Gripping, terrifying and ultimately rewarding
THE Evil Within 2 is one of those few games that leaves you with a temporary sense of emotional bankruptcy after completing it. Tense and difficult from the early stages of the game, Tango Gameworks have crafted a very ambitious but ultimately successful survival horror that suffers from very few pacing issues in its breakneck dart to the brilliant and touching conclusion.
You play as the now familiar - and admittedly archetypal - Sebastian Castellanos who yet again returns to the world ‘ beyond the looking-glass’, a hellish Anytown-USA-type land teeming with abominations and saturated with the macabre.
Sebastian’s task in this nightarish hellscape is to rescue his presumed-dead daughter from The Evil Within’s version of the Matrix, called STEM. The element of searching for his daughter, while still reeling from the guilt of losing his family, exposes the endearing flaws in Sebastian’s character and serves to extra dimensions to his personality that were lacking in the first game.
Another facet of The Evil Within 2 that has improved drastically over the first game is the feel of real adventure that pervades throughout the 20-odd hour long playthrough. Gone are the isolated levels of the original, replaced with Union - a twisted caricature of the American small-town utopia.
Scattered with side-quests, blood-curdling oddities and a genuinely balanced loot system, Union really feels like a labour of love from the perspective of the game’s developers. Over time, the environment descends deeper and deeper into chaos, turning the small town into a horrifying distortion of its former reality.
Tango Gameworks have done an undeniably good job of implementing their survival-horror approach. Moments of gut-wrenching fear as you attempt to stealth past mobs of enemies that can rip you limb-from-limb in an instant to reach important supplies for ammunition and crafting are very frequent. The unlockable Classic mode raises the stakes to even greater anxiety-inducing degrees with the removal of auto-saves, upgrades and a limit to the amount of times you can save the game.
While their may be some occasional technical hiccups, and a small number of baffling glitches, The Evil Within 2 is a near-perfectly realised horror title that thankfully doesn’t suffer from classic pacing issues within the genre that have negatively impacted its peers. Gripping, terrifying and ultimately rewarding, The Evil Within 2 is an instant classic.