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.

DOOM (PS4): I'll be Damned.

I can't deny what the first person shooter genre did to the video game industry. The first one I ever played, probably like most people, was Wolfenstein 3D. It was new and interesting, but one of the games that has heralded as one of the most iconic of the entire genre is the Doom series. Like most people, I feel this is one of the games that really defined what made a great FPS. Fast paced, interesting weapons, fun monsters to kill. I specifically have childhood memories of Doom 2 being exceptionally good.

But as well all know, FPS games and I have a very/love hate relationship. There aren't a lot of them that I really love, and many of them seem to be carbon copies of each other. Very few rise to the top. That being said, the recently reviewed Overwatch has kinda softened me on FPS games lately, and I found myself curious about this newest installment. Thankfully due to one of my local libraries, they had a shiny new copy waiting for me to check out. 

DOOM{2016}(PS4)

I honestly went into this not caring what the Doom story was. I just wanted to go in and shoot some demons. Thankfully, the game obliges. The game opens with you seeing a red mark appear on the screen and you waking up chained to a stone sarcophagus with a demon fast approaching. You break one of the chains and quickly smash its skull against the stone. After freeing yourself you quickly find a handgun and dispatch a few more enemies. When you enter the next room to find the famous Doom Marine armor waiting for you.

Upon touching it you have series of flashbacks of hell and demons. When you come back you are armored and checking the PC screen next to you, all of the information about what has gone wrong is blocked off and receive a message from one of the scientists. He goes to explain that he has plans for how you can mutually help each other, but the Marine pretty much trashes the screen immediately, grabs a nearby shotgun and heads out into Mars to raise hell.... again.

Hello again, old friend.

So right out the gate I have to appreciate this. Doom for a lot of people is really just one thing: Man with guns shooting demons from hell on Mars. The people at ID software clearly realized that people did not like the direction that Doom 3 had taken, and realized they just want what they had before, just newer. And that is exactly what they did. They framed the story, gave you a gun, and put you out there to start shooting everything in your path. This was smart of them, because pretty much from the first level I was locked in a ready to go. 

To be fair, there is a story. The long and short of it is a Mars base owned by the Union Aerospace Corporation is here to solve the earth energy crisis. Dr. Samuel Hayden heads this project and has learned not only how to siphon energy but also can travel to hell to steal and research artifacts they've found there. One of his subordinates however, Olivia Pearce, makes a pact with one of the demons from hell and opens a portal allowing their release. Hayden is forced to release the "Doom Slayer" trapped in one of the artifacts, to try to take the fight back to the demons and send them back. As you play through the game it fleshes out the context of this story.

Seriously, Do people who start cults not listen to how crazy they sound?

But who fucking cares, we aren't here for a new doom story. We are here because we want to kill some eff'n demons. Now as someone who was a fan of the original Doom and Doom 2, I only really had a couple of things I really wanted in this game. Are the iconic monsters there? Are the guns I enjoyed using still there, and is the game fast paced. This was pretty much the standard for me on the game being good.

The game starts you off with a pretty big and wide open area of mars terrain to get you going. There are handful of imps around and lots of infected humans. It felt like i had a pretty fast run speed but I didn't really have any sense of context for how fast I was moving due to the size of the map. That did not last long. Almost immediately I found myself in an area of tighter corners and I found myself strafing at a full sprint as imps dashed at me chucked fireballs at me, zig-zagging closer so I can pop a close range shotgun blast. Speed? Check.

The speed of the game feels just right. Fast and frantic without being too much.

As I played through the the game, I was very happy to see some familiar faces appear as a I played. The regular shambling dead were kind of new, and I kind of "hrrrrnnngg'd" at what appeared to be more than one variant of Imp walked by. But maybe not even a level goes by when see one of the newly modeled remnants appear, leaping around and firing from its shoulder mounted rocket launchers. The redesign was amazing that it looked new, modern, and terrifying while still exactly reminding me of what sprite it used to be.

And then I turned around to see a Cocademon I didn't notice before point blank range chomping me for an instant kill. Scared the living fuck out of me. But as I continued to play the game more and more of the original monsters started to appear, all with cool new designs, new tricks, and new behavioral patterns. Not only that though, they made sure to have specific demons appear in specific map layouts which forces your to adjust your attack strategies because the same tricks won't work with different combinations of enemies. Even that first encounter with the Cyberdemon my brain just went "Ooooh yeah.. I remember you. *cracks knuckles* Lets go." Iconic monsters? Check.

At this point you know of this third check point is going to go. I don't remember the specific order I picked the weapons up but you start with a shotgun. OK no big, the game always has a shotgun. Then you pick up an assault rifle. Yeah yeah, FPS I get it. Even when I picked up the rocket launcher I met with a un-enthused "meh"... But then I landed the double barreled shotgun, and all the memories of Doom came flooding back.. That "ooooooohhhh yeahhh, shit's about to serious now" feeling just hits you the moment you see those two shells get loaded into the gun. The pulse rifle shortly followed and of course the infamous BFG 9000. Doom Weapons? Check.

Another point about the weapons that I should note is that there is no reloading in this game. I don't specifically remember that there was reloading in the old Doom games, but apparently there was not. But because I was so conditioned by Overwatch and most of the modern shooters these days, I would constantly find myself hitting the square button to reload only to yank out the chainsaw instead. Fun note about that weapon: If you use that to kill a demon, they drop a shit ton of ammo. I did not realize this right away and it caused for me to have a lot of difficult and stressful moments of the game because I would be fighting very tough enemies with practically no ammo, because I'm an idiot who didn't know how to get more.

But wait! There's more! While I continued to play through the game there are areas where you have skirmishes with waves of enemies, typically while you are fighting your way to get blue yellow and green skulls or key cards (another throwback to classic Doom) while the fight is taking place I noticed that I was sort of head banging in place. I realized that I was REALLY enjoying the music in this game. In points of high tension and battle Doom delivers an unrelenting mechanical hybrid of industrial. Very sharp and hard repetitious riffs, with very punctuated drums.

I know this sound, I've definitely heard this before. And sure enough one google search showed me that behind the soundtrack was Mick Gordon, who you would know from the amazing remixes of the Killer Instinct OST from the updated release of that game. The music in this game absolutely rocks my ass off. I must have played a 4 hour stream of this on one day off and I couldn't help but constantly comment on how bad ass the soundtrack was. There is no official OST for the game available, but if you search the Internet hard enough, there is a 3 disc rip of the all the music from the game, and it is fucking bad ass. Mick Gordon is quickly becoming a member of my god tier of video game musicians with Akira Yamaoka, Richaad EB, Shoji Meguro, and Nobuo Uematsu.

For the most part, I love the level design. For a pretty large majority of the game I was able to navigate my way through level after level without finding myself getting lost too much. The game guides you only with a small HUD that points you in the general direction of where the objective is and most of the time so long as that is pointed the right way you will be able to march your way to the goal without getting too lost. It does a pretty good job of not being too linear in the maps because there are a number of areas where you can spread out and use various covers and launchers for some pretty wild firefights without using cover mechanics.

But the path indicators don't necessarily mean you are going the right way. Sometimes the only indicator your have is blocked by a locked door, which then forces you to explore your surroundings to try to find the appropriate colored key to move on. Normally this is a very good thing because the levels are designed to be complimentary to exploring. but when this happens, I am the type of player who will find himself completely lost with no idea how to backtrack back to where I needed to go. The in-game map is not very helpful when you have multiple levels all layered over the same spot.

There is one really specific section that annoyed the shit out of me because it was a map that had a series of teleporters that warped you all over the map. This was an incredibly frustrating segment and it showed while I live-streamed it. Because in order to proceed I needed to find a yellow key. It took me nearly an hour to constantly be warped from place to place trying to figure out what specific area would help me find they key. But then once I found the key, I couldn't figure out how to get back to the area with the door so I could continue on.

This is one of my primary gripes about FPS games. The moment I find myself lost and wandering to figure out where to go next, is the moment I start to lose interest in the game. What followed were a couple tortuous hours of constantly wandering the same areas to the same droning song with no monsters to fight. It forced me to close the live stream because it wasn't entertaining anymore. The game could have lost me at that segment. Thankfully not long after I called it a stream I stumbled on where I needed to go but it could have lost me there for good.

Fuck. You. Map. You were not helpful at all.

There is also a multiplayer section that for some bizarre reason requires several minutes of loading to get to from the main screen. Something I don't understand, and for a guy who is usually pretty against playing multiplayer giving me a more difficult barrier of entry just makes me less likely to try it, which is pretty much what happened here. I can't comment on how fun the multiplayer is because I didn't try it.

This iteration of Doom features something called the SnapMap editor. I suppose the most comparable comparison I can make would be something like Halo's forge mode. Essentially its a plug and play user generated content map builder for players to create and share. Since I just had the game checked out from the library and this seemed like a lot of work, this too is something that I didn't really try. But from what I have been reading some real wizards have come up with some clever uses for it.

Apparently there are whole bunch of hidden things to find in this game too. I found a couple of the Doom Solider dolls as I played through the game, but talking a friend about it apparently there are ways to unlock classic levels of Doom titles to play in the new system. They must be well hidden because I didn't find a single one of them but a quick google search proves that they do exist. So I guess that really layers some replay value to the game in addition to the series of challenge maps you come across in the game, as well as the multiple levels of difficulty.

One last little nitpick here. The install file for this game is fucking retarded. I get that we've reached an age where we can't just throw in a cartridge fire up a game. But I thought the whole point of the PS4 is that I could toss the disc in, and it would install just enough that I could start the game up while if finished downloading and installing the rest of it in the background. After the game was "ready" to start I was treated to another install screen, just like the bullshit Resistance 3 pulled. By the time the update file finally finished, the game was taking up a whopping 77GB of hard drive space. That's almost a 5th of the drive! Absolutely ridiculous and probably unnecessary. Download enough to let me start the game, then do the rest later. Yeesh.

I have to be totally honest here, I freak'n loved this game. Honestly I'm pretty surprised at how much I loved this game. For someone who is pretty lukewarm to the majority of the FPS genre as a whole, Doom pretty much managed to nail down every single thing I liked about an FPS game while managing to leave out almost everything I don't like about it.

I really cranked through Doom once I really knuckled down with it and I don't remember having this much fun with a FPS campaign for a long while now. And this is how I know it was a good game. Once I was I got through the whole campaign, I deleted the game data and moved on to a new title. Maybe less than hour later I found myself looking away from the game I was playing looking at the box for Doom. I wasn't ready to stop playing, so I put it back in, cranked up the difficulty, and started to play it again. That means something.

So If you still haven't played through this game yet, you are in luck as Doom is frequently reduced to 30$ these days, which motivated me to purchase a copy of it for myself even after beating the campaign. I enjoyed it that much. I look forward to going back and playing it on a harder setting. Surprisingly and highly recommended.

Seriously, the new design of the Cocademon terrifies the crap out of me. 

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. 

Dishonored (XB360): Stealthing its way out of my memory.

As you found out from my Black Ops 2 review I recently learned that Redbox rents games, which is super helpful now that I am not gainfully employed at my local Derpstop, (thats a joke, nobody is gainfully employed there). But in this continued quest to branch and try games I don't normally play, and partially because the only other option was Borderlands 2 I decided to step into the steampunk universe of a game marketed out the ass in....

DISHONORED:(XB360)

In Dishonored you play as silent protagonist Corvo Attano, assassin and bodyguard to the empress Jessamine Kaldwin. The game picks up with Corvo returning from a dignitary mission to the surrounding foreign lands seeking aid from a plague infection affecting the Dunwall empire. After your boat docks you meet up with the empress and her daughter to report on your mission.

After a brief few seconds of conversation, teleporting assassins descend on you and you get a very quick crash course in the combat where you fend off 2 or 3, and then the empress is killed in front of you. The assassin's make off with the empress's daughter Emily, and with her dying breath the empress implores you to find and save her. Of course this is shot immediately in the foot as Lord Regent enters and blames you for her murder and are promptly arrested.

Corvo is held and tortured for six months before the Lord Regent reveals that he was in on the murder and you will be executed to be made an example of. After being thrown your cell, you receive a letter and key from Empire Loyalists who help him escape and request his help to save Emily and return the empire to the proper bloodline.

Ok Bethesda Games, really? You know what? No. You guys are suspended from me ever trying your games again. This is now the 3rd game of yours I've played where you start off as a silent protagonist who is captured and near executed before the game actually starts. I know it must be hard to write a story but you can't keep using the same goddamn opening for all of your fucking games and expect me to keep giving a shit. 

So as the savvy gamer can already tell, this is going to be a first person western RPG like all Bethesda games are. But I will say this one breaks the established convention I've come to expect out of this developer. At a glance, I could say that this game is the ungodly offspring of an orgy between Assassin's Creed, Fable 3, Mirrors Edge, and Bioshock over a skeletal structure of a Bethesda RPG.

Its visual design definitely borrows the most from Fable 3. Lots of bright colors in a tightly confined steampunk city with character models that are seem a bit too cartoony for the violence this game has. They are a bit more grim and dark than say Fable 3's character models that look like they have been ripped from a Sims title. The game starts with one of those "set your brightness for the proper play visuals" but I don't know why its there. Pretty much every stage is brightly lit with little issues of visuals. One last little visual side note about the game, watching bodies getting picked to the bone by swarms of rats never loses its charm with me. That was fucking awesome.

Dishonored's overall play style feels like a hybrid of the Assassin's Creed and Mirror's Edge parkour. The problem I have with this is the game is strictly first person, and I feel that inhibits that style of running game play. They spruce things up by giving you different magical abilities like blink teleports which allow you to zip to the tops of ledges or from building to building or to swoop in for a kill.

One of the abilities allows you to see through walls so you can track your target better

It may be why the NPC guards that wander around seem to be kind of dopey and seem to have a pretty generous margin for error. But what bothers me is if they spot you once, it takes FOREVER for them to stop looking for you so you can complete your mission. It can be somewhat aggravating  and even more so if you are trying to play the game via non-lethal methods. 

First person combat and I never get along. Even in games that I love that have it such as Left4Dead 2 the melee combat never feels as smooth as I would like it to. Admittedly, Dishonored probably has some of the cleanest first person combat I have played in a game but its still not great. Again, the margin for error seems kinda big here as guards really telegraph their attacks long enough for you to fumble your way to the block button and then allows you to mash the trigger all to hell. I did not have the game very long but I never felt I got to the point where I could fight without taking damage. Perhaps that is by design so you are forced to try to stealth around.

This is where Bioshock's meager influence pops up aside from the steampunk setting. Littered throughout the stage are cakes and candies and snacks that you can pick up to restore your health through out most of the stages. Generally all the looting you do pretty much pays out in cash for all the items you pick up along the way which you use to upgrade your health and items and such.  

The combat is pretty visceral though and to that end its actually pretty enjoyable. Scoring a well placed block or a sneaking up on some unsuspecting doofus results in you watching your blade wedge deeply into their neck or spine. But if there is more than two or three people on, you might as well just chalk the fight up as a loss.

I found myself not even worrying about the stealth after a while because once you unlock the slow time ability, there really didn't seem to be a need to use anything else. I would get caught, let them chase me a second, slow time, then cut the lot of them to fucking ribbons before I broke a sweat. If you are going to try to make this a stealth game, then you really shouldn't give me abilities that render sneaking pointless.

Some of the quick kills are very satisfying to watch.

Dishonored has been getting really solid reviews from all the major outlets, but it certainly isn't going to get one from me, I found this game to be really insubstantial. Maybe I am an overly rigid judge of games, or maybe I just can't be convinced that this boring style of western RPG that people seem to enjoy is actually fun. But I sat down with this game for a solid 8 or 10 hours, and much like other Bethesda games I've played like Oblivion, Skyrim, or Fallout 3 I just found myself trudging along from mission to mission in a half lulled state of sleep. I was constantly getting distracted by Internet videos or instant messages or even just staring out my window and usually that is not a great sign of the game. 

I think if this game had given me a 3rd person option much like Skyrim did I might have been a bit more favorable to it. Bethesda has shown me that they can do it and make it work, because it got me to play Skyrim to the story's end. But instead I got a slow paced parkour RPG with some decent combat mechanics but not engaging enough to keep going.

Dishonored shot itself in the foot with me because after Dead Island I don't trust game trailers that don't show me game footage and all the trailers I saw of this were all fully CG with no game footage. I was right to stick to this belief, because if they aren't showing me game play footage then even the devs know their game is lacking. Had I seen actual gameplay prior to playing it, I wouldn't have wasted the 2 bucks to rent it. I'm sure Dishonored will find its crowd, its reviews will see to that. But this game does nothing for me and I don't intend to pick it up again.