Evil Within is Awful

That is all.

Okay that's not all. It's really that bad. Poor Shauna had such high hopes for the game. I think she was expecting scary and instead we got blurry graphics, poor performance, terrible controls and all around bad gameplay. All it has going for it at this point is a few intuitive game mechanics. I think this is the first game we have changed the difficulty on to make it easier. And that's saying something when we played all of Alien Isolation on HARD.

I actually had to take a break from fighting the butcher boss. He's the one with the chainsaw in the barn on chapter 3. I was so angry and stressed out it mixed with my upset stomach and the heat, and I literally ended up needing a 10 minute break from the game as I sat on Shauna's couch with a bag of frozen hashbrowns on my face. So we have now coined the term "Hashbrowns-on-face bad" to describe a game. Might just shorten that to "hashbrown bad," but that would suggest that hashbrowns are anything but delicious.

Before this boss you have to wander around this town area using the "stealth" mode because your weapons and fighting skills are shit. You can't see half the traps. You can't see half of everything. We had to reduce the resolution and graphics quality just to get the game to run at 25-30fps. Anything higher than the reduced settings gives us 10-11fps. This is all BEFORE Fraps is a factor. Actually we had so many issues even getting the game to run at all. I had to upgrade drivers, turn off settings, edit some files and FINALLY it ran. Even before we reduced the graphics quality, the character moves in this lurching, drunken gait. We had to turn off motion blur because we were getting nauseous. It was even bad during the cinematics, which feature all these plastic looking people.

Then the controls. After playing a good 2-3 hours last night, I finally got the controls to work in my favour, but seriously, I keep hammering the R3 button to crouch or run because muscle memory dictates it. I keep accidentally turning on my ass light and alerting all the zombie dudes because it's bound to L3. I pull out my gun to shoot, but then I want to switch to my fists to pummel a guy and end up shooting with my melee button because the melee button (R2) switches when you have a gun out (becomes Y...as in WHY DOES IT DO THIS?) and then L2 lets you aim and shoot, but the hip fire ends up being more accurate half the time. The inventory system lets you bind items to the D pad (figured that out last night), which helped greatly (though not with the melee issue) and sometimes when you try to use a pistol you whip out your crossbow and UGH. Then you're sprinting away from dudes, have a limited sprint, and when you run out you stand in place and catch your breath for three seconds which is long enough for a zombie to catch up and ram a pickaxe up your ass.

Realism. It's great. Except when it's not. IF the game had ways to compensate for the stamina feature, the slow-down on the stairs, the jittery and ineffective crouch system (seriously, you'll exit stealth randomly after performing certain actions), the lurching walk/run and the terrible camera (IF!), then yes, maybe we could work with this. But it doesn't. Combat is just as cumbersome (as mentioned above), the enemies arbitrarily see you when you sneak up on them, the enemies suddenly have weapons like shotguns (actually one cool aspect of the game I liked is that the AI will actually find and pick up weapons, so you often need to sneak or get to those weapons first) and they all do shit tons of damage. The traps are BS. I like the variety and they do catch me off guard and they are useful for killing unsuspecting enemies as you can lead them through trap areas, but disarming is awful. The bombs for instance. I assumed you'd get multiple turns of the needle to try and land the blue area. Nope. You get one shot to land it and if not, you explode when the needle hits the 12 0' clock position. Which, is incidentally hilarious as when you die to explosions your body just falls apart like a bloody, gooey mannequin. Your head just comically rolls off. Another great one (and quite satisfying), is when you land a headshot with a melee weapon and the zombie's head explodes you are showered with radioactive pink jam.

So yeah. Melee with weapons, when it works, is great. AI going for weapons is great. Needing to burn bodies and make sure things stay dead is great (though you can only carry FIVE MATCHES at the beginning of the game...and don't ask about where Shauna thinks he stores them). Having effects like fire and melee damage carry to other enemies and do splash damage is great. The variety of traps is cool. Everything else is disgusting. I'm to angry while playing to even pay attention to the atmosphere (or lack of) or the story while playing. All I know is that some detective dude was investigating an asylum and there's this undead ripoff Assassin's Creed assassin running around trying to be creepy, murdering random dudes and sticking knives in things and suddenly we're getting in car crashes and falling off cliffs and there's this mental patient that's important for some reason and an upgrade area with a doctor lady and...just what?

Man I'm sorry for all the typos you're going to find in there. That rant wasn't supposed to happen. Honestly, I'm more angry with this game than Awesome Possum. Yeah. You heard right. At least I expect that game to be awful. I expect the anger. When I need to run around for 30 mins trying to kill a guy cause I ran out of ammo and my only option is a spike trap (which was hard to time because Butcher McIdiot Face can't make up his mind whether he wants to get lost and confused or run at us at light speed) and need to stop to put frozen hashbrowns on my face, you know there's a problem.