Evil West Review: "A vehicle for pure beat-em-up pleasure"

At the end of a long day, sometimes it's nice to just sit down, pick up a controller, and punch a bunch of vampires until they explode. Evil West, the latest game from Shadow Warrior developer Flying Wild Hog, offers simple pleasures. Its sci-fi and horror-laced wild west setting gussies up a very straightforward combat-heavy action experience – one which is heavily influenced by the original God of War trilogy, right down to the treasure-chest-smashing animation. 

Evil West presents a beat-em-up toy box that sets you up with arenas full of monsters to kill, and lots of tools for smashing, shooting, and burning them to a crisp. It's a one-trick pony: There collectibles to hunt for and the occasional puzzle that to create a sense of pace, but it's all punching, all the time in Evil West. There are times when you may wish for a more balanced experience, but if you approach Evil West as a vehicle for pure beat-em-up pleasure it has a lot to offer.

A new take on the old west

Evil West follows Jesse Rentier, a large, angry cowboy who happens to be the ace agent and heir-apparent of a secret, family-run government vampire killing agency called the Rentier Institute. When a group of vampires threatens open war with humanity, starting with the Institute, Jesse picks up a one-of-a-kind electric gauntlet and smashes through hordes of monsters to stop them.

The story and dialogue is pure B-movie fare, in the worst way. Evil West is full of plot holes, predictable twists, and superficially drawn characters who yell and swear at each other, but develop little to no meaningful personality. Flying Wild Hog adequately dresses and binds the levels together, but the cutscenes are made for skimming, not reading deeply.

Even without a compelling story, Evil West manages to cultivate an interesting and surprisingly fresh aesthetic within the boundaries of the western, retro sci-fi, and horror tropes it pulls from. Its levels run the gamut of conventional western settings – train heists, swamps, one-horse towns, and oil fields – but they're often decorated with grindhouse horror flair. You may stumble upon a corn field full of vampiric leeches, or a train station crawling with spiders and covered in their webs. (FYI: You can turn off the aesthetic spiders in settings if they freak you out.) 

Likewise, many of the enemy designs riff on conventional western and monster movie staples with enough flair to feel like something you haven't seen before. Many of the enemies feel like genre staples, including Half-bat vampires, zombie-esque wretches, and western-style bandits, but they have a unique design all their own, and some have an inventive aesthetic spin that makes them a little more interesting to look at. All the gore and bugs create a mildly gross, mucky veneer that blends well with those western settings. Throw in an occasional retro-futurist Tesla coil-powered generator or a gigantic zeppelin, and you have a world that stands out as different and interesting, even if it isn't well defined.

Big Beat-Em-Up Energy

Jesse isn't here to take in the sights, though. You spend most of your time in Evil West clobbering waves of vampires and other monsters in large, open combat arenas. Following Jesse with a very familiar over-the-shoulder camera, the hunter brings a constantly expanding arsenal of weapons to every fight, giving you lots of options for how to deal with every combination of enemies you encounter.

You'd expect a cowboy to rely heavily on a pair of six-shooters, but Jesse's main weapons are his fists. Not only does he have a mean right hook and an uppercut that launches enemies into the air, but he uses his electrified gauntlet to dash over to enemies or pull them close for a flurry of punches that will kill or do substantial damage. He has the pistol too, and a shotgun, and a rifle, and a flamethrower, and a host of other destructively-entertaining weapons. Many of these are, in essence, special moves regulated by cooldowns. A couple of long-range weapons, like his rifle, give you the ability to hit enemy weak points at distance, which both prevents the attack and generates a useful healing orb.

All of these weapons and attacks make Jesse feel incredibly powerful. Especially in the early levels, you can handily crush large numbers of enemies simply by wailing on them until they start to glow – prompting you to trigger a stylish finishing move. Over time, the enemies power up to match your own and come at you in larger numbers, pushing you to use your skills strategically to prevent attacks and take out foes in an order that limits their capacity to wail on you right back. 

As you find gold and earn experience, those weapons and abilities gain more powerful wrinkles that make them more effective when used tactically. For example, you can upgrade Jesse's shotgun to deal extra damage when it's used to interrupt an attack, or learn an ability that slams enemies you launch in the air back down for extra damage. By the end of Evil West, you have a large number of powerful weapons and abilities to cycle through before going in for a conventional punch.

That sounds overwhelming, but most of these moves are mapped to a button press, or a simple (often situational) combination of a movement and an attack. These fights feel tactical, but don't require you memorize combos like in a fighter or technical action game like a Sifu or Bayonetta 3. The fights in Evil West never feel mindless, but you can often punch and shoot your way through, intuitively picking your moves step-by-step based on what feels right in the moment.

Between fights, Jesse walks from arena to arena, exploring cracks and crevices along the main path to uncover hidden rooms with money for upgrades, chests with cosmetics, and collectibles that offer small snippets of lore. There isn't much to these in-between areas. You get the pleasure of finding loot and upgrading your gear as you go, but without a strong story the narrative interludes aren't as engrossing as they could be. 

Every once in a while you'll run across a small puzzle or an on-rails mine cart sequence, but they never feel challenging or engaging enough to feel like more than a means of breaking up a formula that teeters on monotonous. Luckily though, there's just enough exploration to break up the combat sequences and give you a little breathing room without overstaying their welcome.

Punching with Friends

There's one last little wrinkle worth mentioning with Evil West: You can play the full game with a friend in online co-op. On the one hand, Evil West's large, bountiful arenas full of very punchable enemies makes perfect sense as a two-player beat-em-up – especially when Jesse gets more powerful and has abilities that affect groups of enemies, making it easy for you to chain attacks together. On the other hand, co-op comes with a lot of technical caveats. 

For starters, only the host player makes story progress, so there's a disincentive for people to be their friends' player-two instead of playing alone. On an aesthetic level, there's no secondary character for the second player, so you just have two Jesses running around. It's not really a technical problem in two-player mode: With the over-the-shoulder perspective, you'll never confuse your Jesse and your friend's, but the lack of meaningful distinction makes co-op feel poorly defined. 

Regardless of how you choose to play it, Evil West feels like the best version of the AAA "B-tier game" that we don't see as often as we used to. It's not technically polished and I wouldn't call it innovative, but it's mechanically solid and comes equipped with a lot of fun ideas that mostly pan out. Sometimes you just need a game to punch out some bad guys; it can feel familiar and straightforward, just as long as the punching feels good. Evil West fills that specific, but very relatable need quite well.

Evil West was reviewed on PC, with code provided by the publisher.