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amazon The Evil Within reviews
The Evil Within – Since the “father” of Resident Evil – Mr. Shinji Mikami left Capcom after Resident Evil 4, the series has become more trivial than ever, because the versions, later on, more inclined to action, making the feeling of “awe” when experiencing a horror game has become fading.
When Shinji Mikami founded Tango Gameworks and the announcement of the horror game The Evil Within, fans eagerly awaited and believed the product would bring back the third-person horror game line prime time.
The Evil Within has shown its promise through numerous trailers released ahead of the launch date, but has it met the expectations of fans?
Under the “shaping” hand of Shinji Mikami, The Evil Within perfectly conveyed the extremely tense horror atmosphere to the player.
As expected, it is one of the people who gave birth to the action game genre with a horror style!
The Evil Within does not focus too much on surprise threats or startles players a bit and leaves almost nothing like the way Resident Evil 6 shows, but instead, the development team focuses on realizing the horror around the main character.
Entering a world where real – virtual is still confusing, around the player is full of monsters with strange shapes, deadly traps, and most of all, the amount of ammunition is extremely scarce.
Moreover, although the number of weapons is quite diverse, to earn enough “money” (Green Gel pots) to upgrade them is extremely difficult, making the player always consider carefully before optimizing strength.
All invisible creates a “pressure”, weighs heavily on the player’s mind, making them always have to concentrate high to be able to overcome dangerous situations!
The gameplay in The Evil Within also tends to encourage players to choose a sneaky, hidden lid or take advantage of traps to destroy enemies.
The environment is also very well designed to make the gameplay style more interesting but no less thrilling because zombies are capable of making the player “startled”!
Bringing many such fears, The Evil Within development team did not “let go” for players at the place where they thought they were the safest ever: save.
Unlike the classic Resident Evil, which put a “typewriter” for the need to save the game, The Evil Within dedicates an entire area to just do that.
By “teleporting” through the mirrors, the player will get to the area above.
But this place has a gloomy atmosphere, gradually becoming gloomy with cracked walls, articles telling stories about the missing person, or even being intimidated by the “last boss” few times!
So seeing in The Evil Within, there is no place called “peace”.
In The Evil Within, the types of enemies the player encounters are mostly zombies or different types of monsters, but they all have a very distinctive look and show a creepy quality at first sight. Of course, that feeling cannot be “love”!
It can be said that the types of demons in The Evil Within bring an indescribable “haunt” feeling!
For example, a zombie has a mouth … slit to its ears, like smiling (Batman’s Joker), old face, dark eyes enough to make anyone who sees it!
Besides, many other shapes also create a “disgusting” feeling like those wearing smile masks with blood oozing from their eye sockets and mouth, or babies crawling while their body is red, seeing… vomiting!
The types of “soldiers” above mentioned, although very “standard”, but still far behind the style of the “bosses” in the game.
The most typical is Laura – the witch with long hair and many hands, who has appeared in many trailers: naked body, skin red from burns, hair loose, many hands, long claws, moving with socks all the limbs, and the voice screams “earaches”.
This is also what makes the player … run away the most, because it is impossible to defeat her directly!
It can be said, creating the “creepy” enemy is what The Evil Within brings direct and existential fear to the player, instead of the “invisible” other things mentioned earlier.
In addition to the basic “scare” gameplay, the horror level of The Evil Within has also been raised to new heights, with the powerful support of the sound.
Throughout the game, background music and environmental noises always give the player a feeling of insecurity and tension with the core of the sound from monsters.
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Each monster has its own unique whimper that shows its “personality”.
For example, Laura has a scream of pain when being burned, making the writer feel pain in the heart (and eardrums too), or the sadistic butcher (Sadist) is very “romantic” while “meat”, while gently enjoying the symphony “Air on the G String” by G.Bash.
Surely these personality “enemies” will create a long phobia even if the player completes the game …
In particular, director Shinji also demonstrated his “artiste” character by using another symphony “Clair de Lune” (Moonlight) by Claude Debussy, as the background music in several scenes, and it has brought into play a very “intense” effect: creating loneliness and loneliness for the player as well as the villain who plays this song in the game: Ruvik.
Maybe many people do not know that the two tracks above have appeared in many other titles, such as the song “Air on the G String” used in BioShock Infinite and even in the teaser video of The Evil Within itself, “Clair de Lune” is the main theme song in Rain – the work expressing the loneliness of the invisible boy on the PS3 system.
In The Evil Within, these two songs are shown in a higher tone, creating a heavy tone that is very suitable for the dark and indescribable “sick” context!
In terms of sound, it can be said that The Evil Within performed so well with only one point: the voiceover voices for the characters were still not expressive.
And players should use headphones to “absorb” from the inside out the fear that the game sound brings.
Just like what Shinji Mikaki said before: he will bring back some familiar scenes from Resident Evil 1.
In The Evil Within, in the first scene is also a group of investigators consisting of three people (two men, one female) like the trio of Chris, Jill, and Wesker, entering to investigate a place full of death.
Following that, the first encounter with zombies in The Evil Within was almost the same scene as in the first part of Resident Evil 1.
Besides, many other stages also recall old feelings such as the design of the palaces, the way of building situations.
But the above things make players feel “sad” when remembering the fascinating and dramatic plot of the previous Resident Evil, because The Evil Within possesses a very blurred story and full of absurdities.
Moreover, the end of the game not only does not answer any questions for the players but also raises more questions about the ongoing event.
Hopefully, in the upcoming DLC plot character Kidman will fix this, otherwise, The Evil Within has to release a sequel for everything to be unraveled!
In addition, the characters in The Evil Within seem to appear just to serve for an easy to predict scenario, making the game look no highlight, as well as no lines or actions worth recording in mind.
Therefore, when compared to the cast of characters appearing in the first part of Resident Evil, The Evil Within becomes much and less steamed.
Not long before its release, The Evil Within received a lot of criticism when performing poor graphics, nothing special through the trailer, or for asking for an extreme PC to run this game smoothly on PC.
Until the debut, the situation was still nothing better.
I had the opportunity to experience The Evil Within on three platforms, PS3, PS4, and PC (mainly played and completed on PS3), and noticed one obvious truth: the graphics on PS4 and PC are the best, with more detailed textures, shadows, and realistic lighting effects compared to the PS3 version.
But this advantage turns out to create a “minus point” when players have to witness the graphics are so trivial when the environment and character models are quite rough and hard.
It is worth mentioning that this quality of graphics requires a “terrible” PC configuration but runs unstable, and consoles also do the same fate.
In addition, the point that makes the player uncomfortable is the two black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, created with the purpose of helping to “play games like watching movies” (according to the developer).
But in fact, that masking makes the consoles less “strenuous” while processing images because The Evil Within is using id Tech 5, a heavy engine that so far only appeared in two other titles: RAGE and Wolfenstein: The New Order.
Because of that, the developer has recently released an update that removes the two black bars above, and “unlocks” the frame to 60FPS, but only for the PC – because there are powerful machines here, not for PS4 or PS3.
However, according to the writer, and most other players, The Evil Within will probably be a more enjoyable experience when playing on PS3, when the image is “fuzzy” showing better warm tones and Thereby, adding more horror to the game.