Evil West Review (PlayStation 5)

by Jim Smale · Published November 21, 2022 · Updated November 21, 2022

For this Evil West Review, we attempt to rise up and become a Wild West Superhero, eradicate the vampire threat in a visceral, explosive style and save the United States! Behind the facade of the Old West, we are the final line between humanity and a deep-rooted terror that now emerges from the shadows.

Evil West Review Pros:

Glorious graphics.
33.75GB download size.
Platinum trophy.
You get the PlayStation 4 and the PlayStation 5 versions of the game.
Graphics mode – performance and quality.
Aim support – on/off, lock on target, and aim snap strength slider.
Controller settings – Invert axis and sensitivity sliders, swap shoulder buttons/left and right stick and/or directional controls.
Subtitles settings – on/off, subtitle size slider.
Arachnophobia setting – on/off.
Hud scale slider.
Four difficulties – Story, normal, hard, and Evil.
True death is Iron man mode where dying will delete all your progress.
Two modes – single-player and online multiplayer.
Wild West world full of Vampires and Werewolves.
You play as a field agent that is tasked with ridding the world of these creatures, Your name is Jesse Rentier and your Dad is the Mayor of the town you protect.
Co-op play has you teamed up with Edgar Gravenor a retired field agent.
Third-person action gameplay.
Tutorial pop-ups as you play.
Combat tutorials are generally video clips.
Visceral melee combat.
Bucks is the in-game currency.
Cannonball is the act of uppercutting someone and then hitting them forward into an environmental hazard that kills them.
16 missions.
Executing an enemy grants health and looks particularly badass.
Combos can be done with or without your gun and environmental hazards.
Can skip cutscenes.
Co-op allows you to share all found bucks and revive each other.
Good voicework.
Guns – you have a close-range pistol for melee combat combos mostly and a rifle that has sights and long range.
You can replay levels and each one shows what Collectibles you have and haven’t found.
Weak spots will glow on enemies when aiming down sight.
Enemy attacks flash when you can interrupt them with a kick.
Earn EXP and level up to get skill points to go into a tree to unlock new abilities.
Massive boss encounters.
Use bucks to buy weapon upgrades.
The Gauntlet weapon is your metal encased glove that you use in melee combat and can be upgraded and even have electricity within it.
You can reset your perks and upgrades at the designated machine as often as possible.
Hidden loot within levels.
Chests come in regular with bucks in em and unique harder-to-find ones that grant more bucks and a perk.
Find and equip new costumes and weapon skins.
Stunning locations are full of detail and grim splendor.
Ever so slight puzzle elements.
The weight of the combat is meaty and satisfying.
Plays like a Gears Of War style game.
The pause and quit menu will say the last time the game autosaved.
Chaining kills never felt so good!
You get so many guns and variations that you are basically a one-man army by the end, from flame throwers to guns to electric combos and grenades.
Generous checkpoint system.
The Co-op mode scales the difficulty.

Evil West Review Cons:

Performance and quality settings require a game reboot.
Cannot rebind controls.
Doesn’t have any settings for blood/gore and swearing.
Only a few enemy types.
No manual save so you are at the mercy of the autosave.
Invisible walls.
The slight learning curve as the combat does have a sense of finesse about it.
Won’t let you shoot enemies down below you.
Telltale fight areas.
In Co-op, only the host keeps the progress and the co-op partner loses everything.
The slowdown happens and seems to happen more in cutscenes.
At times your character’s lips don’t even move when talking.
The actual cutscenes are full of hard switches and are rather disorientating.
The game is not as open as it appears.
Fighting a lot of enemies at once is exhausting.

Evil West:

Official website.

Developer: Flying Wild Hog

Publisher: Focus Entertainment

Store Links –

PlayStation

8/10
Graphics - 8/10
7/10
Sound - 7/10
7/10
Accessibility - 7/10
8/10
Length - 8/10
8/10
Fun Factor - 8/10

7.6/10

Summary

Evil West is a third-person action game taking place in the wild West during a time of progress and with that comes Vampires and Werewolves because why not. The game plays very much like a Gears Of War melee edition for the gauntlet you have conducts electricity and gives you almost superhuman strength. The combat is heavy and seriously satisfying as you teleport around and generally fuck people up. It all moves at a fast pace and levels are linear but they have an ever-small window where you can find loot chests and money, money is used to upgrade your weapons and chests generally give cash or skins for weapons and outfits. Talking of weapons, you get a lot of weapons to play with and it’s going to sound like you could never use them all but they have made it not accessible but fun to use and swap between weapons. You start with a gauntlet and a six-shooter and land up with flame throwers, Gatling guns, a crossbow, and sticks of dynamite! That’s just the weapons as you still have the powers of electricity that allow you to teleport, do mad combos, and shock the air to stun all enemies, oh and of course my favorite… The ground pound slam because everyone loves a good smashing of the Earth. The game has a lot of boss fights and set pieces which are fun at first but do tire you out, the later encounters suffer from the trope of throwing all the biggest and strongest enemies into a small area and then adding in more shit like guns and stuns, it makes what should be fun, a stressful and aggregating situation. I started off cold with the game then as I got new weapons and mastered the combat it grew on me and I really like the story, regardless of the fact that it is very predictable, it did have a lot of ups and downs but by the time I got to the last level, I just had enough. The constant bombardment of big enemies that were once bosses and they can heal each other, it just broke me. It’s the auto-aim that frustrated me as it would lock on to everything except the fuckers that shoot Gatling guns, it would always lock onto the wrong enemy and didn’t have the means to let me change target, and it’s just not fun. Despite leaving a bad taste in my mouth at the end, I still think the game is very good. It’s quite as dark as I thought it would be but it’s a very well-done third-person action game. No matter what, Evil West is the best example of brutal melee combat, and it’s so badass.