Evil West – Zero Punctuation

And despite the agency’s entire supply of weapons and gadgets being constantly worn by one of those dudes so he waddles about the battlefield rattling like a dodgy shopping cart full of lego. Said hero is Jesse Rentier, or Jesse Renti-ay, the voice actors never really reached a consensus on that one, vampire hunter in the Hugh Jackman Van Helsing mould but without the excuse of cold European weather to justify wearing the entire stock of a camping supply shop at once, who refuses to take a desk job at HQ because he’s a vampire hunter cop on the edge and they need him out on the streets etc, and besides he’s got all their weapons strapped to his back which would make it very difficult to sit in an office chair. Fortunately, the agency is driven onto the back foot by a coordinated vampire assault and Jesse finds himself on the front lines of all-out supernatural war, leading a now severely undermanned agency against the schemes of an insane vampire leader and the plans they have brewing behind their insidious magical glamour. Or glam-oar. That was the other thing the voice actors forgot to compare notes on.

Happily, this is a war that can be fought by trudging through linear environments getting into conveniently fenced-off battles with strictly regimented numbers of enemy units. So yeah, it’s another ghost train ride game where herds of wild contextual button prompts sweep majestically across the plains and then politely queue up to squeeze down narrow passages of every imaginable variety. But as implied earlier, setting aside, there’s something terribly old-fashioned about Evil West that feels a bit Playstation 3 era. A lot of that could be the story and the way it clunkily switches from gameplay to prerendered cutscene where the camera zooms in too close on characters as they massively overanimate so it looks like Paul Greengrass shooting a documentary on submarine crews with Parkinson’s disease. Or maybe it’s the fact that there’s precisely one female character in the entire plot whose every other line of dialogue is complaining about how the boys don’t take her seriously enough. Or just that the main character is a stock squinty grumbly badass whose usual contribution to exposition scenes is to grunt “English, doc!” whenever one of his pet tech nerds starts using language roughly as advanced as that of an instruction pamphlet for an electric beard trimmer.

So initially I was down on Evil West, the theme and setting and prominent crashed zeppelin early in the plot brought back a few vestigial memories of The Order 1886 that I’d long thought solvent abuse had successfully quashed. And there’s a general ramshackle vibe given off by the occasional awkward edit and frustratingly unoccasional bugs that meant I repeatedly clipped halfway into the floor and had to reload a save, either because of physics fuckups or the floor finally giving way under the weight of Jesse’s anorak. But once I settled into the combat groove, I became aware of an upsetting sense that I was having fun against my will. It never stops being janky and unrefined, but that might be part of the appeal. It’s not so much a finely crafted patisserie dessert as a big bucket of cake, candy bars and whipped cream all smooshed together, and I’m certainly not above enjoying such things, especially when bored, depressed or pregnant. If there was ever a game crying out for some kind of spectacle fighter mechanic that rewards the player for varying their approach, it’s this one, because by the end your available variety of attacks would shame a battleship crewed by poisonous hedgehogs.

Standard punch, uppercut, electric punch, clearing electric punch, sneaky interrupt kick in the bollocks, parry shield, electric lasso, six shooters, shotgun, rifle, crossbow, flamethrower, glory kills, super duper attack with ten minute cooldown, I haven’t even gotten to the facetious made up examples yet, grenade launcher, minigun, hedge trimmer, angry cat in a bag – and there we go. Plus everything has the all important satisfying feel, especially when you uppercut a dude into the air, jump up and pound him into the exploding barrel three of his mates were standing around for their weekly gasoline tasting. Your dude still moves around like he’s got horny dogs trying to get off with both his legs but he’s also got an electric teleport and electric pull to swiftly move himself and his foes around, and it was incidentally the number one cause of unwanted floor intimacy, but the intention was solid. If there’s anything that brings the combat down – in the non-floor related sense that is – it’s overdoing it with the big damage spongey dudes in the game’s back half. Almost every boss fight comes back later as a regular enemy, usually in numbers, and poor old Jesse Rentier gives himself repetitive strain injury biffing away at them.

If you keep biffing them over and over again it builds up their stun meter, y’see, and once it fills up they stop moving for a bit so you can continue biffing them over and over again with slightly more confidence. But there are more than a few things to like about Evil West, it’s silly overblown combat against big chunky targets and it’s fun like covering yourself in grease and pogo sticking through a defrosting meat locker. Just me? Okay. Well besides that it frequently manages to be quite visually striking as well, I like its use of vibrant colours, which is another way it sets itself apart from Order 1886, which looked mostly like it had just had the dust blown off it after a hundred years in the backroom of an antique shop run by people allergic to fun. And as I say, it did feel like stepping momentarily back to the late 2000s era for a week. There’s even a “multiplayer” option on the title screen. I can’t remember the last time I saw that. A single player game with an included, entirely separate multiplayer mode that doesn’t try to awkwardly smash them together into a live service grindathon? That certainly does evoke a bygone age. Thanks for the memories, Evil West. “…you… gonna try out the multiplayer mode, the-” NO.