Evil West is a western-themed horror shooter by Polish developers Flying Hog, who are known mostly for their reboot of the Shadow Warrior series. You play as Jesse Rentier, a member of a secret government agency (the Rentier Institute, named after Jesse's father) in charge of protecting the United States from vampires and other supernatural creatures. The story starts off interesting, with the Institute under attack and Jesse racing for a cure for his father while trying to stop a vampire uprising, but the schlocky nature of the tale is cliched rather than endearing, especially considering the stock characters and lazy dialogue. There are a lot of cutscenes in Evil West, and I found myself skipping them about halfway through due to my complete lack of interest in the story, which is really saying something, since I usually give even the most boring tale a modicum of my attention. The western setting is underutilized--you'll spend a lot of time crawling around caves and wandering around icy locales rather than shooting up vampire-filled frontier towns. Why Evil West doesn't have a train level is beyond me. This ain't Red Dead Redemption, and while I didn't expect a Double-A game with a tenth (more like a twentieth) of the budget of Rockstar's classics to compete in looks or world building, I did expect more competent level design from Flying Hog. Graphically, Evil West looks like a remastered Unreal Engine 3 game. Textures are low-res and environments lack detail, which is strange, since Flying Hog's Shadow Warrior 3 came out earlier and looked a whole lot better. Unreal Engine shader compilation stutter also rears its ugly head as well, making the PC version a pain to play.
So what the hell does Evil West have going for it? Well, its combat is pretty good. Flying Hog have clearly been "inspired" by the gameplay of the God of War reboot. While Jesse has many firearms, including a flamethrower, rifle, pistols, and a crossbow, his main method of doing damage is his electrically-charged gauntlet, which you'll utilize to pummel vampires and werewolves into submission. My go-to move is the cannonball, triggered by holding down the right button on your controller, which launches an enemy into the air and into any other baddie standing in the way. As the game progresses, you'll also get a timed electrical stun, perfect for crowd controlling. Juggling all the enemies that Evil West throws your way can be quite a challenge that often borders on frustrating, since the designers have a bad habit of throwing multiple minibosses your way along with fodder enemies that can easily overwhelm you. I think they were going for a Doom Eternal style loop, where you're meant to harvest the little guys for health, but Jesse dies pretty easily, even on normal difficulty, and there's no way to quickly kill the minibosses, unlike in Doom. The combat upgrades come pretty slowly, so as the game gets harder, you don't really feel like you're getting more powerful.
So despite being about eleven hours into Evil West, I'm not sure that I'll finish it before my Game Pass subscription runs out. The setting is a real missed opportunity, since we don't get too many western-themed games, and even fewer horror westerns. I keep waiting for Flying Hog to have a real breakout title, but they seem unable to transcend their Double-A status. You can currently check out Evil West on Game Pass.
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