Evil West review – One of the year’s best action games let down by outdated level design

There’s an early 2000s interview with director Quentin Tarantino in which a conservative pundit chides him for the appalling level of violence in his movies. His impassioned pleas question the necessity of violence, but are met with a frustrated sneer: “Because it’s Very funnyJan. Do you understand?

I thought about that interview while playing bad west, the new game from the master shooters from the Polish studio Flying Wild Hog. Evil West is an old-school action game that combines hand-to-hand combat with firearms; a hybrid not often seen in the modern age.

Set in an alternate version of the frontier lands of America’s Wild West, the story follows a secret vampire hunting order that has been dealing with an evolving threat for generations, while the government covers up their discoveries as viral outbreaks.

It’s a silly game, and he knows it, often reveling in his love of man vs. monster violence.

That setting only really exists as a justification for featuring a variety of monsters you can fight using era-appropriate weapons; they could easily have been zombies or aliens. It also allows a lot of freedom with technology, in the world. If you’re okay with the existence of vampires, you’ll probably be fine with electrically infused gauntlets and railgun upgrades for your lever-action rifle.

This is where Evil West is at its best and worst. When you’re done watching a cutscene, you’re thrown into restrictive levels made up of clear meeting areas, quiet zones where you have to search for collectibles, and the occasional puzzle that stands between you getting to either of those two areas.

Although the level designs aren’t always predictable, the way you navigate through them is. Painfully so. Like an Xbox 360 generation game, the designers expect you to move through those levels in a specific way: if they say you can’t go over this log, you won’t be able to. If they decide that you can easily jump between rocks to reach a hanging chain, your character will play the canned animation that does that. With the exception of one mission, you never have the freedom of how you want to explore the world.

Worse, the game doesn’t make it clear which areas block you and which allow you to move back. I usually like to exhaust all possible routes in a level before heading to the main objective, but you rarely know which is which in Evil West. The same place that allowed you to cover one way may decide that you can’t cover the other. Whether it’s due to a bug or it’s the intended behavior of the game, it makes going through missions frustrating. It’s like the game doesn’t want you to spend too much time poking around. Despite the secrets it hides.

I don’t necessarily find it unpleasant that the levels in Evil West are linear, it’s the way you are or are not allowed to move through them that is perplexing. Doom 2016 and its sequel share a similar approach to level design; you know when you are going to be in a fight and when you will be left alone. But those games allow you to “fail”; they allow you to chase down dead ends and end up somewhere you can’t get to yet because you don’t have a certain upgrade.

Evil West transports you too much to feel anything but a videogame; one that hides an archaic core beneath its modern imagery.

The redeeming quality of Evil West, and the one thing that will make or break it for many players, is the combat. It’s also the most thought-out component of the game, one that ramps up the excitement and difficulty throughout.

Things start out simple; you can punch, juggle, and launch enemies cannonball-style into conveniently placed hideouts and TNT spikes. Before long, he is taught to use a long-range rifle and quickly swing the revolver’s hammer to dispatch enemies that get too close.

Later, he is presented with a double-barreled shotgun which effectively completes his main arsenal. Ammo is constantly reloading, so you rarely worry about reloading. The way the buttons are mapped (on the controller, at least) is intuitive and helps keep the action fluid. The right trigger fires the revolver by default, or the stick action if pointed down. It takes the pressure off your brain and puts it on your fingers.

Evil West manages to keep all of his toys fresh during his relatively short run time by dishing them out one by one. As you play, you’ll see that some items on your HUD are blocked, suggesting that something is going to fill them at some point. This keeps the combat interesting, because you know something good will unlock later to give you an advantage. It also allows you plenty of time to get familiar with what you already have and to map out a path in their respective upgrade trees.

Each of the main weapons can be upgraded with the money earned by leveling up and scattered all over the world in caches, chests and… on the corpses of some of the hanged people you come across. Instead, character upgrades are gained through perks, with a limited number of perk points available.

In general, some upgrades offer clear linear improvements, while others allow for more significant variations to your repertoire. Since he has more perk slots than points, Evil West does the right thing by allowing him to re-spec freely, and quite early in the game as well.

However, the combat flow is an area that would benefit from some post-launch work. There are different elements at play that could make things unnecessarily chaotic, especially when you’re up against different types of enemies that require a certain amount of focus to take them down.

Fodder can be thrown at larger opponents, easily interrupted with a discharge from his electric gauntlet, and quickly stunned. This opens them up for a Doom-like glory kill.

The larger enemies, however, do indeed have layers of defense that you need to break through. Depending on the enemy, you may need to destroy shields before you can deal any real damage, while others swing their weapons so fast that you need to interrupt them with a kick to keep the damage in check.

Some encounters can be nail-biting thrills as you teeter on the brink of death waiting for your healing ability to recharge. Others are a test of endurance more than anything, killing that momentum. Constantly trying to dodge off-screen projectiles while facing off against three shielded enemies who push you into a corner… is antithetical to electric action elsewhere.

Having played the entire game solo, I felt like some fights were balanced with co-op in mind. This is also true for certain bosses, but the game thankfully marks checkpoints in each boss phase. Outside of bosses, the autosave frequency is unusually irregular. The game will tell you how long ago it was autosave, which, while welcome, does expose a problem.

Evil West just doesn’t save as often as you think it should, and I often kept playing just to get to the next big scene or moment, because I didn’t want to repeat the last 12 minutes.

It’s these kinds of baffling issues and design decisions that add unnecessary friction for a game with this style of action.

It took me about 13 hours to roll the credits, since I missed half a dozen collectibles. If you search for each sack of money or piece of history, I would imagine it will take you an hour or so to finish. I appreciate shorter games more and more these days, but I doubt everyone interested in Evil West sees it that way. However, Flying Wild Hog clearly wants you to replay all the levels.

You can easily restart missions from the menu, and the game clearly shows which collectibles you missed so you can go back to find them. I imagine people fascinated by the game’s combat will opt for a New Game + game instead, or start a higher difficulty run in a separate save slot.

If you manage to convince a friend to buy it, you can play co-op together, but there’s no matchmaking or crossplay, so your only option is to convince a friend to buy something that isn’t cheap. It’s already a hard sell, especially once you learn that only the host progresses.

Regardless of how you feel about Evil West, the starting price of $50/$60 is far too high for what’s on offer – the nature of its level design, limited variety of enemies, and forgettable story will all get in the way of your enjoyment, even if You’re only there for the fight. As attractive as it is, that action just doesn’t make up for Evil West’s shortcomings elsewhere.

Evil West is out tomorrow, November 22.

Tested version: PC. Review code provided by the publisher. Also available on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.