Play Your Heart Out: “Evil West”

Evil West is a third person action-adventure game developed by Flying Wild Hog studios and published by Focus Entertainment. It was released on Nov. 22, 2022, and is available to play on Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S, Playstation 4 and 5, and Microsoft Windows platforms.

Evil West’s main premise is how it is obviously a western and it is set in a universe where vampires of different kinds exist. These vampires are killing humans all across the Western United States. Jesse Rentier is part of a line of vampire hunters. As Rentier, your quest is to eliminate the vampire threat and restore peace to the United States.   

In the game, there are multiple ways to go about attacking vampires. You have a custom six-shot revolver that is good for close range, a custom rifle good for long range, a “boomstick” sawed off shotgun that relies on a cooldown available once every several seconds, a gauntlet that has an electroshock function, and a punch function which is good for close range. There is no ammo count, which is a little unusual for this kind of game, but it works.

Often the combat seems monotonous as you progress through the game. Also, as you progress, you keep unlocking newer ways of attacking. Of the attacks I mentioned, they are all equipped at once.  This makes you a walking battle tank.  To fire the pistol, you either tap or hold in the right trigger, hold the left trigger and press the right trigger to fire the rifle, etc.  In other words, of the 10 or more different attacks, you don’t have to reconfigure your active gear, you don’t have to swap out any weapons.  On the downside it makes combat much harder to figure out the best gun to use for the moment.

The gameplay is linear as opposed to open world, reminding me a little bit of the game series Gears of War, a popular game franchise for the Xbox systems. Also, Evil West is rumored to take about 12 hours to finish.

This is a fun game, but not a great game. The vampire killing gets monotonous and repetitive. If I had to play this for 30 or 60 hours, I might throw in the towel. Games like this are ones where you finish the 12-hour campaign and never play again. However, it is still worth completing once.

I give the game a rating of 7/10.