Video Game Review: The Evil Within 2

This is going to hurt, in pretty much every way you can imagine. So, let's get started.

This is the sequel to 2014's The Evil Within. Which followed Detective Sebastian Castellanos as he answers a call for help at Beacon Mental Institution only to be sucked into a diabolical experiment called STEM. He survives, and breaks the system, but the main villain escapes.

The Evil Within 2 returns to Detective Castellanos with a brand new STEM system. And that's really the only connection to the first game. There are a few other returning characters, and flashbacks to the first game, but the story otherwise has nothing to do with the first game.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. The Evil Within 2 stands well on it's own merits, with lots of tension, jump scares, and run-and-gun action. To say the game doesn't stand out would be remiss as well, there's lots of mind-fuckery as well as several things we haven't really seen in mainstream horror games.

What stands out the most is the open-world levels, fairly unique for a horror game. You have your mission, your objective markers, but the levels are fairly big, with side missions and other things scattered around for you to find on your own, if you're so inclined. You can still race through and claim the objectives and ignore everything else, but you can take hours to scour every unlocked house, rescue a few stragglers, discover extra weapons caches, and things like that.

Unfortunately, the praise kind of stops there. Not that there's a lot that's wrong with the game, but it's just kind of...standard? Nothing else really stands out. Not the enemies, not the weapons, not the levels themselves despite being open, explorable, areas.

I'm going to reiterate this, it's not a bad game. It's actually a fun, scary, well-made horror game. It's just very, very heavy with missed opportunities, and you feel it at just about every corner. Especially compared to the first game.

So let's start there. What's missing from the first game? The ability to burn bodies on the ground for a start. It's noticeable because you find a LOT of enemies laying prone on the ground, waiting for some kind of signal to get up and attack. It was one of the great tricks of the first game. Not all the bodies on the ground were enemies waiting to jump you, and you had a limited number of matches to use. It was one of the things that set The Evil Within apart from games like Resident Evil. Also, the first game used hordes of enemies to great effect, putting extreme pressure on you even in large areas with your limited amount of ammo.

Lastly, the traps. The traps were strewn throughout the first game. They were one of it's hallmarks. You could disarm them for weapon parts for the game's crafting system, or lure enemies into them. Or you could walk into them and die, too. Yes, The Evil Within 2 is in a different setting, but all the different kinds of traps, right from the very beginning is what really set the game apart, and to not have them in the next game just feels, wrong.

And that pretty much sums up the game for me. It's fun, it's scary, it's a great game in and of itself, but as a sequel, it's just wrong. All the directions they could have gone in, they picked ones that almost completely separate the sequel from the game it's following up on.

Still, we can probably expect some downloadable content in the future, so maybe they can fix a few things with that.