Our review of horror shooter Evil West.
God I love a good werewolf. Werewolves, I propose, are a chance for game designers to be unreasonable. Werewolves do not wait politely to attack. They do not shamble and bunch together like zombies, taking blind swipes at you with the wrist rather than the hand. They do not have rail guns that need powering up. Instead, werewolves come out of nowhere and they’re suddenly right up close. They do not acknowledge your personal space. Werewolves are a flurry of terrifying slashes of the claws, they are berzerk energy and long health bars. Werewolves are jerks and we love them for it.
There is a werewolf equivalent in Evil West, and I reckon they get to the heart of what’s great about this euphoric, silly, straight-ahead chugging blast of a video game. Simple really. When you first meet werewolves they’re absolutely terrifying. They’re overwhelming. Each one is a boss fight in itself. Wow! What was that? Hope I don’t see any more of them, pardner! But you do, you do see more of them, pardner. They come in packs. They come alongside other enemies. They come alongside bosses.
And yet, by the end of the game you’re knocking them aside. Batting them away. Popping their heads off and splattering their bodies. This is Evil West: it’s got that great Double-A treat, the ludicrous power curve. By the end of the game you’re pretty much a god. And gods really give game designers a chance to be unreasonable.
Let’s get the plot out of the way. Evil West. That’s the plot. It’s the old west, but there are monsters and shambling horrors and vampires and all that jazz out there in the wilds. You play part of a team who takes these beasts and shows them who’s who. It gets a bit more complicated, but not too complicated. This is a game where a zeppelin loaded with hideous slobbering nightmares crash lands in the narrative’s equivalent of the White House.
