Amid Evil
There’s a lot of evil in Amid Evil, but don’t worry, because you can use planets as grenades.
Amid Evil’s worst weapon is a staff that shoots blue homing blobs – pathetic water balloons that splash against low-poly demons, many of whom look like what you’d get if you coated a bunch of triangles with super glue and threw them in a dryer. I don’t like it or the moments when I resort to it, but I can also use the entire Earth as a grenade, which more than evens things out. Amid Evil is good.
It’s a throwback FPS like Dusk, but rather than the hitscan headshots, Amid Evil recalls Heretic and Hexen’s magical weapons. The staff sucks, but there’s also a magic sword, a grenade launcher that shrinks and fires planets (like the Earth), a spike-firing morningstar, a lightning trident, plus your axe and a geometrically-unreasonable purple thing that clears rooms like Doom’s BFG.
Most of the weapons are fun, but the Star of Torment, which pins enemies to walls like FEAR’s stake gun, or can be used to homer them out of the level entirely like they’ve been slapped by a god, is Amid Evil’s pièce de résistance – I never tire of it.
Part of Amid Evil’s appeal is that it ignores certain annoying, speedhindering FPS conventions scaffolded onto shooters since the late ’90s. There’s no fall damage. You can breathe underwater. Elevators won’t crush you if they catch your shoulder on the way down. They’ll just clip through you as they should. Accidental deaths have their place in games, especially when they’re comedic, but here they’d only get in the way of the fun, and the speed. They aren’t missed.
Amid Evil falls prey to other genre foibles, though. Getting out of water is a pain in the ass. And then there’s the platforming, and you probably already know the type. Here’s a game about running very fast all the time because there’s a mob of demons chasing you, so how about you climb spiralling, ultranarrow balance beams and leap between platforms that disappear on a timer?
Also slowing things down are the gods’ architectural designs. You’re the latest mortal champion taking a stab at cleaning up their evil-infested lands, and except for the boss stages, every level is a button hunt. Body-check one of the big blue switches, and something about
The Star of Torment fires clumps of homing crystals..
the level changes: an elevator activates, a door opens, the water level rises. And then you go find the next button to walk face-first into until you eventually find a key to open up the next big area, just like in the classics.
SOUL SACRIFICE
That’s not really why I liked the classics. I love Amid Evil’s big open levels – the way some of them fit together, especially the one made of moving gears – and they’re full of secret areas to discover. But kicking around demon guts as I retrace my steps to try to figure out which damn pathway the last button opened up isn’t as fun as pinning demons to walls with the Star of Torment, which is very fun. When I’m just tearing through evil knights and stone giants and weird heads with flamethrower mouths, and I’m more kite than man, Amid Evil shines like the best of Quake and Serious Sam.
Slain enemies drop souls, and if you fill a meter with them, you can activate Soul Mode, which turns all of your weapons into fire hoses of death. The Star of Torment fires clumps of homing crystals that one-hit just about anything and explode outward on contact to clean up nearby grunts. Whisper’s Edge fires bigger waves that always pierce enemies and bounce off walls. The BFGlike Aeturnum, which often saved my ass when I needed to vaporise a room without a real fight, fires black holes.
Despite barely telling a story, Amid Evil made me wonder if the gods might be the real assholes – they were the ones who put buttons everywhere, after all – and when it was over I lingered for a long time before letting it end. I want more.