I need to begin this piece with an apology. I am truly sorry. I’m sorry to absolutely everybody that’s mentioned Evil West to me in recent times and suggested that it looks like a great game, only to have me shrug and say it looks fine, dismissing it as a B-grade action game that’d get lost in the landscape of upcoming releases. I recently had the opportunity at Gamescom 2022 to play through around 30 minutes of the next title from Shadow Warrior 3 developers, Flying Wild Hog, and I’ve realised just how wrong I was. Evil West is hands-down one of the best things I played at the show and has skyrocketed to the upper limits of my most wanted games this year.
THE CHEAPEST PRICE: $74 WITH FREE SHIPPING FROM AMAZON.
Some context perhaps, for those who need it. Evil West is an upcoming third-person action game that sees you take the role of Jesse Rentier, a vampire hunter in a doomed version of the American Frontier. Gameplay-wise, think of it as Devil May Cry meets Bulletstorm meets Mad World. Or somewhere in-between all that.
My demo had me in the game’s second level, some of which you might’ve seen in some previous gameplay trailers, starting Jesse off in a very Wild West mining town with his companion, Edgar, and a loud-mouthed prisoner in tow. The first section of the level had me making my way through the mostly-abandoned and dusty town, fending off ornery bandits as I went and giving me my first taste of the game’s meaty combat. My impressions in the first few minutes of the preview were that of a stylish and competent third-person shooter in a fairly unique setting, based on my initial instinct to take any enemies out at range. But while Jesse comes equipped with a handful of different flavours of gun, his primary arm comes in the form of, well, his arm.
The Gauntlet weapon in Evil West is its biggest combat hook and an absolute blast to use. The Flying Wild Hog team on hand during my demo put it best when they described Evil West’s melee combat as, “Complex, but not complicated.” It’s all highly contextual, meaning positioning, enemy states and the surrounding environment are just as important as your choice of combo or special skill. Jesse as he was in the preview could wail on enemies at close range, bridge distance with a running move, uppercut them into the air, take stunned baddies out with brutal finishers or cannonball them into other enemies and environmental hazards, and that’s just the early game stuff. It’s super, super satisfying and almost enough to make the shooting feel superfluous (but not entirely, because the shooting is also a ton of fun!).
The rest of the level I played had me delving deep into a semi-abandoned mine, now home to a horde of ‘Familiars’, the game’s vampire race. Among shooting and punching my way through these creatures of varying levels of ugliness I also engaged in some light traversal and environmental puzzling, mostly through the use of my gauntlet as a tether to pull objects down or swing across ledges. There are a couple of interesting things I noted in this section – one is that the spiders infesting these mines, which are purely for visual effect, can be switched off in the options menu for the arachnophobes out there. Also, a moment where the game had me to the requisite, tropey shimmy through a crevice in the wall only for him to get stuck because of the giant Gauntlet had me chuckling to myself, and hopefully is an indication of the tongue-in-cheek tone the game is going for.
After making my way through the mine section, taking on a few rooms of baddies of both the on-foot and airborne variety with the occasional uppercut into a spiked wall for good measure, I came across the climax of this hands-on demo in the form of a boss battle. This fight against a huge, demon-like Familiar came with a warning from the Flying Wild Hog developers watching me play, who recommended I spend my spare skill point on an upgrade to my healing skill. Turns out I didn’t need it though, as I absolutely obliterated the boss and supposedly impressed the team by taking advantage of a strategy they had yet to see anyone use. I’m not sure how I’m the only one who thought to launch the nearby grunt enemies into the big boy to take huge chunks off of his health as well as farm the little guys for health pickups. I’m usually terrible at games though, so I’ll take the praise where I can. I suppose it’s just another testament to how flexible and brutally satisfying the melee stuff is.
The kicker with Evil West is I could talk about it all day, and you could watch any number of gameplay videos, but it’s the kind of game you need to experience first-hand to understand. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve played something that feels this good to play, especially with a controller in hand (the studio recommends PC players opt for a controller as well). I’m super keen to spend more time and see if the amount of fun I had in a short session carries across to the full game, if nothing else to see where the effortlessly cool spaghetti Western vampire story goes.
Evil West launches on November 22nd for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC. The cheapest copy is currently $74 with delivery from Amazon.
