varingblaarEvil West
Spoiler warning: If you haven't played Evil West, I suggest you do so before going any further. If this spoils it for you, it's not my fault.You have been warned.
Found this one randomly on XBox Game Pass because it had a co-op campaign. If you want to hear it in buss words, it's a "story-driven, over-the-shoulder third-person brawler/shooter with RPG progression". That's a pretty accurate description of the game.
Cool Vibes
In terms of atmosphere, it's 19th century sort of Steampunk Wild West. Everything is bulky and mechanical. Electricity is just starting to show up in these Nicola Tesla style inventions. There's the occasional zeppelin. Oh and also Vampires. Well, sort of. They're called "Sanguisuge monsters". So vaguly human-shaped blood sucking leeches. At least in the beginning of the game. Eventually the enemy design gets really interesting, with Werewolves and enormous birds.
As usual, we play as the son of the guy in charge, with special access to special equipment and a whole bunch of plot armour. I say "we" because in co-op mode both players play as Jesse Rentier. Probably it was less work to make it a single player game and copy-paste the main character instead of creating a whole separate skillset. It works. At least it has a co-op mode. We need more of those.
Anyway so there are these monsters that are being fought by a government owned secret society with special steampunky weapons. Then it starts looking like they're organising instead of simply being monsters. Oh and the main boss guy? Your dad? Yeah he's one of them now but of course we don't kill him like we do with everyone else because he's your dad, even when he kills most of the people that work here and is clearly feeding information to the bad guys.
The story feels very typical Wild West but also very typical monster game. The steampunk technology and how it's woven into the story is great. It's not a very expansive or complicated narrative universe, but it's solid and well thought out and I enjoy spending time in it.
Run Up And Punch It
There's a lot of focus on melee combat. For the first part of the game, guns are used more as an occasional help rather than the focus of combat. It puts you more in the middle of the action, and the areas in which you fight are generally small and contained so you're forced to dodge and engage, managing multiple threats and using the environment. As you play the basic weapons are unlocked. The main one being the Gauntlet on your hand. Make punch go boom. The Revolver for picking off specific targets, Rifle for longer range but slower, Scorcher for putting things on fire but briefly. Some area-of-effect things also come along, like dynamite because what's a Western without TNT. Also a thing that freezes everyone for a moment but takes forever to charge up. Each of these have their own skill tree and upgrades. Leveling up unlocks skills, looting buys upgrades.
For the beginning and middle part of the game, you can tailor your fighting style with specific builds. Between missions you can respec for free, so it doesn't even matter. Towards the end of the game you would've unlocked almost everything so it doesn't make a difference.
The weapons are all fun to use and viscerally animated. Punches land with force and weapons hit hard,except the revolver and the repeating crossbow that feel like they don't really do much. Because certain things work better against different enemies, it requires switch up play styles or dividing responsibilities between players.
Oh and combat is loud! Everything makes a big noise all at once! After a couple hours playing with headphones, my ears are singing.
Another Fight
The flow of the game is basically the same as Gears of War. Arena where we fight, through narrow part that hides a loading screen, another arena where we fight. The bits between are basically ladders or ropes or swinging across a chasm or a zip-line. Very occasionally there's a puzzle, which basically means moving things around to push buttons in sequence, or making it from the generator to a fuse box before the electricity discharges. It's fun and a little diversion but mostly just busy work until the next open flat section where we can fight.
Every new monster is introduced as a mini-boss, then once you've levelled a bit, you face that monster as part of a larger wave. After a while it's just the same monsters but in different numbers and different waves. There's nothing wrong with that, though. If gave me a chance to learn their patterns and how to best attack them. Even the big final fight with Felicity was more about following her attack patterns and then eliminating waves of other monsters until there's an opening again. It's a satisfying loop.
Unpolished
It feels like Evil West is a little unpolished. From the beginning of the game, sometimes ropes or chains would get stuck and get pulled across the entire map. They don't do anything, it's just a visual glitch. In a particular mission the game kept crashing go desktop. We actually rage quit the game for a day or so, until we looked it up and found out it's that specific mission. If you open the menu it will crash. Even to assign skill points. If you press the menu button, it may not crash immediately, but it will crash before the mission is done. Once we knew this, we managed to get through it. But that feels like something they could've figured out and patched, right?
Fun Adventure
It took about 15 hours to finish the story, and it was a fun experience, but there's no incentive to go back.
