The Evil Within

The Evil Within is a brutal, challenging, and remarkably fun game. Its eerie world and imaginative enemies are genuinely frightening, and the scares are heightened significantly by the scarcity of resources at your disposal. It keeps the odds stacked against you to the point that they often feel insurmountable, yet it’s finely tuned to ensure that they never really are, as long as you can keep a cool head and a steady aim in the face of building panic. While its story ends up buckling under its own ambition, there is little here that takes away from the joy of experiencing survival horror unde...

It’s not Mikami’s best game, but The Evil Within’s excellent gameplay, incredible atmosphere, and the sheer variety of enemies and environments on display make up for occasional frustrations, a overly grimdark plot, and pointless stealth sections. It’s a great game, and a return to form for Mikami. It’s not Resident Evil 4, but you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that.

I got that Resident Evil Feeling and it feels good!

Night of the living dread.

If you like old-school third-person action games with horror elements, I’d recommend picking up The Evil Within on a console, possibly at a price cut. It will definitely scratch the itch of someone who has been pining for a return to the older days of gaming, but everyone else who has come to expect that certain layer of polish likely won’t be amused.

The Evil Within knows how to make you sweat. Tango Gameworks’ disgusting debut outing will leave you teetering on the precipice of failure with every twisted encounter, causing you to curse your shortage of resources or your character’s lack of superhuman strength. This is a game that, like its survival horror superiors, isn’t satisfied with slowly whittling away at your sense of safety – it wants to erode it at every opportunity. And while this pervading sense of danger does result in some controller damaging difficulty spikes, the game certainly succeeds at keeping you on the edge of your se...

A throwback to action horror games of the early 2000s, The Evil Within features slick gameplay in spite of a sloppy story.

There is no question Shinji Mikami’s primary goal with “The Evil Within” was to scare the absolute bejeezus out of anyone who dared to pick up the game. To a large degree his team at Tango Gameworks have successfully managed to accomplish that goal. You will jump out of your chair, the hairs on the back of your neck will stand on end, your palms will get sweaty, you’ll close your eyes and there are a glut of ‘holy shit’ moments where you just know that grotesque looking butcher wielding a massive machete is going to slice you in half like a ripe watermelon. Despite nailing the fear factor, “Th...

A game that fails to live up to it's hype, despite some good action.

The Evil Within might not be the resurgence of the survival-horror genre, but it is a fun and varied experience. However, some elements will serve to frustrate more than scare, causing overall disappointment.

Had The Evil Within been released ten years ago it might have blown people away, but in 2014 it simply feels derivative. It's not particularly scary, the gameplay is frequently frustrating and the story isn't compelling enough to incentivize pushing forward to find out more. Hardcore survival horror enthusiasts should definitely check it out for the monster designs and the RE4-esque puzzles and combat, but everyone else can feel free to give it a miss.

“The Evil Within is almost pitiable in its need to recapture the fresh tension and anxiety of Mikami's best work.”