I just read some solid hands on with the evil within at GAF..
So I got the chance to play The Evil Within's mansion level at an event held in a Game store in London. I played for around an hour and a half and beat the level on both Casual and Survival difficulties. Survival is the normal difficulty level. There are two above it that were locked out - Nightmare and Akumu.
Controls - First thing I did when I got my hands on it was to get a feel for the controls. Aiming is weighty - the reason you don't have a laser pointer for a reticule in this game is because the reticule is dynamic. Think Counter-Strike - when your moving and panning the camera around the reticule is spread out - stop and keep it steady, the reticule is smaller and you are more accurate. Coupled with the weighty aiming, this makes the gunplay less snappy than the likes of an RE4. But that's a good thing. If RE4 skewed a little bit towards the action spectrum in the survival horror genre, then the Evil Within skews towards a more tactical, survival-based approach. A lot of the time you don't want to take enemies on head-on.
Ammo is scarce. If you are not using your resources carefully, you will run out of ammo. The game isn't afraid to throw multiple enemies at you even if you have next to no ammo.
The game is challenging. You do not want to be in close proximity to an enemy with only a few rounds left in your pistol. I tended to run back and aim from midrange. Multiple enemies can overwhelm you very quickly. In this game, more so than in RE4, you will need to make use of every available resource in a gunfight. For example, I had the unfortunate luck of facing 4-5 enemies in a single room. Taking out one guy with a few well placed headshots with the pistol alerted all his friends in the same room. In this game you can't shoot one of them in leg then run up and do a roundhouse kick in the face of three guys in front of you. After the first guy was down, another was coming really quickly towards me from the doorway I shot his friend from. Precise, time consuming aiming with the pistol was no an option here - too much risk if I missed. I switched to my shotgun. I blew the enemy's head off as he was two feet away from me. I then very quickly switched to my explosive crossbow bolt and shot one of the remaining two enemies who were further back. Both thankfully exploded in satisfying chunks of gore. What makes these encounters so exhilarating is that had I missed the first few shots with my pistol, the encounter would have gone very poorly or I would have run out of ammo very quickly.
There is no go-to weapon here. No ideal way to dispatch a group of enemies every time. Every encounter, I had to stop and think, plan ahead on my next moves. Because once a group of enemies are alerted to your presence in a room, you have to react quickly on instinct and make decisions on which weapons to conserve and which you can afford to use in this encounter - because the next one might require it more.
Playing through the level multiple times, I really appreciated the occasional random enemy placements. There is less trial and-error gameplay, and it keeps you on your toes as there might be a threat behind every door. I also found that it helps replayability a great deal.
The gunplay is satisfying - the tactical decision making you do for tough encounters makes it really satisfying when those decisions pay off.
I won't bore you guys with how great the art in this game looks, or how you can take multiple paths to beat a level because, well you guys can all see it in the long gameplay videos on youtube. I mainly wanted to talk about the mechanics of the game. I loved my time with it. This isn't the next RE4 - this game is if RE4 grew some balls and stopped treating you like an action hero and took pleasure in punishing you, taking away the things you like - your ammo, your snappy aiming, you're paused inventory screen, your unlimited run and so on.
Take it from me, Mikami is back to school designers on a new type of modern TPS.
