy 13-2 because its a long game and it reminds me of important points that happened much earlier. So the game either has a poor estimation of my memory, or thinks its not good enough to hold your attention the whole time and expects you to put it down. I understand not letting us skip the actual story elements, but we should have been able to skip this crap if we have been playing continuously.

In between chapters, you'll talk to Dr. Hill with all his creepy facial expressions.
He might be the most terrifying thing in the game. 

I thought the characters models in this game were incredibly appealing. Almost all of them, specifically the girls, had this unbelievably lifelike quality to them that in a lot of points made me feel like I was actually watching a movie in some scenes. So my brain initially thought, this must be motion captured. A correct assumption because not only was the game motion captured for all of the major characters, it also is backed by a handful of professional hollywood actors that appear in both movies and television.  So if people want to start pining that video games aren't a legitimate art from, guess what, you are still wrong. Because the people who contribute to the forms of are you have already accepted are starting to get onto the video game bandwagon.

My biggest question in this game is what is the replayability going to be like. Throughout the entirety of the game it keeps making references to the Butterfly Effect, and that every little decision you make affects the entire story as a whole. And maybe to a degree this is true, but the game notifies you by a flutter of butterflies in the corner when a decision you have made has effected the story. It seemed to happen often enough but I wonder if the game is designed in a way that certain characters can't die until certain points of the game.

For example, there are scenes in the game where you are given a choice when climbing a ledge. There are safe paths to take, and less safe paths. When I wasn't being chased or time wasn't a factor, I opted to choose the path that seemed safer. But if I was being rushed at these same points, I would take the riskier option to save time. Now, botching up one of these QTE's killed my character in one sequence, but I wonder if I were using one of the more important characters, would they just get hurt but the game would continue?

From what I can tell about how the game ended, from what I can see, the ending doesn't grossly change depending on the number of survivors that you get through to the end. I know there are endings where everyone dies and one where everyone survives, but from what I have read this hinges on collecting the right number of items along the playthough. This is kind of frustrating because collectible gathering can destroy the pace of a game like this. And that's a real problem since the pace in a horror movie or game is everything. Sure I can play them again to find all the collectibles, but if I know the story already how many times am I going to play it?

Most annoying of the collectibles are the Totems. When you find them they give you a brief glimpse of something that can happen later in the game depending on the choices you make. On one hand, "ok, cool mechanic". On the other, they are pretty much in game spoilers. If on my first playthrough I knew they wouldn't affect the ending? I would have just skipped getting them so I can be surprised.

The menus for all the clues you uncovered is very intuitive. But
exhausting and intimating. There is a lot of stuff you can miss.

In my first play through I did a pretty good job of keeping mostly everyone alive, having most of the cast make it almost to the end. but then I made some phenomenally bad choices that ended with a number of the cast members dying. Thankfully, the game allows you to pick back up at specific chapters so I was able to replay the last chapter to see how the situation could change. It also seems like doing this allows me maintain the collectibles I have so this might affect my ability to get the other endings.

So ultimately the question is, is it a fun game? I guess it depends on context. As a game is it fun? No, its basically a decisions making simulator in the vein of the usual "cinematic storytelling experience". And typically as far as gameplay goes these are lacking. But what it does right and where it earns its fun appeal is that it keeps you making regular decisions however minute at frequent intervals so you don't really have a moment just set down the controller and watch. From a simple bit of idle banter or a cheeky snowball fight, it keeps you making decisions so you have to be engaged. So on that front it succeeds were others in this genre fail.

I fucked up so many of these "don't move" scenes.

Did I like it? Fuck yeah I liked it. It had all the makings a great horror movie. You have some likeable protagonists, you have some hateable protagonists, you have some good twists in the story, you have some visceral gruesome horror. But more so than that, yes, it does have some replay to it. I have been talking with my roommate and some of my game night friends and its been incredibly interesting to hear how all of our games shook out differently, telling each other about the scenes we missed and giving us motivation to go back and try it the other way.

Look, let's call a spade a spade here. Until Dawn is not really a game. It is an interactive movie, but it's a really good interactive move and it gave me pretty much everything I want in a horror movie experience. I've played through the game once alone, halfway through with friends, and will probably play it again soon. That's at least 15-20 hours of play of the game, and that makes it worth 60 bucks in my book. Until Dawn was a unique and beautifully designed, and earns my recommendation. If you own a PS4, you should own Until Dawn.

I seriously didn't think Josh's face was real person's.

The Evil Within: Mo' like the Anger Within.

I've been pretty stoked with the upcoming horizon for releases. For years I was starting to wonder if the horror genre was just dying a slow painful death, but in recent months and past conferences, it seems like the horror genre is experiencing some kind of resurgence. With games like Outlast, Amenisa: The Dark Descent, and Dreadout making waves, developers have finally realized there is a itch that needs to be scratched in the horror niche.

Almost a year ago, around the time the new consoles were just getting released, I was seeing snippets from a game by Resident Evil luminary Shinji Mikami which often followed by concepts about him wanting to get back to his true horror roots. Initial impressions were good. Terrifying gore, frightening imagery, difficulty and desperation. All these things sound great. It's been almost a full year coming but I can't wait to sink my barbed teeth into....

THE EVIL WITHIN

The story starts of with detective Sebastian Castellanos and two of his partners Joseph Oda and Julie Kidman are picked up by a squad car after just getting off a case. However, it doesn't appear that they are going home because a gruesome mass murder has taken place at a nearby psychiatric hospital.

The scene inside is brutal as there is blood smeared everywhere and the floor is littered with corpses. They find a doctor who is still alive, and as Joseph tends to him, Sebastian checks the security footage to try to see what happens. He finds a tape of 3 of his fellow officers opening fire on a figure in a white hood, that seems to be able to teleport in a flash, slashing the officers throats. The figure seems to catch the camera on him. When Sebastian turns around the figure is behind him, jamming him with a syringe and sending him into darkness.

Initial appearance was rough. At game onset, nobody was really "likable".

Sebastian comes to in a bad situation, he is hung upside down and a monstrous person is just hacking up bodies, and clearly his turn is coming. Sebastian is able to escape and flee the hospital to find a ride from the beat cop, the doctor, one of his patients, and detective Kidman. They try escape in an ambulance but not without the hooded figure seemingly laying waste to the entire city in an attempt to stop them. They manage to escape the city, but the ambulance crashes during the escape.

So as I played this opening sequence with my roomie watching, the constant question that kept popping up while I played was "Do you have any idea what the fuck is going on?" I wouldn't call this in medias res because we clearly start at the beginning here, but 3 chapters in there isn't a lot of exposition to go on. At about 8 hours in and it's sort of explaining what is happening, but even then I'd say it's a jumbled mess of a story. It's not particularly good. If it threw in more penis references and the word fuck a dozen more times, I'd think this was a Suda 51 game.

Yep, sure nothing evil is happening here. Looks totally like a hospital.

But Shinji Mikami's influence here is absolute unmistakable. Just the overall feel of how this entire game plays like on of his games. It uses the over the shoulder 3rd person style you might know from a Resident Evil 4, but if I had to compare it to other games, I would say it borrows more influence from say Shadows of the Damned feel and play, with a Resident Evil 5 inventory system (but better).

I do find that this game makes some pretty bad mistakes, specially for one that pushed on next gen consoles. Games like Beyond: Two Souls and Last of Us show some of the incredible things you can do with motion capture for animating games. Yet for some reason, none of the character models in this game looks all that great, especially when talking. Everything looks so hokey and roughly done. It's bad enough that I've noticed it at each cutscene. Things are made worse with the washed over grainy brown grindhouse sort of filter it puts the game through. It doesn't make the game look better, stylized, or more scary. Even worse, the textures don't load before the scene does sometimes. It just looks like crap.

The presentation will feel familiar to you if you've played a Mikami game in the past 10 years.

Honestly, for games like these I shouldn't be surprised by this anymore. But as you might have figured, the voice acting is crap. Lines of dialog seem forced, out of place, or not matching the scenario they are in. It's strange because I thought we finally got past that point of bad voice acting in games. It's been a very long time since I can't think of the last game where I thought, "ugh, this voice acting is bad." Even some games where I think they are bad at the onset, I start to warm up to it later. Not so much in this case.

Movement is pretty direct and simple the analog makes you move where you want to go, and the other spins the camera. Not that it will help much, the developers on this one were exceptionally proud about how tight the camera is and how it adds to the horror experience, but from what I've played, it doesn't enhance the experience, it just gives me less visible room. There have been more than one occasion when I am trying to sneak and move the camera to see my attacker just to have the camera zoom in on the back of my head or right into the cover I am trying to see around.

Ruvik is a massive asshole. He can basically teleport and can one hit kill you.
Sections he is in will usually result in some trial and error.

For the most part, the controls aren't going to throw you a curve ball. If you've played a 3rd person shooter in the past few years most of this will feel familiar. One trigger aims, the other shoots. One bumper sneaks, the other sprints. Square (on playstation) reloads the gun. The only hangup I occasionally have is when I'm trying to melee someone. as it works both with the trigger and the Triangle button. Neither of them really feel all that natural to me, and on more than one occasion I've tried to scramble for a melee strike and stood in place because I was hitting the wrong button.

Not that it would have helped. Melee in this game is about as effective as cutting a log with a feather duster. The first punch might send a baddie reeling, but the 2nd one they will blow through and take a chunk a damage out of you. If you don't have your hands on a weapon like a torch or a hand axe you are going to get your ass handed to you. Sadly, most weapons are only good at killing one enemy.

Sometimes one well placed match will save you a significant number of bullets.

The reason I mention melee first is because it's going to be a situation you will probably find yourself in often. Ammo in this game is STUPIDLY scarce. Like, worse than Dead Space scarce. at the early goings of the game you can only carry like 6-10 shots for a weapon at any given time, and it sometimes will take a perfectly squared head shot to hit 3 or 4 times before an enemy goes down. In Evil Within it is often smarter to run if you can (especially if you are a magnificently awful shot like I am). I did find out near the end of the game you can shoot them in the leg and then burn them with a match. This would have made a lot of the game much easier.

Or, if the situation allows, you can stealth kill. This is actually pretty hard to do because it's difficult to tell what environments actually provide cover. If you are sneaking you can get behind people and they can't see you, but they provide covers like low walls or tall grass. Sometimes I can get right up on a guy for a kill, other times they notice me immediately. I haven't figured out it's nuances yet, but I hope to soon because every bullet counts, (as again, I am an awful shot). You will often find yourself either scrambling to hide, or strategically burning bodies to try to take enemies out.

While the inventory doesn't pause the game, it slows it down for you to pick what you need.
The crossbow you can build bolts for, but even that is pretty quick.

Now, something I hadn't noticed when I bought the game was the stamp of one my arch-nemesis' on the cover, Bethesda. Now back in my Skyrim review I used a Love/Hate analogy about my feelings towards western RPGS, but I really can apply to Bethesda as a whole: They love to Suck, and I hate playing their games. So I shouldn't have been surprised when they put their stamp in the game with a skill system. Now, there have been a number of action games that do this very thing and I've never complained about it before. So why do I bring it up now?

Because they tried to crowbar in the "Accuracy" skill again. This isn't Fallout, shit is coming at me and it's coming at me fast, so if I have the natural ability to line up my reticle for a perfect head shot while they are running at me, then I should be rewarded as such and not miss because an arbitrary statistic said I did. Otherwise most of the skills are pretty simplistic and cut and dry. More health, longer sprint, faster reload, more damage, etc etc.  You level up your skills by picking up green jars of what I've been calling "Brain Juice". You can find them scattered around the level and sometimes enemies drop it. I suppose it's cool to have customization, but it all feels pretty pointless. Max health and ammo capacity.

The longer I play the less it seems I'm going to be able to max my abilities.

In addition to the bullets being scarce, the recovery equipment is equally difficult to come by. You can pick up syringes along the way for a minor and modest health boost (I quickly leveled the number of them I can carry and how much it heals) and there are also large health kits that recover you fully. But even those have draw backs as you get momentarily dazed when you use it, so you can't even use them in the heat of combat or you will be a sitting duck. Since they extend your health bar they are important to use, but I'd be lying if I said I found them particularly effective.

I won't lie, the game is fucking difficult. There is no way to sugar coat it. I don't know if this was an attempt to raise the level of desperation while you played or not. To use an already tired example, Dead Space did this by making ammo relatively scarce, and when that happens you don't have much to protect yourself, and thus raises the tension because every single shot fired matters.

Laura will mess you up. If she gets a hold of you, chances are it's going
to be a one hit kill. Until you HAVE to fight her, you don't. Period.

The difference here is despite the difficulty, I could make it out of that situation alive. You will die in Evil Within a lot. This is the problem I had with Outlast: when you are protected by a relatively frequent checkpoint system and you don't lose the equipment you've expired when you die in a confrontation, suddenly the desperation that is supposed to make a fight so tense suddenly isn't there anymore. It's not like say in Dark Souls or Demon Souls where if I've been plodding along for an hour, desperately trying to find my checkpoint and I get killed I've lost all that progress and have to start over. That is desperation.

There is a scene in chapter 3 where you are going toe to toe with a large guy with a chainsaw (you really need a new thing Shiji, you've done this to death). The context of the scenario told me I needed to confront this guy, but I wasn't sure if I had to fight him or not. So after the first few rounds resulted in me getting my ass handed to me, I tried other things. Because the checkpoint would drop me off right before the fight started. So if I have no progress to make up, I wasn't afraid of losing, so I'd try different things and if I got killed no big deal. It's frustrating, but it's not scary.

Later, the baddies get shotguns, machine guns, riot armor, and bullet proof masks.
And it's fucking bullshit.

And that ultimately is the biggest problem with The Evil Within: it's not scary. I heard that in reviews and previews going into the game, but I sort of shrugged it off. Yeah, monsters are fucked up looking, and all the enemies are dangerous. It does an excellent job of letting me know almost anything in this game can ruin my day. But the pacing never feels tense enough, I find the tight camera more frustrating than unnerving. Since I don't have limited saves of Resident Evil or the long spaced checkpoints of Demon's Souls, I have pretty limited tension to do well.

Don't get me wrong, I don't feel that ruins the experience as much as you might think. But it is a problem when Mikami says he's going back to his horror roots, but then sort of misses the point on what it is that makes a game scary. I've talked about it on hashtagnerd.com but P.T. is a great example of understanding fear. Scary looking and fucked up monsters help, but it's a truly terrifying atmosphere complimented by an equally horrifying ambiance are really what gets under your skin. A threat you know is there but can't often see or protect yourself again.

I've found "Nurse Joy" to be a cryptic snot, and I have no idea what connection she
even has to the story aside from passive aggressively mocking me for saving often. 

What does ruin the experience for me however, is the controller shattering frustration I have felt while playing it. Make no mistake about it, this game is punishing and not in the fun way. I've already mentioned how Dark Souls is incredibly difficult but on the same hand it's fair. The Evil Within is not. There are multiple sections where the game will pull a cheap kill out of nowhere, or pit you against a boss that can instantly kill you while you try to find the contextual things you need to hit to progress. It's frustrating to infuriating levels. It's not challenging, and it's not making the game any more fun for me. Next to the game not being scary, this is the next biggest issue.

At the time of writing, I haven't finished the game yet. I find myself hard pressed to rate this game because I don't feel it's a bad game. But it's certainly not great.  Despite it being an entirely new I.P. with new characters, new story, new monsters, and new mechanics, I can't help but feel like I've already played this before. It pushes no boundaries, and brings virtually nothing new to the table. Which is fine I guess, a lot of games do just that and still manage to be pretty good.

But given how amped I was to play it, I gotta say that I'm let down. The game's most remarkable feat is how average it is across the board. I'm a fan of Shinji Mikami's work but it's really about that time he developed a new game engine. Because while it was a blast in Resident Evil 4, every game that  plays similarly to this is going to just feel like a watered down rehash of his previous games.

The game is fun at times but aggrivation is more prevalent. I got more than 10+ hours of "entertainment" for it so I can't say it was a wasted purchase, just ended up being more hollow than I expected. I could give it a recommendation as a solid 6 or 7/10, but I couldn't blame you if you wanted to wait for a used one or for the price to come down on it.

Seriously Shinji? Dude with Chainsaw? That's like 4 games now.
Get a new thing.