SONY E3 2014: The Evil Within Review
Tricks, traps, and trust me...a whole lot of dying
Death is a way of life in Bethesda's new survival horror game from the brains of Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami. While most of the attention this death-fest has garnered has been all about how scary it is, and even how not scary it is, the one thing you should know is this: you're going to die...a lot. And badly, too.
Okay, death in a survival horror game isn't any great surprise. After all, that's to be expected in a storyline that sees playable hero Detective "Sebastian Castellanos" drowned by a river of blood in a...Continue to read
hallway. Or was he? "The Evil Within" slips between reality and hallucination so often that you feel constantly weird & confused about what's actually happening and what's just a supernatural mind-trick.
So how many ways are there to die in The Evil Within? Well, I actually gone at it yet but having my eye balls fixed on IGN's "Chuck Osborn" in a 20-minute hands-on play session, having a pickaxe lodged in his chest, was strangled and bit, had his skull crushed by a hulking ghoul's meaty foot, and got blown to bits by a tripwire bomb. Does he just suck at survival horror games? Well, that's entirely possible. But given that the creatures are so troubling to harm that some shrug off headshots and can only be permanently subdued by landing another blow on them when they're down, I'd cut him some slack for dying a few times when he was just dumped into a kill room teeming with shambling corpses.
Dying is all part of the learning curve, though. Especially in discovering traps and deciding whether you should disable them or use them against your enemies. In the kill room I just mentioned earlier, you're locked inside by a hooded ghost lady who calls upon traveling droplets of her own blood to awaken a motley crew of blood-drenched, mutilated humanoids. Faster than you can say "hot dog," they embark on a slow but steady chase to add you to their crew. Like most survival horrors, keeping your distance and not leaping into the fray is the key to survival here. The large knife and pistol you're armed with are more for stunning a target temporarily so you can flee. They're not really offensive tools. Sure, a bullet in the face may put down a creature long enough for you to burn them, but ammunition is extremely limited. And the knife? I could almost hear monsters chuckling as they overpowered him after a couple swipes of the blade.
It turns out that learning your environment is the key to taking down large groups. As mentioned, you can leave tripwire bombs active and either shoot them with your pistol or lure creatures into triggering them. Numerous hand switches lay the area, which can trigger some pretty wicked
results like a statue falling down a chute or, more salt to the situation at hand, activate a deadly rain of bullets that perforate anything in their path.
So is "The Evil Within" scary? It's obviously disturbing and spooky, but no, I never saw anything that made me jump or shriek in horror neither did Chuck. Then again, He was only playing one short sequence of a much longer game. What's most notable is how much it borrows from its predecessors in the genre, specifically Resident Evil (which, given the game's pedigree, is also not a surprise.) Even the montage sequence shown to the press before the hands-on I watched featured not one but two monsters slowly looking back at you over their left shoulder. Love Resident Evil? Then u should love this too...
Leave your comments below...
Death is a way of life in Bethesda's new survival horror game from the brains of Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami. While most of the attention this death-fest has garnered has been all about how scary it is, and even how not scary it is, the one thing you should know is this: you're going to die...a lot. And badly, too.
Okay, death in a survival horror game isn't any great surprise. After all, that's to be expected in a storyline that sees playable hero Detective "Sebastian Castellanos" drowned by a river of blood in a...Continue to read
hallway. Or was he? "The Evil Within" slips between reality and hallucination so often that you feel constantly weird & confused about what's actually happening and what's just a supernatural mind-trick.
So how many ways are there to die in The Evil Within? Well, I actually gone at it yet but having my eye balls fixed on IGN's "Chuck Osborn" in a 20-minute hands-on play session, having a pickaxe lodged in his chest, was strangled and bit, had his skull crushed by a hulking ghoul's meaty foot, and got blown to bits by a tripwire bomb. Does he just suck at survival horror games? Well, that's entirely possible. But given that the creatures are so troubling to harm that some shrug off headshots and can only be permanently subdued by landing another blow on them when they're down, I'd cut him some slack for dying a few times when he was just dumped into a kill room teeming with shambling corpses.
Dying is all part of the learning curve, though. Especially in discovering traps and deciding whether you should disable them or use them against your enemies. In the kill room I just mentioned earlier, you're locked inside by a hooded ghost lady who calls upon traveling droplets of her own blood to awaken a motley crew of blood-drenched, mutilated humanoids. Faster than you can say "hot dog," they embark on a slow but steady chase to add you to their crew. Like most survival horrors, keeping your distance and not leaping into the fray is the key to survival here. The large knife and pistol you're armed with are more for stunning a target temporarily so you can flee. They're not really offensive tools. Sure, a bullet in the face may put down a creature long enough for you to burn them, but ammunition is extremely limited. And the knife? I could almost hear monsters chuckling as they overpowered him after a couple swipes of the blade.
It turns out that learning your environment is the key to taking down large groups. As mentioned, you can leave tripwire bombs active and either shoot them with your pistol or lure creatures into triggering them. Numerous hand switches lay the area, which can trigger some pretty wicked
results like a statue falling down a chute or, more salt to the situation at hand, activate a deadly rain of bullets that perforate anything in their path.
So is "The Evil Within" scary? It's obviously disturbing and spooky, but no, I never saw anything that made me jump or shriek in horror neither did Chuck. Then again, He was only playing one short sequence of a much longer game. What's most notable is how much it borrows from its predecessors in the genre, specifically Resident Evil (which, given the game's pedigree, is also not a surprise.) Even the montage sequence shown to the press before the hands-on I watched featured not one but two monsters slowly looking back at you over their left shoulder. Love Resident Evil? Then u should love this too...
Leave your comments below...
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