Schlocktober '24: Evil West is a prime example of flawed but still enjoyable gaming schlock.

Schlocktober '24: When spooky season comes around I start looking for (mostly) mediocre games to satisfy my urge for gore and chills. Some are horror, some are just horror influenced, most are deeply flawed and a little obscure, but as long as they've got spooks and shivers, games of all shapes and sizes can be part of Schlocktober.

It’s impossible to talk about Evil West without discussing other, mostly better, games. The story of Evil West is more or less “What if The Order: 1886 took place in the American West and was pretty goofy” except it’s also just Darkwatch. The game play is clearly built on the modern God of War framework, with slow, impactful melee mixed in with additional abilities and ranged attacks. It also draws on Doom Eternal with its focus on cool downs and weapon switching. Its character designs seem to draw on Darksiders’ chunky-boy aesthetic. Elements of other games are borrowed shamelessly and while I won’t say it’s a wholly unoriginal project it’s pretty clear that the designers’ ambitions started and stopped with the concept of creating a source of pulpy fun.

Fortunately they succeeded. For the most part.

Evil West puts you in the dusty cowboy boots of Jesse Rentier, a vampire hunter in the 1880s. The game is not overly concerned with either history or geography, and you can tell this is a vision of America being realized by Europeans both by how close everything is (characters easily get from the high deserts of the Southwest to Washington D.C. despite the main mode of transit being horses, though there are also trains and zeppelins) and details like downed power poles in small desert towns that in real life probably weren’t electrified until well into the 20^th century. It’s all very silly and campy and if you’re looking for a game that treats its subject matter with any degree of seriousness or gravitas you need to look elsewhere.

Jesse works for the Rentier Institute, a government funded agency named after and run by his father that is tasked with battling the evil vampires who infest the country, though again the game is not overly concerned with consistency and happily throws other monsters like werewolves into the mix. The plot centers around a vampire who has decided to wage all out war with the humans because he fears that the progress of technology will allow humans to wipe out all the vampires if the vampires don’t seize control first. There’s some dramatic tension with Jesse’s father wanting to groom him as an administrative successor while Jesse just wants to be out there punching vampires, but frankly the game’s story is both filled with cliches and kind of a mess. Supernatural threat, nation and even the world in peril, blah blah blah, all problems can be solved with punching and the judicious application of hot lead and electricity to the right blood sucker.

Despite the story being mediocre there is quite a lot of it and every mission starts and ends with a lengthy and fairly well done (for a mid-budget game we’re not talking The Last of Us or God of War here) cut-scene, with some mid-level scenes as well, and plenty of dialog between Jesse and NPCs or, frequently, just Jesse and himself.

Even though the cut-scenes looking nice, there are weird inconsistencies that show how the game is unpolished. You’ll storm into a bar in the middle of a stormy night, get in a yelling match with another character, and then smash cut to that same bar moments later…with sunlight streaming through the windows. In general time of day will flip around without much warning. Jesse will tell a priest to keep his congregation safe until daybreak while Jesse battles the supernatural threat outside, only for you to find the actual fighting taking place under the high noon sun.

And fighting is basically all you do in Evil West. The game has been called an Xbox 360-era throwback, but even on that ancient console this would have been seen as something of a throwback to an earlier time. I think that structurally it’s more properly placed in the PS2/OG Xbox era, though of course it looks much better and plays much more smoothly than almost anything on those retro consoles. The vast majority of the levels are both extremely linear and structurally similar. You move forward through an exploration area where all you do is walk forward and look for very short side paths behind which might be some loot (primarily “bucks,” this game’s version of gold, though there are also some chests that contain optional upgrades and lore items as well.) Then you get to a combat arena, which you enter and fight in, and then move on to the next short transition area, rinse (with vampire blood) and repeat. There are a few puzzles, which mostly involve pushing carts around on tracks to form pathways or hitting a few switches, a couple mine cart sequences, and a couple areas that are a bit more open where you can accomplish objectives in whatever order you like, but these are the exception rather than the rule. Much of the time you can’t even go backwards in the level after you’ve traversed certain points, even if it looks like Jesse should physically be able to vault back over a waist-high wall, or leap back over a gap that he just jumped in one direction. In fact, Jesse can’t jump up or leap down onto anything if it doesn’t have these glowing silver chains marking it as a transit spot, which radically limits his movement in a level and contributes to the old school feel. This is not a game that’s interested in immersing you in its environments, though some of them are quite pretty and fund to look at. This is a game that’s interested in putting you on a guided tour from combat encounter to combat encounter and using any exploration and puzzle solving as palate cleansers and pacing mechanisms rather than sources of actual gameplay. Before many of the missions you’ll find yourself running around the same bar in a town called Calico and the game gives you almost nothing to do there other than respec or look for a few collectables. It’s clear that the designers just wanted a bit of downtime to let you cool off after a big level climax or boss fight before plunging you into the next battle, and that’s all that the non-combat portions are meant to do.

So how is that combat? It’s alright.

The main issue with Evil West’s combat is that it’s a jack of all trades master of none. It starts out as a pretty straightforward 3D brawler, where you punch enemies in the face, using the massive “Rentier gauntlet” on your right hand to pop them into the air with uppercuts and land devastating combos. Over time the game adds an increasing number of tools and mechanics like a six-shooter, a rifle, a double barrel shotgun, a melee shield, and more. The game especially focuses on electricity as a weapon, with lots of ways to stun enemies and zap them to build up charge. By the end of the game you have a full suite of tools at your disposal and have become an ultimate badass. Evil West is one of those games where the character’s power curve outpaces that of the enemies so that while I died in combat to some of the earlier mini-bosses and the mid-game boss, I never came particularly close to dying in the back third of the game, except that things got a little dicey against the final boss, who I did manage to defeat on my first try on normal difficulty.

As the game doles out these combat abilities it becomes a hybrid experience where you can play it as a brawler, a third person shooter, or focus on building up your overcharged ultimate attack and using that to dispatch of enemies. You’ll end up using at least some of each strategy (though I rarely used the ultimate attack) but will probably gravitate towards one over the other. The game features both upgrades purchased with the aforementioned “bucks” and perks bought with perk points (acquired through leveling up or occasionally found in loot chests) so there’s a fair amount of build customization, and most players will gravitate towards builds that have synergies with their preferred playstyle. Personally, I played it largely as a shooter because if you give me the option to sit back and play defensively that’s what I will do, and while I don’t think it’s the optimal playstyle (your guns do very little damage compared to your fists) it certainly worked fine for me.

It becomes clear pretty early on, though, that whatever your preferred playstyle the actual focus of the game is crowd control. Most of the combat takes place in large arenas full of monsters, with more enemies spawning in regularly. The game also loves to introduce an enemy as a level boss and then use it as a normal enemy later on (though it seemed like the ‘normal’ iterations had lower health) and then start throwing two or three of them at you, often intermixed with other prior mini-bosses and a constant stream of fodder enemies. You’ll often be fighting half a dozen or more enemies simultaneously, with more constantly coming as you dispatch the ones you’re up against and the main gameplay loop is prioritizing and neutralizing the biggest threats while avoiding everything else.

It's certainly a functional gameplay loop but it means that playing the game can be fairly stressful even though it’s not that difficult, and it also means that most of the enemies will be seen not as challenges or even stuff that’s fun and empowering to beat up on, but rather as hassles you need to deal with while you focus on what’s important. It should be fun to smash a leech-covered ghoul with an uppercut and slam him into his friends where he explodes, but in this game you often just feel like you’re getting him out of the way so you can instead focus your attention on the spider-werewolf hybrid that’s throwing webs at you, or the gross abomination up on the wall that keeps blinding you. It’s like dealing with a constant swarm of buzzing gnats.

Then there are the times where you defeat a few mini-bosses to have more spawn. Or the mini-boss that flies around shielding all the other enemies so you have to avoid them while you focus on her. Or the enemies that shoot at you from the edges of the arena forcing you to pick them off in response. It’s very Doom Eternal in its design except without as much mobility or combat arena variance, and with a much lower level of difficulty. None of this stuff makes the game unfun, because the act of smashing vampires in the face or blasting them with a shotgun or a flamethrower is still enjoyable, but I found myself wishing that the game was a little less stressful and closer to the pace of those recent God of War games, where you have fewer enemies to fight and combat is more about doing battle with a couple foes at once than herding a big swarm of them around while you try to reduce their number.

Beyond the pleasures that the combat does have, and it does have enjoyable and empowering aspects, the game also gets a lot of mileage out of its visual design and atmosphere. From sun-drenched deserts to gloomy swamps to crumbling ancient temples there’s a lot of environmental variety, and while texture fidelity and polygon counts aren’t exceptional, the art design is mostly on point. It’s enjoyable to trudge through a forest beset by squirming leeches only to stumble upon the giant corpse of a long-dead beast and then into the lair of the queen leech herself. Or to cross an oil field that has been the site of a battle between the National Guard and a pack of vampires and ghouls. Evil West gets a lot of mileage out of just providing spooky environments to slam vampires around in so you can progress and see what’s around the next corner, and I’d say these environments are the highlight of the game. Sound and music are less memorable but are fine and don’t do anything to detract from the experience.

In many ways Evil West is kind a prototypical 7/10 AA game. It has a lot of flaws and nothing specific that makes it exceptional but is still enjoyable enough to be some turn your brain off fun. It’s not very difficult, it’s a horror themed game that’s got lots of gore and gross stuff but almost no scares, and plenty of scenery chewing performances from voice actors working off a fun but very stupid script. It’s fun to see the world the designers have built and mess around with its systems, but it’s not overly memorable, slightly outstays its welcome, and while I would be interested in a sequel, I would also be fine if we never get one, even though the game’s ending definitely leaves room for a follow-up while also providing a satisfying conclusion to the main storyline.

I’d like to make one more comparison before I end this entry. Evil West reminded me a lot of Shadows of the Damned, a Schlocktober game I played three years ago and thoroughly enjoyed. Like that game this one is an off-kilter story with cool environments and gameplay that was serviceable but nothing special. I liked Shadows of the Damned more because it was significantly weirder, though Evil West’s gameplay is probably better. Both games are horror themed but not scary (Shadows of the Damned at least takes a shot at offering a few frights) and they both take about 10 hours to beat. I really enjoy this kind of straightforward simple game that doesn’t ask too much of the player or try to deliver anything overly ambitious. Evil West gets better as you play it and while I actually played the first couple levels in January before setting it aside for close to a year, I ended up playing the back third of the game in more or less one sitting when I’d only intended to play a little because once the game had revealed all its mechanics and allowed me to customize my Jesse to my playstyle I found it somewhat addictive. If you’re looking for a non-taxing spooky themed but not scary adventure for the Halloween season I’d recommend it. Though there’s a Shadows of the Damned remaster this year so maybe just play that instead if you haven’t.

Schlocktober Rating: Prime Schlock. This game is almost the definition of good schlock. It’s rough around the edges, not spectacular in any way, but overall enjoyable with plenty of aspects that are good, though not great. If it were candy it would be a limited edition version of a classic that works fine but that you wouldn’t necessarily need to eat again, like a Strawberry Kit-Kat. It’s fun to try once or twice, and if someone offered you one you wouldn’t say no, but once it’s off the shelves you won’t think about or miss it very much.