When I think about what the real world would be like if it was overrun by vampires, werewolves, and zombie-like corpses, this imaginary apocalypse doesn’t quite give me the maniacal giggles of Evil West. From the Tesla-inspired electricity weapons to the gratuitous blood and gore, this old-school action game was some of the funnest monster-slaying I’ve done in a while; unfortunately, its formulaic structure also makes it one of the most repetitive.
Evil West’s approximately 12-hour linear campaign is spread over 16 different missions that all follow the same format. Each level has a clear start and end point with collectibles sprinkled along the way, broken up by hordes of enemies assailing you until you get a dialogue break during the next cutscene. While you’re technically free to explore the levels a bit to find lore items or bags of gold, aka “bucks” to buy upgrades, the crux of your adventure is walking from one fight to the next. other and finally finish the missions with a boss battle. Fortunately, the environments between each combat engagement are truly sights to behold with enough picturesque backdrops ranging from the extravagant to the beautiful to make even the grumpiest cowboy shed a tear.
Screenshots of Evil West Steam
Evil West’s leveling formula rarely gets mixed up, except for a few unique situations like the odd mine cart segment or the handful of times you wander around the base camp while in the spooning exposition. Its story puts you in control of Jesse Rentier of The Rentier Institute, an organization founded by Jesse’s father to hunt down and eradicate all manner of vampires and other vile beasts. Developer Flying Wild Hogs really latched onto the whole “Wild West, but Weird” idea and ran away screaming. You have floating illuminati pyramids, portals to hell, and demonic girls with skin-shredding voices. It’s a tale full of funny exclamations and really distinct characters, such as the fiercely opinionated Dr. Emilia Blackwell, so there’s never a dull moment; I just wish the story as a whole was more sophisticated than Jesse just chasing down some bad people for revenge. .
Throughout Evil West you’ll gradually unlock new weapons, powers and upgrades that alter Jesse’s abilities in new and fun ways. For example, you can increase the number of shots your pistol fires in a single magazine, boost your rifle with electrical damage, and even add new abilities like ground pounds and aerial combos to further evolve your arsenal. The way the combat unfolds always helps break up the monotonous level designs of Evil West. There’s rarely a period of time longer than 20 minutes where you won’t unlock a new ability, augment an existing weapon with a new effect, or find an entirely new gadget to dismember enemies in glorious ways.
Evil West on Steam Deck
During the review period, Evil West was still listed as “Not Supported” on the Steam Deck, but it likely hadn’t been released and hadn’t been certified yet. Although I mostly played on my desktop computer, I found that I much preferred using a gamepad instead of a mouse and keyboard. The UI is clearly designed to mirror a controller layout for quick reference, and some commands, like throwing enemies at you with the power gauntlet, feel awkward on a keyboard.
To that end, I decided to install it on my Steam Deck (I’m using the 512GB model) and try it anyway. You have to use the touch screen or touchpad to install some Unreal Engine compatible files on the first release, but it worked great after that. It’s already optimized for controller support, so the entire UI has changed immediately to gamepad prompts.
At first, the acting was a bit all over the place. Framerates dropped to the low 20s on Epic or High settings, but after turning off motion blur (lol), leaving V-Sync on, and dropping to medium settings, it was much better, hovering around 40-60fps per second Finally, I chose to set a frame limit of 40 FPS in the Steam Deck performance settings menu for the most consistent performance. This wasn’t too bad, although my RTX 2060 Super desktop PC was able to play smoothly at 60fps without stuttering at high settings the vast majority of the time.
In addition to this constant evolution, the combat has a frenetic flow that feels great on the move. You can zoom around the map and stun enemies and then rack up a melee combo, slash them in mid-air and jump to smash them back into a puddle of blood and guts. Or you can load your rifle with a high-powered beam of electricity that bounces off enemies before unleashing your flamethrower to finish them off. It’s a ridiculous selection of weapons that’s easy to swap out on the fly, as almost every piece of gear has its own dedicated button and cooldown timer – there’s no ammo or bullets to keep track of. You can just wait for things to recharge while you use something else.
The only part of the combat that got a little boring at the end of Evil West was the lack of enemy variety. Slow-moving zombies with large wind swings never pose a challenge, and even the most aggressive shield-wielding monstrosities lack strength after the first few fights. It can even be hard to tell what’s going on during the more chaotic battles because all the enemies bleed together (pun intended) and they all end up looking the same shades of blood and mud. (It doesn’t help that the notification arrow to let you know someone is attacking is relatively subtle and easy to miss in the middle of things.)
Enemy reuse is also especially noticeable when dealing with larger health sponge enemies, as Evil West likes to copy and paste former boss baddies into later levels as mini-bosses. Sometimes these enemies even attack in packs in subsequent encounters, which is pure mayhem and, admittedly, a veritable symphony of violence. But since each combat encounter is basically just a circular arena that you dodge and look at as you fight, this bunch of big health bars could wear on my patience after a while. With no jump button or variety in how combat encounters are laid out, every fight ends up being the same puddle of goo even with the creative arsenal at your disposal.
That’s not to say that jumping into that (gross) goo wasn’t fun, it just means that this is simply the kind of game you start when you don’t want to think. It’s repetitive, predictable, and unoriginal in many ways, but I found myself not caring because I really enjoyed killing monsters anyway. In this regard, Evil West shares much of the same DNA as Flying Wild Hog’s previous chaotic action game, Shadow Warrior 3even if the genre is completely different – both games reduce what matters most to obfuscate many other areas that are lacking.