The Evil Within Reviews
Over the course of the lengthy, ill-paced campaign, one thing really stuck out for The Evil Within. It's not really a horror game. Yes, there are areas where you are often subjected to intense imagery and situations but they are more shocking than anything else. To put it simply, the game is more like the Saw film franchise than what we have come to expect from a good survival horror game.
There's little of that symbiosis here, as The Evil Within's more serious tone and greater reliance on non-interactive cutscenes leaves the player disengaged from the rollercoaster of action.
At its best, The Evil Within offers a few scares and decent, if bland and predictable, combat; at its worst, it's unoriginal, uninspired and plodding. If you're looking for something scarier, try playing through two other recent current-gen horror games, P.T. or Outlast. Heck, I'm betting my nephew's skeleton costume this year will be spookier.
The Evil Within is almost pitiable in its need to recapture the fresh tension and anxiety of Mikami's best work.
Shinji Mikami returns to the genre that defined him, but the result is a jumbled mess of ideas that never quite come together.
At the end of the day, The Evil Within is a good Resident Evil game from 2005, but a below average third-person action adventure game in 2014. Silly design choices and just plain awful decisions manage to hold back what could be a fantastic experience.
The Evil Within is absolutely sure to appeal to those obsessed with the original Resident Evil games. That said, it's a real shame that the developer didn't take this fresh start as a chance to reinvent himself and horror games in general.
The Evil Within feels like a the worst kind of throwback--one that feels stale, uninspired and most disappointingly, boring.
'The Evil Within' has some rich and interesting imagery, but its story and gameplay are disappointingly derivative.
As a horror experience, The Evil Within completely misfired.
The Evil Within has all the elements of a great survival horror game. There’s a great story… eventually. There’s satisfying tactical combat… sometimes. The world looks suitably grim and foreboding… when it’s not breaking apart before your eyes. It’s a game that needed another twelve months to meet the developer’s vision. That’s what sequels are for. I can’t wholeheartedly recommend The Evil Within, but I can encourage you to keep an eye on the sequel. It could be something special.
The best thing to say about The Evil Within is that it is a good survival game with some decent mechanics, the worst thing I can say is that it is a poor horror game that doesn't live up to its design or the talent of the director. I'm not angry, I'm just very disappointed I'm not scared.
The Evil Within is a noble attempt at bringing back classic survival horror, but it could have learned a thing or two from games that aren't almost ten years old. It has its moments of brilliance, scattered through periods of antagonizing design.
The Evil Within might not be the resurgence of the survival-horror genre, but it is a fun and varied experience. However, some elements will serve to frustrate more than scare, causing overall disappointment.
Resident Evil fans will have a serious case of déjà vu when playing The Evil Within. It offers much of the thrills and creepy environments that make the series so enticing, along with some of its frustrations.
Rather than the future of survival horror this is merely a retread of its defining moments, and even then it rarely manages to equal what has gone before – let alone exceed it.
A challenging blend of stealth and action, but relies on gross-out rather than real fear. Poor design choices leads to technical shortcomings.
The Evil Within's biggest sin is that it just isn't particularly scary.
A game that fails to live up to it's hype, despite some good action.
The Evil Within feels like a project shackled by the desire to relive past survival-horror glories instead of pioneering brave new ones. Sometimes, it seems, giving fans what they think they want isn't really the proper course of action.