Evil Within: The Executioner, The (Video Game)
Developed by Tango Gameworks
Available on PC (reviewed), PS4, and XBox One
Rated M for Mature
Do you remember the first time you watched The Phantom Menace? I was 10, and though too young to fully comprehend the monumental slip in quality, I knew by the gaunt faces of grown men and silence in the theater that something terrible had happened. The Evil Within: The Executioner is a fourth part to a franchise, a split from the main series, removes all of the soul of the original, and brings the series to new almost unfathomable lows. It is The Evil Within’s Phantom Menace.
I want to go back for a second and talk about the previous reviews I have done for The Evil Within. When the game came out, it was the first major horror release on the new consoles. Yes, Outlast existed, but that wasn’t a next gen game, don’t pretend. This was supposed to be the return of the scary game, and true horror classic that would be loved and respected long into the future. I was still relatively new to this whole “professional critic” thing at the time, and was afraid to give it a perfect score. I remember the emotion at the time, the desire to boot up again and unlock all the extra guns and tell the world about my sublime experience. In retrospect, I was a bit overzealous, swept up in the fervor and delight of a quality horror release. If I were to rate the game now, I would give it a 4, as it has since been pointed out that the game did indeed make no fucking sense.
As for the DLC, The Assignment and The Consequence both still stand up as phenomenal. The gameplay is different, and surmounts the Herculean task of making the plot make sense. It was a thundering entrance for John Johanas, who has proven himself to be someone to respect in the industry by standing shoulder to shoulder with the giant Shinji Mikami. The next time one of his games is on the horizon, I will stare into that sun and go blind with anticipation.
As a package, the three are as close to an impeccable horror game as you can get without being named Resident Evil 4. And here is The Executioner, putting his swampy dick straight in my mouth and holding my nose until I choke on it. Make no mistake, this expansion is fucking bad. I will not be wishy-washy about this and give the whole “if you look at the positives” half assed apologetic review so that fans don’t blast me. I am the fucking fans for this game, I have put up with questions and explained the plot and created my own theories, and I have played Akumu mode. If you think this is just someone that doesn’t get the series giving a bad review, you should check your privilege, because clearly you are a galactic space emperor with no concept of how the common folk can appreciate things without buying the whole planet it was made on.
Oh The Executioner let me count the ways you fuck me. Well, right off the bat, you play through The Executioner as the character named “The Keeper”. Im sorry game, was the name “The Keeper” not good enough for you? Was the man with a dial safe for a head, a person sized meat tenderizer, sack of body parts, and barbed wire landmines not murdery enough for you? Did you have to hammer home that he also executed people? It makes sense in the respect that yes, you do execute people in the game, but you also executed people in the original game and the DLC. It wouldn’t have ruined my experience if the DLC was good, but luckily, it is just the first monumental nonsense oversight in a series of many.
If you were playing The Evil Within and thought, “Wow, this would be much better as a first-person melee brawler,” then please stop reading. I’m not sure how you made it this far into the article given your illiteracy and fear of loud colors, but go buy it, because this is the DLC for you. The Executioner manages to deprive the game of all tension by 1) putting you in the role of the keeper, an unkillable beast monster from the original game, and 2) putting the camera in first person and reducing the combat to unstoppable hammer smashes.
They don’t change any of the textures, mind you. The previous installments are in third person, which gives some leeway in texture detail since you never really see anything that clearly. You are free to develop the overall ambiance and grand environments because you never really look at things like chairs or handrails that closely. But oh man, does this look bad. You know when you are watching someone play a fake video game in a movie, where they clearly just took a bunch of assets from generic stock and threw them together without care of looking like an actual game? That is what this whole game looks like. I never realized how bad this game looked until I was forced to look at every enemy, every barrel, every wall and door knob in nauseating fuzzy closeup.
As for the story, the long expository sequences of the original are replaced with must-collect-to-proceed files and two text-on-still-frame cutscenes. That is the video game equivalent proposing at a monster truck rally: only impressing the most basic and a half-assed no thought plan that makes everyone else uncomfortable. You are given the information that your daughter is kidnapped, and only by fighting through a bunch of people can you save her. Ruvik comes in at some point because of name recognition, and it never fleshes out because they stopped caring.
But hey, you missed Condemned, right? We all miss beating homeless people to death with bricks! First-person hammer fights sound badass, right? When we think melee combat, we think visceral hits, parries, dodges, and executes. We expect variety and skill to play in, rather than sitting behind cover and popping out when they reload. In The Executioner, your only options are hit, running hit, grab, and execute. That is really it. You have 6 weapons you can cycle through (maybe 7, I haven’t unlocked the “secret” weapon yet), consisting of a hammer, molotov, dynamite, chainsaw, sword, and rocket launcher. Is there some big fundamental difference between the hammer, sword, and chainsaw? Well, the chainsaw and strangely sword use ammo, so unless you want to spend the game’s currency of coins to reload them, then the game becomes Bland Hammer Simulator 2015.
The entire 45-minute chapter consists of walking between maybe 7 rooms from the original The Evil Within and fighting a boss in an arena from one of 5 more rooms. I didn’t go back and count, because it really doesn’t matter. It is bland, repetitive, and devoid of any creative direction. Every boss is a boss that you fought before in the main game. You hit your enemy with your hammer until they are staggered, then you either grab and throw or execute them. The executes look pretty cool, but at this point gruesome kills are hardly unique. Other than the perspective, there is nothing at all new here.
It is seriously a straight line from boss arena to boss arena. If that wasn’t enough, they don’t even trust me enough to remember how to kill the final boss from the main game. The final boss of the DLC is *SPOILER ALERT* yourself. If you didn’t remember that you killed him by crushing him in a spike trap, then you are in luck, because they show you again when you walk into the final boss room! *END SPOILER ALERT* Seriously, fuck that. The only joy I could have possibly gotten out of this DLC was figuring out the boss puzzles, and you couldn’t even give me that. The only other boss that could even remotely be considered as a puzzle is the one you kill with turrets, which was spoiled by the giant spear turrets everywhere.
There are bugs galore, including a terrible weapon swap system and questionable ability to go through doors, but bugs only detract from a good game. For a bad game, they are just expected. This DLC does not rise above crap in any aspect. You weren’t even trying, were you Tango? Someone in upper management asked what the game would look like in first person, an underling made this to illustrate that this was a bad idea, and big ol’ cartoony dollar signs popped out of the eyes of Bethesda executives when they realized they could sell this as DLC. It feels like a sloppy half life mod. The krypt from Mortal Kombat X was a more in depth adventure game than this, and with better textures. If you have the season pass, take an hour to play through it and unlock the extras. If you are wondering if you should spend five dollars on this, don’t.
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Game
Categorized:Horror Gaming Reviews
