Aside from crafting, The Evil Within also allows you to upgrade Sebastian’s abilities. If you somehow played Resident Evil 4 or Resident Evil 5 and have gone through their upgrade system, you will find the upgrade system in The Evil Within familiar. As you roam around the creepy places in the game, you will find bottles with a brain logo on it. Collecting it will give you points that you can use to upgrade them. At some point you find a way to get back to the upgrade place in the hospital, you are free to upgrade your skills like accuracy, firepower, and among other things for your equipment – it also includes your health and other things.
Visually, The Evil Within looks good but the engine used is somewhat dated. What makes the game scary at times is the well-designed environments that Tango Gameworks did. Whichever place you go like in the underground tunnel, forests, or hospital, it’s guaranteed that you will get a little scared as you explore it. Thanks to its awesome soundtrack as well, it helps build the atmosphere to give that horror-feel to it. Since the game is directed by Mikami, whom directed past Resident Evil games, just expect to see this game to be quite similar in terms of atmosphere and ambiance.
If there’s one thing that I like about The Evil Within- it’s the bosses. The majority of the bosses in the game are quite terrifying to look at. Just by looking at them, you will get chills on your spine as you wonder how you are going to kill it. While the objectives can be quite simple at times, there are moments where there will be a second objective that you have to do. It gets quite frustrating when you have to kill a boss, and roam the area to find the second objective. However, as soon as you take down those bosses, you will feel good.
While there are encounters in the game that are quite hard, one of the things that is guaranteed to annoy you is the auto-save system. Yes, it’s very nice that the game has one, although the way it does it is in unpredictable. There are times that the game will auto-save after major encounters while most of the time, they will save at mid-battle, which can get quite annoying. Expect to see a lot of auto-saves in the game, although just be prepared at the areas where the game will save. Sure, there’s a manual save progress but it’s so rare that you will encounter one per chapter.
The Evil Within is a remarkable game that many survival-horror fans will appreciate. The return of Shinji Mikami in directing horror games marks the return of the genre hopefully. While the game is remarkable, it doesn’t innovate the genre as The Evil Within gets a lot of inspirations from other horror games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill games. It’s not a bad thing however, but those who are looking for something new out of the box will not find it here.
[Editor’s Note: The Evil Within was reviewed on the PS4 platform. The game was provided to us by the publisher for review purposes.]
Very good review, but I’d like to point out a couple of things:
You said “The crafting system in The Evil Within is quite simple and the amount of items that you can craft is very little. With many materials scattered throughout the world, you can use them to craft the items you need. This varies from your ammunition, syringes to heal your HP, and many more. The good thing when you craft the game is that it pauses the game.”
I want to point out that you can only craft spears for the Agony Crossbow from materials you gain from disabling traps or finding in tool box pick-ups; everything else is either in destructible crates or are placed in specific locations in the enviroments such as a syringe in a sink. Another thing is when you are crafting, even in mid-combat, the game does not pause; it slows down to a certain degree so you can still be attacked by enemies if you linger too long.