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The Evil Within 2 |OT| "Something not quite right"

jett

D-Member
Finished.

This game was pretty good overall, and in some ways a better experience than the first game (I loathed the one-hit deaths in TEW1). But at the same time it's not as memorable, and the art design isn't as strong. Plot-wise I never really felt all that invested in what was going on. Then again, the whole STEM shit just makes no sense to me. I'd rather have a true supernatural setting than this half-baked Matrix ripoff.

Not at all, it was easily my fave weapon.

It's all about getting the critical shot upgrade and precision shooting at weak spots. Lost count of how many enemies I beheaded with a single shot. You can also shoot them in the legs to make them trip and then stomp for the kill.

If you just use it to shoot at the center mass or wherever then yeah, it won't be that good.

Aiming in this game is absolute shitcakes to me.
 
5 hours in and I haven't made it to the second safe house..

You see, I'm on nightmare, and worried about everything, so I creep everywhere, stealth everyone, and if I can't stealth them, I run. Sometimes I kill one dude and I run back to the safe house to save my progress, haha.

I've been dumping my gel into stealth to make these kills easier.. Tense!
 

NotUS

Member
Just finished it, really enjoyable game, clocking in about 18 hours.

Not survival horror like the first, leaning toward action/adventure. Silent Hill meets Last of Us sort of thing.

Regardless, just a great game overall and highly recommended. Lots of freedom, lots of bizarre scenarios and interesting, yet fairly easy enemies. I played on normal difficulty.

Chapter 3 is the more open ended part of the game, spent around 4 hours on that chapter alone exploring everything.

After that the variety of encounters and story pick up momentum all the way to the end, with the chapters being shorter, but more diverse.

Evil Within 1 was better horror game, Evil Within 2 was the better game overall.
 

RRockman

Banned
Chapter 14 was glorious, TEW2 Sebastian is Best Sebastian, this is law.
Yukiko didnt deserve that death tho :'(

I really wished I'd played on survival. It seemed better balanced when it came to bosses. TEW2 is above the first for me. Its lows are no where near as bad as TEW1's lows.
 
Im up to ch.13 now, the game is fun but it's seems clear that this is a downgrade from the first game. This enemy AI is downright garbage and you can basically bus's the stealth mechanics to basically break the combat. Options in combat is good but once the mystery and fear on how to combat enemies disappears because it's so easy to manipulate the system all encounters start to take a hit. It's not helping that enemy variety is poor in this game.

So many combat scenarios is just flood room with same enemies you have been fighting over and over.
Some rooms have lots of cover so you can easily exploit the stealth. Some areas are more open requiring you to use weapons at which point I go to crowd control ones like smoke and lightning for easy kills.

Chapter 10 and 11 introduces a new enemy that is practically the same enemy but now you can't stealth it for a few seconds. The bosses are ok, they are oddly MGS like, lots of running around and taking shots when you can. Ch.11
is basically the fury but with a very RE arena setup with freeze canisters to use.
The fight is fine but it never reaches the highs other great bosses.


I am liking the changing setpieces and bosses, the game is really good regardless of issues. I don't want to sound too down on it But there are some big issues. Oh and the story is bad. These cutscenes in ch.12 have some of the worst writing and logic I have ever seen.
 

myco666

Member
Started Classic mode and damn this is stressing me out so much. Got crossbow, shotgun and broken sniper before I decided to use my first save. Could have probably gone even further but I need some peace of mind for now.
 

Holden

Member
Dunno why I wrote this review, with a rather disappointed view of it.
Played the game Nemesis and on PC
Obvious spoilers:

This game is a bizarre sequel to a fast-paced combat heavy horror game. The change of director is rather obvious after reaching the third chapter. The pacing of the game is vastly different, going from a rather action heavy segment to another, to a much slower pace due to the new open-world mechanic which is an interesting mechanic but executed in a way that missed potential.

The destruction of Union is well caught during the integrity of the game, the different sequences caught a different vibe (dark night with Stefano, the fires of Theodore, and the white gooey thing of Myra), thanks to the open-world aspect you spend quite a bit of time in the same areas to watch Union getting completely destroyed in different ways. This might be cool and all but during the whole game there are huge issues the game has, the PC port is unacceptably awful a constant fluctuation of 30 to 60fps makes this one of the worst PC-Ports I have ever seen in my life, TEW1 was badly optimised, but no where near this bad. The art direction took heavy toll as well, the Haunted from TEW1 look way more diverse than the lost in TEW2. After killing the same models of zombies over and over again, it kinda gets annoyingly repetitive.

The much slower pacing felt really bizarre at first. You go from a game where you don't sneak much due to the constant combat you experience into a game where your knife and stealth kills become your best friend. Which it reinforces the repetitiveness of the zombies, by waiting behind a car and waiting for the very robot-like pattern in order to stab the zombie in the head. This might be different on easier difficulties, but the game does not make fighting the lost worth your bullets. You can easily spend all your bullets on the Harbingers and still not be able to kill them so it is just better to ignore them completely and move on. And when you are using your guns, the gunplay doesn't feel as enjoying as the first game. Using the crossbow in TEW1 is much quicker to load the bolt while in the 2nd game using your crossbow in a fight with multiple zombies chasing you it was painfully annoying to use it.

The most disappointing part for me is the missed potential on so many parts of the game. When me or somebody else plays a horror game I'm fairly sure the most important part is scaring the players. This game had an absurd amount of times where you just expect more of an enemy but then they just vanish... :

- Anima: A Laura-like enemy you discover in an optional house which is bloody amazing since this is the moment I least expect a dangerous enemy to haunt me. With an interesting mechanic where she will now pop up randomly in the open-world location to add including stress to the player. But the problem is every scripted event of her is really, really short, and when she pops up randomly, you just need to run in the opposite direction until she disappears. You also get no conclusion on her, she just stops chasing you for some reason...

- Guardians: The starting guardian acts similar to the Sadist (chainsaw guy) in TEW1 but doesn't provide the same sense of satisfaction. You spend much more time between the moment you encounter the enemy in TEW1, to the moment you can actually kill it. It's about 15-20 minutes, but goes to less than 5 minutes in TEW2 (not counting the parts where you fully don't encounter them). While not perfect in TEW1, this time feels really crucial to the satisfaction to killing these monsters, from being chased, to be the one neutralizing them. They manage to surprise you rather well in chapter 7 with scripted Guardian jumping on a van next to you to surprise the player after thinking this monster was dead and would not come back. After that, they literately transform into normal zombies that can jump onto roofs to help patrol... Feels like so much more could have been done.

- During chapter 6 you encounter a white goo creature which is rather refreshing from design point of view. But after finishing the short sequence with him, that's literately it, you never see him again... why? I want more!

- Safe-houses feel to overlap Sebastian's room quite a bit, it felt like they could have played more with the fact that the safe-house is still in Union and isn't as safe as it should be.

- During chapter 4, there is a FPS sequence where you cannot use your firearms which has a total of 2 enemies inside, what was the point of this part?

- The O'Neal bossfight was really not enjoyable. A bullet sponge where you run around in circles grabbing respawning ammo. That's really all there is to that fight.

- The Theodore bossfight (the PTSD TEW1 bossrush) didn't capture at all why these enemies were scary in the first game. The fight against the Sadist is a single corridor. An encounter with 1 then 2 Keepers that you just need to gun down. Then an encounter with Laura where you have to spin 2 valves then press a switch when Laura is under a specific spot to burn her, but all in a room small enough to find all the pieces to the puzzle extremely fast. These encounters are way too short to experience the stress of these enemies like they felt in the first game.

- The final boss, while Myra looks pretty cool and all, but these boss fights never fit these games at all, same case with TEW1, dead space 1, Resident evil 7 are just not good content for these types of game. Where every aspect of a horror game just disappears and you need to shoot some glowing yellow spot when it feels like they could just sweep you away with one arm and be done with you.
Examples of game that handle their final boss in a much better way: TLOU ( by not having one) or RE4 by not not making him absurdly huge.

From a story point of view, while the first game's storyline is a disaster of total non-sense to "oh and by the way this is a dream so it makes sense". The story of the second game doesn't help the overall story at all. Pretty much every character dies in STEM with the exception Seb and Lily and every single death, such as O'Neil, Esmeralda or Hoffman have no impact whatsoever on the player since you spend such a brief amount of time with each of these characters. Including Myra at the end, the game doesn't show any character relationship between her and seb to show the impact of her being left behind ( for whatever reason... ) because she needs to defeat the evil Illuminati controlling the whole world.

All in all, this game was a huge disappointment for me after enjoying the gameplay of the first game while the story being god-awful. This game might have felt better if TEW1 did not exist, this game feels like the hate Dark Souls 2 got ( which I do not agree with ) where the first game just overshadows how much better it was.
Every encounter with a non-zombie needs to be longer while the encounters with zombies need to be shorter. Huge problem of pacing.

6/10
 

Coldsun

Banned
AD00100D7B58BCDCB448C735C573A69804D75A09

Not bad for a first run. Now I guess its time to work my way through classic (well, tomorrow, as I'm going to get some much needed sleep)
 

BaasRed

Banned
Are there a lot of stealth sections? I didn't like the ones in the first chapters.

Also, what is weird enemy that crawls around fast? I just avoided it every chance I got.

Had a weird bug where I found an enemy waiting to ambush me in a bush and I shot at it with shotgun, nothing happened. Did melee till it died, didn't react at all to getting hit. Strange bug.
 

I just finished the game, and I agree with everything you said with the addition of the AI being one of the worst I have ever seen in recent memory. You can turn corners 5 feet in front of some of these enemies and they'll be completely unaware as to where you went. And stealth being as broken as it is considering
the only enemies invulnerable to stealth kills are the crawling ones and the guardians
, you never need to use your guns. On nightmare, I consistently had the maximum amount of ammo for each weapon with crafting resources to spare for the last third of the game. TEW is one of my favorite games this generation, though I still like this game it's disappointing they went in the direction they did.
 

kromeo

Member
AD00100D7B58BCDCB448C735C573A69804D75A09

Not bad for a first run. Now I guess its time to work my way through classic (well, tomorrow, as I'm going to get some much needed sleep)

That's close to Resident Evil 3 speeds, chapter 3 alone took me longer than that

I'm always slow in games though, I remember people saying they were finishing RE7 in 7 hours and it took me over 12, and that game's linear
 
5 hours in and I haven't made it to the second safe house..

You see, I'm on nightmare, and worried about everything, so I creep everywhere, stealth everyone, and if I can't stealth them, I run. Sometimes I kill one dude and I run back to the safe house to save my progress, haha.

I've been dumping my gel into stealth to make these kills easier.. Tense!

Make sure to get the corner kill skill as soon as possible. You can even initiate it while being chased by the haunted. Just lock yourself behind a surface and have it come straight at you before hitting the X button. I don't know why some people on here said it's finicky to use, worked effortlessly each time I utilizes it on enemies that could be hit by the knife kill.
 

myco666

Member
Question about Classic Mode. I know weapon upgrades are out but does this include ammo pouches?

Anyone who can answer this?

Up to chapter 7 probably but at that point it is not fun to get that far back. Would do it during chapter 3 or 4 personally.
 

Neiteio

Member
Just finished. LOVED the ending. Favorite horror game ending since Silent Hill Shattered Memories. The entire story was so good. This game has, like, one hundred thousand times as much heart and emotion as the first one. Actual character arcs and development and everything, and it nails the ending. Spoilers:
So happy to see Seb and Lily escape STEM, and Kidman defeat Mobius. Also neat sequel hook with someone accessing the STEM at the end. Ruvik?
 
Can anyone tell me if there was anything worth collecting in the alternative entrance for city hall in Chapter 4? Fought the guardian boss, explored the back alley, went in the locked door which asked me to mash the X button for a period of time, then my game crashed. Went though the front entrance after having to fight the boss again since auto save didn't kick in after my first attempt. Now the back door is locked and there is no sequence to bash it open.
 
Can anyone tell me if there was anything worth collecting in the alternative entrance for city hall in Chapter 4? Fought the guardian boss, explored the back alley, went in the locked door which asked me to mash the X button for a period of time, then my game crashed. Went though the front entrance after having to fight the boss again since auto save didn't kick in after my first attempt. Now the back door is locked and there is no sequence to bash it open.

The only collectible as far as I know is after you completed that entire area.

Also you can access the back door zone Even by coming from the front. You’re not missing out.
 

psychotron

Member
The only collectible as far as I know is after you completed that entire area.

Also you can access the back door zone Even by coming from the front. You’re not missing out.

Ok shit. So can I get back there without having to run past that
giant white my monster that drops all that sticky shit on the floor?
I left city hall already and headed for the next area. Ran past him the first time.
 

Nemesis_

Member
Ok shit. So can I get back there without having to run past that
giant white my monster that drops all that sticky shit on the floor?
I left city hall already and headed for the next area. Ran past him the first time.

After your first encounter with The Watcher,
it disappears
 

UrbanRats

Member
Finished.

This game was pretty good overall, and in some ways a better experience than the first game (I loathed the one-hit deaths in TEW1). But at the same time it's not as memorable, and the art design isn't as strong. Plot-wise I never really felt all that invested in what was going on. Then again, the whole STEM shit just makes no sense to me. I'd rather have a true supernatural setting than this half-baked Matrix ripoff.

I'm only on Ch.12, but there plenty of 1hitKO in this game, too.
Thought they were done with that?
 

beelzebozo

Jealous Bastard
this game rules!

incredible follow up to the first. different enough, but with that solid weapon economy and awesome combat i love.
 

strafer

member
Hmm, while I do enjoy the new voice actress they picked for Kidman, I don't like the new Seb voice actor, it's like he's trying to do Anson Mount.

Other than that, seems like a decent start to the game.

Can't wait to dig more into it.
 
How's this game for someone who has never played The first game? I'm not a big survival horror guy. My experiences are the last of us and resident evil 7. I loved both of those games but I'm apprehensive about this one because it seems like making any sort of sense of the story requires beating the first game and its dlcs.

Thanks.
 

Duxxy3

Member
Hmm, while I do enjoy the new voice actress they picked for Kidman, I don't like the new Seb voice actor, it's like he's trying to do Anson Mount.

Other than that, seems like a decent start to the game.

Can't wait to dig more into it.

Seb's new voice actor is awful. I'm guessing the SAG strike prevented him from playing the role.

How's this game for someone who has never played The first game? I'm not a big survival horror guy. My experiences are the last of us and resident evil 7. I loved both of those games but I'm apprehensive about this one because it seems like making any sort of sense of the story requires beating the first game and its dlcs.

Thanks.

Why not pick up the first game? It's real cheap now.
 

Phased

Member
5 hours in and I haven't made it to the second safe house..

You see, I'm on nightmare, and worried about everything, so I creep everywhere, stealth everyone, and if I can't stealth them, I run. Sometimes I kill one dude and I run back to the safe house to save my progress, haha.

I've been dumping my gel into stealth to make these kills easier.. Tense!

It took me 5 or 6 hours to get through chapter 3 on Nightmare don't feel bad. The next couple chapters after go by quick by comparison, but making sure you kill as much as you can and explore everything is essential since you need all the gel you can find.

I maxed out my stealth pretty much right away, especially the move speed, but you're going to want to invest in your stamina a bit by the end of the game or you may find yourself in some trouble
 
I feel very OP right now, even playing on Nightmare. Just got to chapter 13. I'm easily just destroying everything in my path...
Headshotting the flame rock dudes with harpoon bolts. Sneaking until I can trigger the run stealth attack the "normal" dudes- if there is a group I use a bottle to draw them together, and then a single shot chain attack with an electric bolt and then stop their heads. One shot sniper to the blob dudes from a distance. And, I didn't know I could do this when I did the bossfight, but the normal flamethrower dudes I can smoke bolt + sneak attack twice x 2 and he's down.
. I still have a comfortable amount of resources to craft more ammo as well. I hope the final few chapters provide some surprises for a decent challenge.
 
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