Evil West | Gentlemen leeches, good evening!

[adaur]

As the late François Cavanna wrote about the late David Douillet (I never know which celebrities have died), judo may have given the little guy the ability to knock the big guy down, but when the big guy takes up judo, he wins. In the same way, if Colt made men equal, Jesse Rentier remains the biggest cowboy in the West, because in addition to a six-shooter, he has big arms and a huge iron glove.

No, Jesse is no ordinary cowboy. Instead of drinking bad whiskey, fighting bad boys and sleeping with bad women, he works for his father's foundation, the Rentier Institute, whose noble mission is to kill vampires and other abominations that swarm the American West. Yes, you've seen, we've gone from Rockefeller to Twilight in an instant. Or rather to Carpenter's Vampires, because like James Woods, Jesse Rentier has a vast array of weapons to fight the forces of evil. In addition to the huge iron glove that will be used to deliver most of the punches, you will carry on your aching back a rifle, a revolver, a flamethrower, a shotgun, a gatling and a crossbow. Add to that various gadgets that can paralyze enemies or teleport you to them (or teleport them to you, for that matter) as well as active skills and upgrades for your weapons and you'll have an idea of the amount of tactical options available in battle.



It's a good thing, because there will be fights. In fact, that's all there will be. The levels of the game, whose linearity would make La Linea look like a Jackson Pollock, are only there to take the player from one arena to another, with at best some rare optional detours of ten or twenty meters to pick up a bonus. The first of these arenas, moreover, are a bit disappointing. Even if it's fun to stick big fairground potatoes to Lovecraftian horrors that you're more likely to fight with heavy weapons - especially since the feeling of the blows is very, very, very good (I hope you like low frequencies and cracking bones) -, the fights are so simple that you get bored.

But quickly, when big monsters start to appear that you can only knock out after having taken the risk of approaching to break their guard in close combat, when it becomes necessary to use teleportation powers and combos to keep control of very complex situations, when the arsenal grows and you have to juggle with a dozen or so attacks to deal with a constantly changing situation (the rifle to break enemy attacks, the flamethrower to keep a pack at bay, the rifle or the crossbow for attacks of opportunity from a distance against weak points that only appear for a few moments... ), we think that for its first beat'em all, Flying Wild Hog has been well inspired.

A good and efficient B-series.

In the west, something new. However, we can feel that the studio took advantage of the experience accumulated on Shadow Warrior 3. The permanent yoyo of life points, the killmoves that are used to recover life or energy charges, all this is very close to the arena fights of their last game (which pumped everything from Doom, but that's another subject) and is not very original, but has the merit of proving that the system works just as well in a third-person brawler as in an FPS. Evil West also proves that shitty writing is not a fatality. Maybe it's the Trek to Yomi effect, I don't know, but in any case, after three episodes of supporting Lo Wang's fart jokes, we finally get, against all odds, a properly written game. Of course, it's not great literature, it won't provoke in you any Malwarian outbursts about "this Japanese masterpiece that made Shakespeare's pen shine on the land of the rising sun" or whatever, but it's a good and efficient B-movie. The pitch is already amusing: the vampires decide to come out of the shadows and attack, fearing that the technical progress of the 19th century industrial era will make humanity too powerful and that the bloodsuckers will turn from predators to prey. Not to spoil anything, the characters are endearing and the world building brought in a very subtle way by the dialogues. As for the staging, from the terrifying (yes, really) vampire leader to some passages rich in spiders, leeches and illusions, it has quite a few striking moments.



Not everything is rosy in the Great West. The game suffers from some occasional bugs and the levels, besides being atrociously linear, are stuffed with invisible walls and cut into mini-segments connected by bottlenecks (slipping under a door, jumping over a precipice...) that prevent you from going back or exploring as you would like to in this intriguing world and its environments. We feel that the finishing touches are a bit limited and that Flying Wild Hog may not have had the means to achieve the ambitions they had for this game - which, by the way, is their first title sold at the high price of 50 €. That's the paradox of Evil West: it's so nice that you wish it was more than what it is.











Evil West is certainly a bit rigid and directional, and won't revolutionize the history of slaughter. But it will provide to rendering fans very well thought fights, halfway between Darksiders and Doom Eternal, in levels full of visual finds, carried by a rather nice B story.

What do you think?

Genre: 3rd person action
Developer: Flying Wild Hog (Poland)
Publisher: Focus Interactive
Available Platforms: Windows, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series
Test platform: Windows
Download : 25 GB
Languages : English with French subtitles
Price: 50 € for the game