The Evil Within 2 - Game Analysis (Major Spoilers)

I've finally finished The Evil Within 2. I was so thrilled when I saw the game's announcement trailer earlier in the year. It's been three years since the first game and I had no idea a sequel was in the works. It was up in the air if we were even going to have a sequel due to the poor sales of the first game. Sales figures mind you, that don't reflect the product: horror games are a hard sell anyway, it's a niche genre, people as a general consensus would rather watch horror than interact with it.

So, it was fantastic to see that Bethesda had commissioned a sequel and that it was to release in this very year! Very unheard of, a release trailer for a game coming out that year. No need for the hype train, I was sold as soon as you showed me.

Please note this article does include some major spoilers for the game and it's story.

So, how does TEW2 stack up against it's predecessor? The two it seems, have less in common than what you'd think. TEW2 moves away from the first, overhauling the story, tweaking the core gameplay mechanics and just going for a general different feel. TEW1 was criticised for it's characters and story but what people saw as underdeveloped I saw as mystery and intrigue. I didn't need to know Sebastian's, Kidman's and Joseph's backstory to feel any connection to the characters, you strap in for the ride and you enjoy the push and pull narrative. Learning that Kidman was secretly working for Mobius was interesting, not shocking. Joseph's seemingly shot dead by Kidman, after struggling to resist losing himself was tense not heartbreaking. Really the whole point of TEW1 is you're supposed to lose sight of what is reality and what is STEM. The ending was so poignant of this, watching Lesley walk off, turning and practically winking at the camera. I'm Ruvik, it's brilliant! Part of the fear of the unknown is not understanding and TEW1 did a good job of keeping the player largely in the dark.

TEW2 on the other hand, seeks to give complete and utter transparency to the plot and characters. Almost every minute detail is explained so that only a few elements are unexplained and of them, they are not integral to understanding the game's story.

Before I delve deeper into the story side of things however, I rather start at the very essence of any videogame - the mechanics. On the surface things look largely the same but there are lots of little tweaks, additions and removals that have fundermentally changed the game and make it different from the first. The single greatest overhaul is stealth, to be honest generally for the better as stealth is much more important this time around. TEW1 had obligatory stealth sections that were not well received for good reason, TEW2 also has these sections only they're not as glaringly obtuse as before and when you consider that stealth actually makes up the majority of this game they had no choice but to improve it.

First and foremost the "eye" that appears at the top of screen operates in a sensible manner. Before, in TEW1 the eye would appear "searching" if you were near enemies and would change into the glaring eye if spotted. TEW2 only shows the "searching" eye when enemies are aware of you. It's immediately an extra layer, there's a big difference between spotted and not spotted and TEW2 bridges the two with a mechanic that should not have been absent from the first game.
It's important to implement this as it naturally affords the player an opportunity to flee before being completely overwhelmed. Like most stealth games once you're spotted every enemy in the vicinity can pin point you exact location so having this leeway really helps balance things out. The first game didn't have this and sometimes gauging enemy sight lines and what should and should not constitute as spotted, was vague and that was the basis of peoples frustrations with the first game's stealth.

Furthermore, Sebastian can now actually go into cover, previously you simply hid out view round a corner or something and used the camera to peek. Using cover for stealth is a far better option.
In TEW2, when Sebastian is in cover, he is also harder for enemies to spot, in that parts of him can be visible out of the cover but enemies don't detect him, and you can quick move from cover to cover with additional invisible frames. You can even upgrade Sebastian's abilities so that he can stealth kill an enemy from cover which is pretty handy as the developers have been a little bit devious this time around; most enemy patrol routes are away from cover and some enemies always look at the direction Sebastian is coming from irrespective of how alert they are. It's underhanded, I don't like it and it's a cheap method of increasing the difficulty of the game.

Ammo is the next gameplay overhaul, in that there is less collecting it and more crafting it. I saw a lot of comments that people foundTEW1 really stingy in the ammo department and a fair few people were restarting the entire game on easy just to get by sections they otherwise couldn't finish for lack of ammo. That's pretty damning I'll agree, but I have to say that wasn't my personal experience. Regardless, TEW2 has implemented the crafting system which is supposed to help the player stop hitting this road block whilst also not dolling out tons of ammo. But the cost of doing so away from a workbench is pretty extortionate, especially when you consider that the weapon balancing is all over the shop here.
I personally don't think the crafting system is very good here, it does work in the open world portions of the game but the actual majority of the game is linear. Being force to have to constantly go through a mirror to get to a workbench to make ammo is an inconvenience and a time waste. They could just of easily not included the mirror in the linear portions and instead trickled ammo to the player. You can still craft away from the mirror for that ridiculous cost, but if you are that stuck then it's at least there.

Enemies are next and initially the Lost are pretty good. Outnumbered and resource poor is a vunerable position to be in and the game plays this really well in Chapter 3 where you're sneaking around the town. The tensest moments I had in the entire game come from this chapter and y'know it's almost like a completely different game from what Evil Within is supposed to be. The Lost at their core are bog standard zombies, which is their initial strength but ultimate flaw. Chapter 3 is like playing a really good zombie survival game and it's wholly enjoyable (and I actually don't like the current zombie survival games). But once you get enough ammo, abilities and resources you turn into a one man army and what you end up doing is losing the tension and it devolves into a generic zombie shooter.

In comparison to the Haunted, I preferred them over the Lost. The Haunted were genuinely creepy, even when you had enough ammo to contend with them. They took a punch, some had creepy masks, they utilised all manner of weapons and if you wasn't quick enough with the matches to burn them, they'd get right back up again. They actually evolved through the game as well, gradually becoming more powerful and smarter under Ruvik's influence, using machine guns and explosives.
The Lost do not get more dynamic, instead about two thirds in they get a  reskin, HP buff and intermittently burst into flames; granting them immunity to stealth kills. Which doesn't make them any more interesting to fight, just irritating. In fact, the game even tries to tell you that these enemies are different to the lost. They're supposed to be followers of Theodore but why would the Lost follow anyone when they're all completely driven mad by the Anima? This is the story at odds with the gameplay in essence and it doesn't do the whole thing any favours.

Onto the bosses in the game and I have to say I wasn't especially impressed. Stefano's Obscura was perhaps the prize boss of the lot being equal parts creepy and deadly, and also had interesting encounters. The laughing amass of heads, looks grotesque but is just a bullet sponge fight, but most disappointing of all is the flame thrower boss and the weaker variants of itself. The boss is an absolute bullet sponge with horrendous AI. (I was able to cheese it around a desk with no issues first try) It's more formidable in the later chapters as an enemy in the open world section and only because cover is further apart and it's flamethrower attack has some extreme range. Though the only reason to confront them at this point is to repair the broken flamethrower you can get from the aforementioned boss version.

It's grief to kill two of them,
they're both bullet sponges which makes that option out of the question (unless you want to be ammo poor for the rest of the game) and both take around three stealth kills on normal difficulty. Which is not so straight forward as to compensate for their poor AI the Flamethrower disciples will auto-detect Sebastian when he is not in cover and when they are not doing around two frames of their flame spray animation. So you can muck about for hours trying to stealthily kill them or if you had the foresight to upgrade the warden crossbow's smoke bolts, you can repeatedly stealth attack them in a smoke cloud in relative safety and it's much quicker. Again, you have to cheese them to get anywhere near an even playing field. The bosses just aren't as creepy or interesting as TEW1's to be honest, and perhaps the developers felt this also as they included them for stand-in bosses for Theodore (what a cop out! We should have been the ones to deal with him!).

Even the final boss, Myra herself isn't that interesting to battle. It is hard to make a boss in a shooting game that is 'strategical' but you can at least make it cinematic as they did with Ruvik in TEW. Myra, whilst she looks absolutely amazing, amounts to little more than target practise. Shoot the glowing parts to do damage, it's like a carbon copy of Dead Space 1's Hive Mind boss, she even grabs Sebastian prompting a short timed section to shoot yourself free just like the aforementioned boss!
I don't see why they couldn't have made it more interesting?
The first technical encounter you have with Myra in the Marrow is treated as a stealth section and I think it would have been better to have done the same with Myra, mixing the shooting moments in. They did so much with the Stefano fight that each boss after feels so weak in comparison. Stefano had layers, he changed tactics as the battle went on. You have to be mindful of where he is, what the eye is doing, where any explosives have been planted and you can even use stealth to get a breather. No other boss fight is half as complex as Stefano and it really baffles me, I get a really strong vibe that after Stefano the game design struggled to keep in tone with the story, which results in the watered down experience post Stefano.
 

And lastly, what did I make of the story? Well, once the credits had rolled I didn't sit back and think "wow". I was left a little disappointed to be honest, people will probably disagree with me but hear me out. TEW1 had a great story, purposefully misdirecting and loose with discerning what is in fact real and what isn't. I enjoyed being hurtled along with Sebastian in the warped mind of a vengeful psychopath. What people saw as plotholes and inconsistences I saw as mystery. Sometimes knowing everything is a bad thing, the mystery is what makes things exciting and scary. TEW 2 has no mystery, therefore it's not exciting. The plot twists, or rather turns are so predictable you find yourself just going through the story motions. The most interesting and enigmatic character is killed off just over half way leaving us with a conventional villain who isn't half as compelling and that's partly due to the fact that as soon as Theodore appears we are told entirely what his plan is the reasoning for doing so amounts to "because I am a psychopath so I can". Either wrap your villain in mystery or do the effort and develop them in a way that makes them a compelling figure. Personally I like my villains a little more enigmatic, as again a lack of understanding goes hand in hand with fear.

Mobius, who went by almost unheard of in the original now get revealed as some sort of illuminati, controlling society from behind the scenes for centuries. Really TEW2? This was all you could think up? Mobius is uninteresting, you're just force fed this evil powerful corporate entity drivel and expected to despise them as much as the characters. Which is hard when you don't actually get to know any of the negative effects they've had on anyone beside Sebastian.
One of the biggest issues I have with Mobius is their grand plan. If I'm understanding the story correctly, Mobius are going to have everyone in the entire world connected to the STEM where they will live in a picturesque town that's essentially perfect. Job stability, security and all that good stuff. So what's so evil about this? Outside of "they wan't to control us" they actually don't have any evil reason to be doing what they're doing and why would you even hide in the shadows with this sort of technology? People would probably cue up for the opportunity to be a part of a virtual world where life is made perfect.
The only two things wrong with STEM is that psychopaths are able to corrupt the world if they assume control of it and that for some reason, due to our own self hatred, loathing and fears we turn into zombies... It's really bizarre and the writers are trying far too hard to get us to hate Mobius.

Also the Haunted were the way they were because firstly, they were mental patients and as such were easily influenced and thus corrupted by the STEM user Ruvik, not because they were being chased by the Anima within STEM so although it's an interesting development it also comes out of a nowhere and is push fit into the Evil Within's overall story.
TEW 2 tries to clarify a lot but just creates bigger plot holes and inconsistances than the original game, but also leaves us with no real mystery. Unless you consider the end credits scene of STEM booting up again, for whatever reason it does and obviously, despite having virtually no one connected to it anymore, I imagine for the next game it will be able to wireless link people to itself, because let's face it. You haven't got any suspension of disbelief if the third game sees wafts of people heading to the abandoned Mobius facility to plug themselves in.

I know I've been pretty critical of TEW2, but that's because I'm disappointed. We have a watered down narrative that focuses on characters we don't get the time or encouragement to become emotionally connected to and the combat is fractured with a tedious crafting system that disrupts the flow of gameplay whenever you're not in a open world section which are the best parts of the whole game.
It's like an Evil Within game for people who didn't like the first Evil Within game. The highlight of the whole thing ends with Stefano's death. Replaying chapter 3 shows me another game, a more interesting game. One that could work if only it was all about survival and a zombie outbreak.

I have no urge to replay TEW2 and for me that's the measure of a truly gripping game experience, is when it's so good. as soon as it's over you want to jump right back in. We may never see another Evil Within game, which is a shame. I think at another time, people would be more receptive to a game similar to the first, which did have it's downsides. It is in no way perfect, the stealth in TEW1 is horrible there is no denying that. But being thrown around a virtual world like an aimless lemming was far more interesting and immersive than plodding through the derivative environs of the second game: Half zombie town, half Doom world and some horror laboratory thrown in for good measure.

Ultimately, I'm interested to see how the reception of the second game will influence the possible third but it would be a shame to see the series end, I think it just needs to find it's feet and then we could have ourselves a truly memorable horror franchise.

I hoped you enjoyed reading this article and if you did please leave a +1 and follow for more game analysis, opinions and nostalgia trips.

Hope you've had a great weekend!