The Evil Within : The Executioner

[Dowsky]

The Evil Within’s final story DLC takes the main game’s survival-horror genetics and throws them away in favour of a more conventionally violent, first-person action experience. It’s an odd choice, considering stealthy challenge and originality were such highlights of The Evil Within, and while The Executioner is a fun and rather cathartic change of pace, it’s missing something special.

The Executioner’s three-hour story places you in the shoes of The Keeper, The Evil Within’s wonderfully weird box-headed bad guy. But while you may look the part, you’re merely a man inhabiting a Keeper’s body, searching for your lost daughter inside The Evil Within’s multiple-consciousness system, STEM.

There’s an elegance to this storytelling. An ongoing issue I’ve had with The Evil Within is its tendency to cram exposition in where it’s not needed, breaking up the flow of the gameplay. But your Keeper is a silent protagonist, and goes about his business with single-minded focus and little interruption from the outside world. This gives the father/daughter story real room to breathe, and it’s to developer Tango Gameworks’ credit that I got a little choked up at the end.

The means by which you pursue your daughter, however, is fairly unimaginative. Though the idea of playing inside The Evil Within’s world as a hammer-wielding maniac is a novel one,

The Evil Within: The Executioner

MAY 26, 2015

The House of the Dead: OverkillMadWorldSplatterhouse in practice you and your blunt hammer are overpowered against weak enemies, and the lack of challenge - without the visceral thrill of combos - grew dull in far less than three hours.

It’s a problem made worse by structure, as The Executioner pits you from boss battle to boss battle with a focus on very basic melee combat. Even when one strongly suggested I switch up this technique to something a little more inventive, I found that bashing its head in was a far more effective means by which to get the job done.

The Executioner at least offers a multitude of unlockable weapons for all this bloodletting. I enjoyed the upgrade system here, primarily because it offered a little variation in combat, though I would have preferred to have access to some of the more interesting weapons - I’m looking at you, rocket launcher - earlier.

The world sets an appropriately bloody stage for carnage. The Evil Within has always reveled in viscera, but The Executioner takes things to a somewhat ridiculous level. Upgrading, for example, involves you plunging your hand into a safe full of guts, while you can ‘teleport’ from one spot to another by tearing your own head off in a single bloody jerk. It feels like Tango just threw up its hands here, and it adds a sense of fun to The Executioner.

 

[XannyS.]

@, in primul rand, nu ai voie sa postezi mai mult de 2 topicuri pe zi, cumulat cu faptul ca nu ai precizat sursa la niciunul dintre cele 3 topicuri, vei primi un punct de warn, insa DaniSteptu are ultimul cuvant.

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