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The Evil Within review

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  • The Evil Within review

    The Evil Within opens with the psychologically wrecked detective Sebastian Castellanos arriving at a mental hospital surrounded by the flash and wail of police cars and ambulances. The few seconds it takes for the building's double doors to creak open are all the time that the game bothers to spend on creating an initial sense of tension and dread. Inside the entrance, Castellanos finds a multitude of bloodied, slumped corpses. It's been nine years since Shinji Mikami directed a horror game with Resident Evil 4; none of that game's rhythm and pace has been lost in the intermission.
    Neither has the tone of his work changed, from the B-movie dialogue to the taut gunplay. The Evil Within is also something of greatest hits of the director's finest ideas and moments. There's the crouched zombie munching on a cadaver who peers back at the camera over a rotten shoulder - a frame-for-frame rerun of the famous scene from the first Resident Evil on PlayStation. There are the familiar ponderous door animations, which ratchet up the tension each time you pass from one virtual space to the next; there are the balloon-bursting headshots. There's a mud-slung rural village and ambient storytelling about unethical scientific experiments that drove its residents to violence.
    There are fat, mad friars who roam derelict churches. There are rabid super-dogs, creeping villagers who stare with bright eyes and wield torches or chainsaws - and there's your own a burgeoning armoury, which you are restrained from using liberally through the scarcity of ammunition. There are familiar sections during which you fight alongside a second, computer-controlled character, tending to their well-being while trying to maintain your own. This is a Mikami game from hilltop to catacomb, and it's undeniably the closest we've had to a direct sequel to his greatest work, Resident Evil 4.
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