The Evil Within

The Evil Within excels at keeping your palms sweaty while delivering a harrowingly rewarding gameplay trial. Watching the credits roll with a sigh of relief doesn’t feel like winning; it feels like surviving.

Mikami is back, with a game that reminds of Resident Evil 4, with a touch of Silent Hill and The Last of Us. It's long, hard, fun and challenging, a game you cannot miss if you enjoyed RE4.

Tango Gameworks have successfully ticked all the right boxes when it comes to the survival-horror genre and The Evil Within is one of those must play titles.

A brutal, challenging, and remarkably fun game. Its eerie world and imaginative enemies are genuinely frightening, and the scares are heightened significantly by the scarcity of resources at your disposal.

With The Evil Within, Shinji Mikami hits the spot once more. It rises as the best option in both next and past generation horror games. It fulfills the expectation that had been building up, with no fear of looking back to retrieve that successful formula that gave birth to genre classics like Resident Evil or Silent Hill.

With its dirty and stressful universe, its wonderful artistic direction and the impressive bosses, Tango Gameworks' game teaches a lesson to Capcom's Resident Evil. A true sequel to Resident Evil 4, believe us.

The Evil Within is a great rollercoaster ride with every location you expect from a horror movie. Brutal, crazy and full of action.

It’s not easy, today, to scare the gamers offering a real survival horror experience. The Evil Within can sometimes achieve this goal adding in the mix the atypical Japanese flavour.

This is undoubtedly a divisive game, with players likely to adore and hate it in equal measure. However, that's The Evil Within's strength: it's pitched perfectly at fans of the horror genre. [Issue#250, p.56]

It's a powerful survival horror experience that I won't soon forget.

It's worth playing through at least once — and if you're into it, again with New Game +.

Bold and brutal, it has the guts to stay true to its horror roots without feeling outdated. [Christmas 2014, p.58]

It's lean, with few repeated ideas, and boasts one of the best save rooms you'll ever experience. [Christmas 2014, p.88]

A solid adventure and a music for horror fans out there who want to play a game which could be described as RE4’s spiritual successor as mentioned earlier.

The Evil Within is a dark and grim place that completely succeeds in bringing its hellish world to your TV screen with squeamish sound effects to boot.

For all the games’ narrative themes of consciousness-probing, identity-subsuming science, the reordering of the psychic self for a greater application of the flesh, I needed to look no further than my own pathological gameplay in its honour. The rage quits, the restarts, the late nights, the infinitesimal adjustments to my thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth attempts, all part of my drive to survive to the end, no matter how many hours of hell it took.

By sticking to tried and tested survival horror staples, The Evil Within effectively creates a sense of tension and fear, something which makes the descent into darkness all the more terrifying.

For better or worse, The Evil Within is essentially Mikami’s survival horror greatest hits.

The Evil Within is a game to respect and cherish, one made by a creator, Shinji Mikami, who is not afraid to learn new things, but is more interested in refining what he knows how to do best.

Even with a plot that never meets its potential, the beautifully designed enemies, superb gameplay and terrifying environments all come together to give horror fans a fascinating, memorable experience.

The Evil Within isn't without some glaring shortcomings, but overall, this is survival horror at its most brutally rewarding. A triumphant return for Shinji Mikami.

Great return to a classic recipe for the man who brought us Resident Evil.

A spiritual successor of Resident Evil 4, and a game that distinguishes itself by taking some distance from the action packed shooters, and returning to the survival roots of the genre. Definitely a Mikami game through and through.

The Evil Within will give survival horror purists a rare contemporary pleasure fix. But be warned: if you prize smooth, silky action above all else, it will drive you insane.

The Evil Within could be leaner and more technically sound, but the blemishes on its blood-stained carapace fade against its thick atmosphere and the frantic thrill of battling its monsters in the dark.

Even with all of the convoluted stuff surrounding them, there are at least a hundred good ideas in The Evil Within. Not two levels are alike, no bullet is wasted, not one minute is boring. When this enormous, visually stunning nightmare comes to an end, it leaves you deeply satisfied. That’s no small feat.

The Evil Within becomes less of a game and more of a haunted house ride, where you just roll with the changes and wait for the scares.

The Evil Within is a varied, deep, challenging and long game. Shinji Mikami and Tango Gameworks scare us, they mix puzzles and third person shooting in a reborn survival horror that is visually poor. The Keeper, the Alpha mastodon and other ugly deformed will make you have nightmares.

Survival Horror at its best. Old style gameplay, for a distressing and surreal adventure.

Smartly aiming for psychological horror over cheap jump scares, it gets under the skin and effects the psyche. Unfortunately, it falls into the modern trappings of boasting too much firepower (Sebastian can look more like Rambo than a detective) at the cost of stealth and intelligence. Still, this is a bold and seductive experience that is seen too infrequently from major publishers these days.

Despite borrowing a lot of well-worn themes from other games and movies (Hello, creepy shop mannequins from Silent Hill), The Evil Within feels fresh and exciting. It’s easy to recommend to fans of the original Dead Space and the earlier Resident Evil games.

While The Evil Within doesn’t quite reach the iconic Resident Evil 4‘s level of brilliance or scariness, this is a satisfyingly gruesome adventure.

The horrible feeling that creeps over your skin as you play makes you want to stop, but the gameplay is good enough that you’ll keep going regardless. If you’re fed up of where Resident Evil is at, then The Evil Within might be the foul-smelling breath of fetid air you are craving, even if it might have benefited from being a tighter, leaner affair.

If not for the unfortunate frustrating points, which really take you out of the bleak atmosphere, I would say this would set the bar for horror excellence. Unfortunately, these small drawbacks will cause you to frequently put the game down, and that simply doesn’t mesh with a horror tone.

Hard, dirty, but definitively brilliant, The Evil Within marks Shinji Mikami's return in Survial Horror genre, with talent. Prepare yourselves: you will suffer.

It's a game that expertly sustains a feeling of dread, and knows when to ratchet up the feeling of being utterly overwhelmed, first slowly then suddenly in a way that induces sheer panic, much like Resi 4 before it. But detective Sebastian Castellanos is no Leon S. Kennedy.

The return to his creative roots mutates to a “best-of-Mikami”-showcase, sacrificing fresh ideas on the way, resulting in decent survival horror that can’t compete with the likes of Silent Hill, Outlast or Alien Isolation.

Shinji Mikami has managed to steer the survival horror genre back on course with an extremely tense and ridiculously bloody tale. [Christmas 2014, p64]

Extremely gory, at times damn creepy and masterfully designed... but also unbalanced, confusing and relying on trial & error throughout most of its admittedly long runtime.

The Evil Within is a case of mission accomplished, but there are some casualties. The game is challenging and has a creepy feel to it, but the voice acting is bad, some locations just don't seem right, and the story loses its strength along the way.

The Evil Within is a fine example of classic survival horror, but it's held back a little by some stiff characterisation and flat story beats.

The long awaited Mikami comeback to the survival horror is an interesting but ultimately flawed and frustrating experience. Great atmosphere, but it's not enough.

After a clumsy opening, The Evil Within hits its stride towards the end and the fist act and the tension rarely lets up. [Christmas 2014, p.114]

The Evil Within returns to the horror genres roots and becomes a rather surprising breath of fresh air of action in a horror climate where the players are usually mostly helpless. The game may be more cozy spooky than terrifying but the problem lies more in its graphical shortcomings and the flat story. Likewise Shinji Mikami is still a better game designer than most even when he's not bringing his best.

What it does at its core it does so well that all those issues floating on the periphery eventually fade away to reveal a satisfying if slightly blemished return to classic survival horror.

Overall, the Evil Within is solid and it definitely has some great moments, but poorly-implemented mechanics and a bland story bring down the overall package. Survival horror fans should pick it up, but others may want to wait until the price drops a bit.

The Evil Within offers the right horror atmosphere with strong gameplay and lots of challenges. That makes it extra unfortunate that the story is weak, the camera is annoying and there are lots of bugs.

The Evil Within is the game Resident Evil 5 should have been. The problem is that in the last 5 years videogames have evolved and some gameplay solutions have become obsolete.

Despite The Evil Within's attempts to mimic RE4, it plays like a game that preceded RE4 instead. It has many minor flaws, annoying problems and nagging issues that its spiritual predecessor didn't have.

The Evil Within is an example of a great idea that lacks execution. There are scares a-plenty and very often, the fear factor is sky-high. The pacing and variety we see in this adventure are worthy of praise as well, and I appreciate how the atmosphere continually drags you into the experience. But with a decidedly outdated feel, difficulty that too often feels cheap rather than fair, old-fashioned AI and a sub-par camera, one can’t help but be moderately disappointed.

It takes a few chapters, but even if this horror is far from a true one, eventually, it is able to move you by its elegant action, and to impress you by some of its juicy moments. Roots cannot be renounced here, however, they are restraining it to no avail.

Despite letting some of its most compelling aspects die off, The Evil Within is still worth a shot for bringing some unique ideas in the first place, and giving us a new way to think about survival horror.

Unfair difficulty spikes swap out the title’s pervading sense of fear for outright frustration at times, while technical issues undo the developer’s outstanding art direction. Thankfully, legendary director Shinji Mikami doesn’t disappoint in the gameplay department, forcing you to get creative with your plentiful combat options due to an unending absence of resources.

In the last few chapters The Evil Within finally becomes what it was set out to be: a disturbingly creepy, challenging survival horror game. But in the 10+ hours before that it's too often a frustratingly unfair, aimless mess, in which the technical issues and the old-fashioned development-tropes are not only an eyesore, but a nuisance as well. Survival horror? More like Trial & 'Terror'.​

When the game works, it is fantastic. Unfortunately, the rest of it feels average and frustratingly built to make players fail. While obsessive collectors might see replay value in New Game+, the story and gameplay simply aren't compelling enough to warrant more than the original 20 hours for completion.

The Evil Within has great moments where the excellent combat and creepy environmental design come together. But those moments are fleeting, inevitably sapped of their delightful terror by design choices that feel trapped in the glory days of a decade ago.

Good old-fashioned action horror will please Resident Evil 4 fans especially. Anyone won’t be pleased with his technical errors. [Issue#247]

Overall, it’s a shame that the final game feels like a missed opportunity to bring the survival horror genre back into the spotlight. Between the poor story and characters, familiar elements from other games and the problems I had during my playthrough, it seems as though The Evil Within is content to live in the past instead of than drawing inspiration from it and moving forward.

The best thing to say about The Evil Within is that it is a good survival game with some decent mechanics, the worst thing I can say is that it is a poor horror game that doesn’t live up to its design or the talent of the director.

Rather than the future of survival horror this is merely a retread of its defining moments, and even then it rarely manages to equal what has gone before – let alone exceed it.

The Evil Within is a noble attempt at bringing back classic survival horror, but it could have learned a thing or two from games that aren't almost ten years old. It has its moments of brilliance, scattered through periods of antagonizing design.

It’s an atmospheric slog with some cool art direction, granted (although its anemic, somewhat confused mad science story doesn’t add much on that front). But it’s a slog nonetheless, constantly punishing the player for not reading its mind. Dying in a game isn’t scary — almost dying is. The Evil Within, however, never figures that out.

Evil Within just plain doesn't give you a fair chance to succeed. It doesn't provide enough information for you to make good decisions and it handicaps your ability to fight well. It requires so much repetition that it can't possibly maintain any sense of tension or unease, and its story is told so aimlessly that you'll likely forget the plot between scenes.