I’ve been excited about developer Flying Wild Hog’s wicked western ever since it was revealed at the Game Awards in 2020. So much about it immediately caught my attention. Despite Red Dead Redemption’s best efforts, I’ve always felt that there’s a lack of a wild west in video games, even though some games use the western formula to tell a story that takes place elsewhere. The premise of Evil West also feels reminiscent of something you’d see in the PlayStation 2 era: cowboys protecting mere mortals from the secret horrors of the world, like vampires and other creatures. My mind can’t help but see Darkwatch, a game I played over and over again as a kid, when I see Evil West.
Even more generally, that era was great for third-person action westerns—Gun, Red Dead Revolver, the aforementioned Darkwatch, and Call of Juarez (although Techland released it during the next generation, its 2006 release year is close enough to -PS2. It feels like home here.) All of which is to say that playing Evil West makes me feel like a kid again in the best possible way.
Beyond its setting, which made me nostalgic before it even came out, almost every aspect of Evil West presents itself to how I remember the PS2 games when I was ten or so in the early 2000s. It begins with a movie that sets up Jesse Rentier, the son of the leader of the Rentier Institute, an arm of the government that works specifically against the forces of evil hidden in plain sight. Jesse is a gunslinger with an electrified weapon on one arm, wolverine claws on the other and three guns in tow, like his father in the past and his grandfather. He has a partner to work with – what good cowboy does it alone in the wild west? – and over-the-top clothing that matches his cartoonish build, and of course, the persona that every lead cowboy has in basically every Western game.
In the Wicked West, the Sanguines, an underground council of vampires, are seemingly split apart by an angry young daughter who, like her father, believes it’s time for her family to stop hiding in the shadows, and it’s up to Jessie to stop her. The story is fine so far. I’ll be satisfied if that’s all the story the game gave me. It does the trick, and it, perhaps accidentally, goes back to the Darkwatches of the world. Sometimes a simple reason to kill countless vampires and enemy creatures is all I need. I certainly don’t need every game to feature a story that raises the hairs on my arms or moves me to tears. And in the case of the evil West, I’m fine with following Jesse to the furthest edge of this strange frontier to stop the evil.
The gameplay also speaks directly to my PS2 nostalgia, though I’d be remiss not to mention that this is one of the first games I’ve played that wears its God of War (2018) inspiration fully on its sleeve. Combat plays out pretty much the same, from a close-up, over-the-shoulder, third-person camera that keeps the action in your face, to the finishes that open up when the enemy glows orange, to the over-the-top guts and wreck that splash with every enemy kill. Even traversing this wild west feels like walking through one of God of War’s nine realms. You use a rope mechanic to reach new places, destroy crates by hitting the top of them, and encounter battle arena after battle arena in between more exploratory cutscenes.
In these fighting arenas the game reminds me the most of my PS2 days. Remember how, presumably due to hardware limitations, the levels were a linear combination of “explore to find a chest or two while you get more story” and “time to fight waves of enemies until an indeterminate, seemingly random amount of time passes?” I do, and even though you wrote That doesn’t sound all that flattering, it’s kind of refreshing – though that could just be my nostalgia talking. The Evil West wants you to focus solely on fighting when it’s time to kill and when it’s not, it wants you to go find that random chest with gold in it.
Even the presentation of Evil West feels nostalgic, from its 2000s-style fonts to the way it displays collectible information clips and more. And the visual style wraps it all up with a nice bow on top.
I suppose comparing Evil West to the PS2 games of my childhood could be taken negatively, but I’m really enjoying my time with it so far. It knows what it is and revels in it by putting its bombastic combat in the front, its story behind it, and its love tropes somewhere in the middle. Evil West is, like countless games from the PS2 era that I still look back on fondly, a game that I will mostly forget about shortly after I roll its credits. But maybe every once in a while, 5, 10, 15 years from now, I’ll think about it and the fun I had for a few short days. Not every game should stay with me long after I finish it, and sometimes it’s okay for games to feel like they used to. It’s not every day that a game makes me feel like a kid again, after all.
Are you playing Evil West? Tell us in the comments below!