TRULY COULDN'T DESCRIBE IT BETTER...
...Probably with the hardest and most fundamental statement about this game: It is bad! It's not just bad, it's worse. It's a joke, an insult to all who really hoped for something good. - If you feel offended already, please leave now and don't continue on reading. It's most likely not going to get better...
I didn't like it - even beyond admitting the possibility of deeply misguided expectations and their natural and utterly painful strokes of disappointment, there's is nothing - absolutely nothing - that makes this game only a bit acceptable to me.
Phew! - Sorry, but that had to get out!
... and HAPPY HALLOWEEN, before I forget.
Why? How can this be the result everybody was praising and glorifying as "The Resident Evil that we have all been waiting for"? What is the difference to the late abominations of the Resident Evil franchise? - Nothing! Let me tell you now already and with all distinctness: Evil Within has everything we (reasonable Resident Evil fans) HATED on the last parts of the franchise and in some points does it even worse! Don't expect something different, please don't! We have action above all, although the game seems to want you believe it is some sort of stealth game, don't fall for it... It's a trap! Sneaking is completely impossible in this game, because the engine - and yes, of course we are talking about the new age Resident Evil engine (first introduced in Resident Evil 4) that btw. brought the franchise to its knees - is not made for stealth gameplay: With a 3rd-Person-Behind-Shoulders camera and a player character mostly filling half of the screen or more, sneaking or rather watching the environment becomes an impossible task. This game is meant for action and shooting... which already leads to the next thing we got, although hated in late Resident Evil games: There are hordes of enemies! - Remember those rooms in Resident Evil 4-6 where you had to hold the position and seemingly endless zombies attacked you... such rooms also exist in Evil Within! Next up: We have zombies with - hold your horses - machine guns, sniper rifles, rocket launchers, dynamite that they throw at you and so on! - Who does this?
Do you see cops in pink leather costumes with magic wands running in the streets? Or cats walking around in boots? It's not supposed to be that way! Please don't give weapons to zombies... or cats for that matter? - Remember a good Survival-Horror game, like the original Resident Evil from 1996! Did the zombies there have fucking guns, or the hunters... did you encounter sharks with rocket launchers?
So, we have an action shooter... deal with it. - NO! Because the worst thing about this game is that it doesn't even give you the ammo to shoot with! Play it, trust me: "Yes! Finally a pack of revolver bullets!" - WITH ONE SINGLE BULLET IN IT! And there are enemies, enemies and enemies. I completed the game in 16 hours and I died 123 times! - That's a word with 18 letters ("onehundredandthree") and comes down to an average of dying every 8 minutes, which in turn is NOT even slightly entertaining. In this game almost everything kills you with one hit and similar to the ammunition problem, there are also almost no health shots to find. And I didn't even start talking about the bosses in this game: First of all, most bosses you can't just kill by shooting. - The designers are surely laughing their asses of, because some you have to just shoot to death though. So be prepared for multiple reloads just to find out which of the bosses you have to shoot, which are to be disposed by other means and from which you simply have to run. The ones you need to shoot always consume all of your anyway low ammo so that afterwards every single enemy is again a deadly threat. And the ones that you must kill by using the environment for example or simply run from are even more of a joke; imagine a confusing room where a fast and instantly killing boss crawls around. While avoiding and constantly running from this boos, you have to be careful of fire traps, explosive traps and you have to find and shoot well hidden valves to redirect the fire. - Excitement pure, let me tell you.
HEREIN LIES THE EVIL
You know what the major problem with this game is? Not that I am a "bad" gamer, not that the game couldn't be fun and if you accept its nature as action game, and not as "survival horror", could in fact have nice mechanics... the real evil is located within the balancing! Because this game is obviously conceived to be played through multiple times. Every time you start a new game you take over all the experience and upgrades from the last game. So yeah... also similar to Resident Evil 4-6... the first run is the hardest, from then on (after upgrading the weapons and so on) the game is supposed to become a cakewalk and a lot of enemies are appreciated. - Well, I guess it's just bad luck for the game then that I have had it already with the first playthrough. If you could only trade your precious brain-pea soup for ammunition... Some games that are based on that principle realized this and did it well: For example Dead Space 2. But Evil Within has made me come up with so many up-to-date, non-existing combinations of curse words, probably caused me a gastric ulcer and almost made me destroy my precious and new Xbox One controller, that I not even dare to think about playing this game a second time! Damn, I don't even want to see it in my shelf anymore.
If there is one thing that can be seen positive about this game it is the story and the atmosphere, which I would best describe as somewhere between Resident Evil 4 and Silent Hill. Sometimes it is too needlessly detestably but overall it is a nice and coherent setting. But that's it! The characters... sorry, I didn't like one and I didn't think even one of them - except maybe the main character - was believable. Isn't it always funny how only the main character gets a good voice - or in other words an expensive voice actor - and all others seem synchronized by local primary school students. Yeah, btw. synchronization, localization... forget it! Of course in my region there is only one version available and although it features A TOTAL OF FIVE languages and voices, ENGLISH IS NOT ONE OF THEM! But hey, if I wanted to, I could play the game in Spanish, Italian or French aside to German! By the love of all cats enjoying their boots, this localization bullshit that is going on - especially with Xbox One, Microsoft and games of certain publishers (post is pending) - is making me really, really angry!!
In conclusion: You liked Resident Evil 4? You like action / 3rd-Person shooting games? You like disturbing images and a story that is based on brain science, lunatic asylums and lobotomy? You like a game that (on normal) is already so "challenging" that it seems like it's throwing feces at you and makes you want to destroy your TV or your controller? - Please... go, pick this one up and "enjoy" the hell out of it. Just don't expect something much better than Resident Evil 6, except the absence of quick-time events and the fact that Evil Within wants to take itself way more serious. This is no improvement. It's yet again two steps back to a different form of a Resident Evil 4, which was controversially either the best Resident Evil ever made, or the end of an era of good Resident Evil games.
Play more! Bethink more!
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