EVIL INSIDE REVIEW PS4

You can lay traps or distract enemies by throwing bottles and sneak up behind them for a stealth kill, but more often than not they’ll turn around at the last second, or will have already spotted you several seconds ago. The Evil Within does cater somewhat to those who wish to choose the stealth route, although the AI feels unfairly tuned in on you. Checkpoints are scarce, so the stakes in this hostile world are high, making for exhilarating experiences regardless of whether you decide to flee or fight as these creatures run - screaming - towards you. Cruelly, for a game where I spent a lot of time running away, Sebastian runs out of puff very quickly. And while the crossbow caters to a variety of special attacks (freeze, electrocute, harpoon, etc) and shooting is as satisfyingly crunchy as you would expect from Mikami, you have little ammo, first aid, or even stamina at your disposal. You are given only a modest but well-balanced arsenal - the usual pistol, shotgun, sniper rifle, grenade and crossbow combo - with which to fight, as well as basic melee. It is The Evil Within’s most unnerving juxtaposition that combat with these terrors is so grounded in reality.

EVIL INSIDE REVIEW PS4

Despite a little roughness around the edges - I noticed texture pop-up and clipping issues in the PS4 and Xbox One versions - the game has been beautifully designed. Zooming in, these places are small and linear level designs, yet with the aid of excellent lighting, they become claustrophobic and labyrinthian.

Even the usual horror cliches have been twisted and contorted in imaginative ways meat lockers, clanging industrial interiors, and mannequins have been granted new and ghastly life. While far from subtle - this is about as excessive as a horror game gets - Tango has created some incredibly strange and wonderful places in The Evil Within’s 15 chapters. It’s hard to care about the stakes when it appears that he doesn’t, even if his calm detachment - “I must be losing it!” - is on occasion darkly comic. Sebastian still quips mundanities like “what is going on here?” after hours of facing the kind of monsters that would drive the average person into a jabbering wreck. In part, this narrative wrapper is undermined by the rather lifeless player character, Detective Sebastian Castellanos, who is emotionless and cool to the point of parody. I found its ending in particular, complete with an unnecessary boss battle apparently inserted only to serve the story, disappointing.

While its central mystery starts off as compelling, it gradually veers off course, and eventually buckles under the weight of its own unfocused ambition. The Evil Within is an investigation of what appears to be a multiple homicide at Beacon Mental Hospital in its fictional Krimson City, before you realize things are not as they seem (an understatement). Not that the plot is a strikingly original work for the horror genre.

Evil inside review