4/5 ★ – kariyanine's review of The Evil Within 2.

I really enjoyed the original The Evil Within when I played it a few years ago. Directed by Shinji Mikami, The Evil Within came with the legacy of Resident Evil behind it. And it succeeded in hitting the right notes. It did enough to stand out on its own and fill in the void left by the absence of Konami’s Silent Hill. Not directing The Evil Within 2, Mikami placed the game in his team’s hands with a solid framework preset but with the freedom to do something different in that framework. Where The Evil Within was pretty much a linear, confined quarters horror tale inside a hospital, The Evil Within 2 opens things up a bit. Early on in The Evil Within 2, the game seems to be toying with the notion of being an open world game. It’s not, at least not in the traditional sense. There are small open world sections that can be explored with items and upgrades to collect or even occasional side missions but it never really detracts from the linear narrative. Think of it as the open world in Silent Hill, it is there but more as a means of giving the game a larger sense of scale between its designed set piece levels. If you played The Evil Within then you’ll be familiar with our main character, Sebastian, and his tragic history. You’ll also not be surprised that the entirety of The Evil Within 2 takes place inside a computer construct. This was revealed in The Evil Within and I’m glad they didn’t try to mask it from us once again. I actually like the idea of a horror animus and it’s a great way of updating the bad corporation from bioweapons/pharmaceuticals. In anycase, you enter the construct (through the weird milk bath brain transference thing) on a search for the core of the construct, who just so happens to be Sebastian’s (thought to be dead) daughter. And away we go. The narrative has all the crazy twists and turns you’d expect of a game like this and the gameplay to match. It’s funny that this game came out in 2017 because in a lot of ways both it and its predecessor feel like the previous generation of Resident Evil but also upgraded a bit. Obviously this makes sense as Mikami directed Resident Evil 4 as well and RE5 and 6 are very much modeled after it with Mikami having the benefit of seeing how those RE games succeeded and failed before launching his own similar franchise. The gameplay and combat mechanics are spot on and the weapon selection (and upgrade paths for them) are enjoyable. Most enemies are fun to fight and the bosses have a great design to them (although there are a couple that I didn’t enjoy battling with). And the level design takes a huge step forward over the previous game. Whereas the craziest stuff in The Evil Within didn’t happen until the end of the game (because you didn’t realize you were in a construct), The Evil Within 2 throws some loopy stuff at you early on and keeps presenting it at a constant clip. There is one level in particular where you are avoiding the gaze of a giant camera lens in a fractured reality that was just amazing (and I generally dislike stealth missions). Early on, I wasn’t sure about the direction The Evil Within 2 was going and I preferred the more linear, corridor horror to this pseudo-open world. But sticking with it was the right call, this is a better game in every way to its predecessor. It has the same great gameplay of the first but tells a more intricate and engaging story, has more creative level design, and is just more ambitious at every turn. Sometimes being more ambitious can be a downfall but everything clicks here. The way the game ends, it implies that we’ll not be seeing any more of Sebastian but there is a path forward for a new protagonist that I’d love to see. So I hope that Microsoft has Tango working on a third entry for release on the Series X in the next couple years.