Until the midpoint, it was one of my favoirte games I’ve played in this year, but it turned sour near the end. Here’s my explanation.

I played it on Hard difficulty from the start to finish. I dabbled into Evil difficulty with NG+ a bit. Didn’t finish that one, but I think my issue will be conveyed without fully playing that one.

What I really liked about the game is the initial attitude of the game; “We are not a typical cinematic game, and we are not gonna waste your time with walky-talky sections. Go and kill some hordes of enemies with these tools and keep moving on”. Within the first three stages, all the important melee/ranged options get opened such as melee juggling, ranged juggling, launcher, sniping, rapid pistol shot, long-distance pull, long-distance dash, parry, cancel kick, etc. These combat options are designed around the fact the player character’s movement is kinda clumsy so that you must actively make a safe space by actively demolishing the enemies with destructive combos. Fodders get easily stunned and electrocuted, and they turn into cannonballs when they get launched. Sniping the weak spot mostly guarantees heavy damage and stun, and a well-timed uppercut and cancel kick can cancel the incoming attack.

These overpowered options synergize with arena combats wonderfully. Since enemies are trying to surround and push you from everywhere, and there are frequent miniboss mix-ups in the later part of the game, you have to improvise the best combat methods that suit your situation every time. For example, when the fat giant type of miniboss shows up, pulling and cannonballing fodder enemies to the mini boss helps a lot. Also, you can zap the mini bosses if you punch them enough, so there’s an incentive to push more in the close distance. If the miniboss that got mixed is a flying type, maintaining your position to snipe the boss becomes the high priority, so you have to use more range-focused attacks to deal with the enemies. There’s a good sense of chaos control simulator in there, and when the game shows more and more ridiculous combat settings (such as fighting 3 giant bats and fodders at the final arena), the game shines brilliantly. I would say, the best moment of the game reminds me some of God Hand combat, even though this game has fewer options than that game.

However, the game really suffers from the technical department. And I’m not talking about graphical fidelity. For that size of a game dev company, the game looks great on its own with its gritty western vibe. One of the big problems is that while the control works fluently 98% of time, in the other 2%, it takes a nosedive and turns into an uncontrollable mess. And that aspect is worsened by the fact that the game is built around context-sensitive moveset and janky-ass collisions. To properly launch an enemy to a target, the target should be in the player’s frontal viewpoint while the character model is directly standing in front of the target in the distance. The same goes for the zapper-related moves. If you want to zap-pull or zap-dash to the enemy, the enemy should be in your sight, and in the right distance. There are some UI elements that try to remove the guess works -such as the glowing circle or the zapper target mark-, but when the arena becomes chaos, not only relying on UI is not viable, but the target priority becomes tangled, and you start to accidentally pull wrong things or launch wrong enemies to wrong targets. Not only that, if the context-sensitive movement failed to register, your input will start the “wrong movement” which will make the player vulnerable for short time. This doesn’t seem like an issue in the early-to-mid part of the game, but as the enemies become deadlier and overcrowded, you will see why it can lead to frustrating moments.

Other context-sensitive moveset-related issues can be found in the zapping mechanic. Happened only a few times in the game, but worth mentioning. When the enemy is zapped, and you are right in front of them, your main melee attack input will start the E-combo punch attack that works like grab attacks. And E-combo makes enemies attack less frequently, which means not only it’s a combo method, but it is also a useful breathing room maker too. Most of the time, it works well with the player’s intention, but when the arena gets uneven, and cramped, and the enemies are too many, the colliders become messy…and you know what it leads to. It may start the normal punch combo when I want to start the E-combo or vice versa. One time, I successfully electrocute the miniboss and then I dashed to the target, but my character model got stuck between the boss’s back and the wall behind the boss. But still, I was still contacting the miniboss and if my E-Combo somehow registered in this situation, I would have survived since it would automatically positioned me in front of the miniboss. But my attempt to punish the miniboss with E-combo didn’t get registered and I died by getting slashed by fodders and the miniboss who just got rid of the status effect. It was so frustrating.

Don’t get me wrong, a lot of games can have issues with context-sensitive movements, since colliders are tricky bastards in game development. Bloodborne’s viscera attack and Doom Eternal’s Blood punch mechanic come to my mind. But my gripe is, the game is designed in a way that makes players dive into groups of enemies and that’s often the most enjoyable way to play. And sadly, it is also the method that makes players deal with the buggy colliders and combo movements. Maybe, if there were better ways to see the “grander picture” of the arena fight, I would have also found the fun in predicting the enemy behaviors, planning, positioning, and proceeding with the attack in a careful manner. Sadly, the camera is also too janky to provide the “grander picture”.
The good thing about this game is that enemy magnetism is not as harsh as Sifu or GoW reboot, fitting to the character’s close-up over-the-shoulder camera. But that doesn’t mean the camera is clean from issues. I think there are some AI features that reduce the attack patterns when they are behind the player’s back, but the unfair offscreen attacks are still frequent. Of course, the close-up camera doesn’t really help in that situation. Also, the camera refuses to work properly when there’s a wall behind the player -my least favorite aspect of the typical over-the-shoulder-view action games-. Getting stuck in the corner by two mini bosses was surely an experience. Some terrains prevent the players from doing the dodge-roll, but thanks to the default camera angle, players can’t see the feet, which caused a lot of death by getting stuck in the small pebble in the road that I couldn’t see. And don’t mention how atrocious can the camera be in some main boss fights.

I don’t know if the issues related to the main bosses stem purely from the technical problem or the design decision, but I have to say, there are many issues. The Parasiter is bad. Normally there aren’t many good static structure bosses in action games in general, but this one is even more frustrating, thanks to the weird lock-on feature that wires the player input in an unintuitive way. Bruch and the third main boss were mostly enjoyable, but the camera didn’t help when there are multiple targets to snipe quickly as possible. Also, I thought the feedbacks for player melee attacks were not that great, considering that all the bipedal minibosses show some flinch when they get hit by the player’s uppercut, no matter how tanky they look. The final boss worked in a similar fashion (with really good animation btw), but the final third phase was not great both on the technical and design sides. The third phase is the sized-up version of the first & second phase entity, but for some reason, your melee attack refuses to register, and you get blocked by an invisible capsule preventing the players to go underneath the body. In this situation, you are forced to use ranged options and contextual punish moves. What a great way to end the game built upon varied combat maneuvers and mostly consistent player interaction, isn’t it? And don’t forget the camera issue, as it gets worse and worse when the boss’s size grows up.

Also, here are some more things to add. Even if every control worked in the way I intended, the camera didn’t have issues, and the bosses were buttery smooth, there are some fundamental design decisions that baffled me. While there are SOME elements that break the flow of constant combat scenarios (such as the mine cart roller coaster sections and the puzzle sections), Fundamentally, the game is extremely repetitive. Now, this is a bit contradictory to what I’ve said before, but the point is different. I enjoyed the improvisational chaotic decision-making in the combat loop, but the combat loop is, still, the loop. If a player finds the most effective solution for certain chess pieces, then it becomes a habit. And a habit is anti-dynamism if you know what I mean. Unless they introduce the absurd difficulty spike (like the 3-bats battle I mentioned), or introduce the chess pieces in a different context, the combat situations will get stale.

While there are varied enemies with different moveset and different weak points, the arena’s context blends together way too much. When the arenas are mostly just the flat grounds with TNT boxes here and there, then the whole massive train cargo, oil rig, mines, vampire cavern, and swamp themes are losing their value as distinguishable stage settings, which must have taken a lot of effort to visualize. I’m not saying that this game should be the next coming of The Wonderful 101, but some elements could have been mixed as the arena gimmicks to make the combat situations more distinguishable and memorable. The sinking swamp tiles that made you keep moving in the puzzle section could have been used in certain arenas. They could have introduced an interactable mine cart that you can kick to turn it into a moving cannon ball on a rail. Sifu also proved that even if the character is mostly stuck to the ground, as long as there’s gravity working on the map, you can turn the whole level into your weapon, like throwing the enemy off the stairs or ledges. And in Evil West, you already can launch enemies off the cliff! This means by adding some layers to the arena, the game could have been more dynamic than what we have right now.

But even then, I’m kinda hesitant to call the game devs were not even trying to break the mold because I’m also facing a similar dilemma as a game dev who is developing an action game consisting of constant arenas. As you develop the enemy behaviors, you will realize that just a tiny bit of obstacles in an arena can make a lot of unintended noises. Maybe the flattened arena with no obstacles in the middle is the best for both players and enemies who are already facing numerous issues with the colliders. Maybe they tried to add the dynamic elements at the end of the dev cycle, but the time ran out, so they released it as it is. Whatever the reason is, I think they knew what they were doing. And my trust in the dev team’s future project is high. The fundamental of Evil West still reminds me of the golden era of PS2 action game titles, and they have balls to put bazillions of enemies in an arena even if they can cause a technical issue, just for sake of the dynamic play. I have no intention to play the game again since I think I’ve seen enough, but I hope their spirit carries on to more double-A game studios.