Game Review: Evil West

The first game I played this year is Evil West, a character action game by Flying Wild Hog and Focus Entertainment in 2022. You play as Jesse Rentier, a cowboy with a massive steampunk lightning fist who punches vampires and their various minions to death, and the game definitely does that concept justice. The combat feels similar to the modern God of War games, using same close up, over the shoulder angle as you punch your way through mobs of enemies, although with notably less complexity and variance in your actual combo options. The game somewhat makes up for this by mixing in some gunplay options, using rifles, shotguns, and pistols to let you stagger enemies, break guards, and juggle monsters. Yes, you read that right, you can juggle enemies using your pistol just like Dante from the Devil May Cry series.

All that being said, the combat still felt fairly simplistic. The perks you unlock as you progress through the game occasionally added new moves to your repertoire and bringing some much needed complexity to the combat, but more often they would just buff a specific attack so much that you'd just end up mashing out the same attack over and over again. For example, the game gives you an attack where you launch an enemy into the air, and from there you can either juggle them for extra damage or you can jump up and punch them into another enemy to stagger them both. One of the perks made it so when I punched them into another enemy, they'd LIGHT ON FIRE AND THEN EXPLODE, doing massive damage to everything within 10 feet of them, and while it felt very cool to do, it did result in me going through most combat encounters just doing that move over and over until everything was dead.

The story is... fine. You play as Jesse Rentier, son of the founder of the Rentier Institute, an organization that works alongside to American government to design weapons and technology to kill vampires with. You start the game hot on the trail of some vampire I've already forgotten the name of, punch all the blood out of his body using a massive steampunk lightning fist, and then find out he and his daughter, Felicity, have figured out a way to supercharge their minions and are planning to start a war against humanity to stop this exact thing from happening. Felicity destroys the Rentier Institute headquarters and you spend the rest of the game working with a ragtag bunch of heroes to figure out how Felicity is supercharging her minions, find her, and punch all her blood out.

This is the part where I need to mention, I don't actually know if you end up punching all of Felicity's blood out. During a late game mission named Lightning In A Bottle I ran into a bug where, when attempting to blow up some rocks blocking my path forward, the game crashed my computer and upon restarting, gave me the error message "a D3D11-compatible GPU (feature level 11, shader model-5) is required to run the engine" because when it crashed it also broke my GPU drivers. After reinstalling the drivers and attempting another go at the level, the game broke in exactly the same way at exactly the same spot, and as much as I was legitimately enjoying the game I'm not going to brick my computer on the off chance I can figure out a way around this one particular pile of rocks.

7/10 if we ignore everything I said in the last paragraph!