The Evil Within 2 PS4 Review
Posted on: 2017-10-23
Our rating:
The Evil Within 2 evokes the scares of the old Resident Evil games, with a tense atmosphere, intriguing plot and excellent survival horror gameplay. If you’re looking for a scare this Halloween I highly recommend this game.
Survival horror is a genre that I’m not usually a huge fan of, but there are a select few games that I like within said genre such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill. The first Evil Within game was released back in 2014 and I was super excited because it was directed by Shinji Mikami, the creator of the Resident Evil series. Unfortunately it was an unfocused mess as it tried to take the action from Resident Evil 4 and mix it with survival horror, but it did not work as it was really unbalanced with the item drops. The Evil Within 2 on the other hand is truly a spine chilling horror game, which shows that survival horror has a place in the current gaming climate.
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You once again step into the shoes of Detective Sebastian Castellanos, where we see him in a bar at the bottom of a whiskey bottle after the events of the first game, as he suffered at the hands of the monsters within the demonic world. He is contacted by an old acquaintance from a shady organisation telling him that his daughter that he thought was dead is now alive within a virtual world which is controlled by a machine called the Stem (yes as in brain stem). After his altercation with her he agrees to go into the this virtual world to find his daughter, but the world has been overran with demonic monsters and a serial killer who can take photos of his victims and make the murderous act loop in slow motion. The game’s story is fantastic taking elements from games such as Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space; it also takes ques from the Matrix of all things with the question of what is real or not with the virtual world.
The game is a survival horror where you are not an unstoppable killing machine as you are a normal human, which despite the main character’s police training can’t hit the side of a barn door. It’s all about item management within your inventory, such as ammo, healing items and junk that will help you craft bullets, weapons and medical kits. The game is extremely challenging as you take a lot of damage from enemies, coupled with the fact the game punishes you for being too aggressive and getting yourself in combat situations. The best approach is stealth because nine times out of ten you’ll be out numbered, so sneaking around is the best choice, but you can dispatch a few enemies with a stealth kill.
You can upgrade weapons and Sebastian’s physical attributes, how you do this is that you have to collect green slime from enemies when you kill them, these are the standard upgrades like better stamina while sprinting or upgrading your health bar. Weapon upgrades are same standard tweaks such as faster reloading or a high fire rate, but are necessary to help you with the later chapters of the game.
The game is beautiful with fantastic facial animations from the characters; they look very believable even down to subtle twitches with anger and sadness. Monster designs are truly terrifying from the standard zombies to the boss characters that have fused with other beings into one terrifying creature. The game has a truly disgusting aesthetic with lots of blood and gore, I winced at most of the death scenes in this game as they are very graphic, from decapitations to monsters ripping and eating someone’s guts, this game is not for the faint of heart.
The only issues I had with this game is that Sebastian’s standard walk cycle is very slow, I get they are trying to build tension but he walks around as if he has arthritis. The game has a few frame rate issues in places as well as graphical pop in with textures when it cuts to different camera angles. Besides those issues nothing broke the overall experience.
The Evil Within 2 evokes the scares of the old Resident Evil games, with a tense atmosphere, intriguing plot and excellent survival horror gameplay. If you’re looking for a scare this Halloween I highly recommend this game.
Article by:
Sam has lived in Bristol all his life. A keen cyclist he speeds around the city but video games are his bread and butter. Whether the old Nes and Snes games or the XBox One and Playstation releases he loves them all. Sam runs his own gaming blog called Bristolian Gamer where he had been reviewing indie games, doing retro reviews and venting his anger at the industry when it does wrong since 2010. Sam joined the 365Bristol team in December 2014.
