Evil West

Evil West is a third-person action brawler set in a version of the American frontier where vampire cults and eldritch horrors have decided the Wild West is their buffet. You play Jesse Rentier, a hunter for the Rentier Institute, a secret government agency that punches monsters for a living. The core loop is arena combat broken up by linear levels, light exploration, and an upgrade tree that gradually turns Jesse from a gruff cowboy into a one-man supernatural slaughterhouse. It sits somewhere between God of War's melee focus and Gears of War's cover-adjacent shooting, with a personality all its own. Combat is the whole show here, and it mostly delivers. Your toolkit grows across the campaign to include a electrified gauntlet for close-range beatdowns, a rifle, a shotgun, a repeater, and a few gadgets like a crossbow and a tesla-style coil launcher. The gauntlet charges up, launches enemies into the air, and lets you string combos that feel genuinely satisfying once you understand the rhythm. There are dodge windows, parry opportunities, and enough enemy variety to keep you from relying on a single button mash. Upgrade points flow steadily and the skill tree is readable rather than padded, which I respect. The game never asks you to grind the same encounter fifty times to unlock the next tier. Where Evil West struggles is in the narrative and structural repetition. Jesse is functional as a protagonist but barely a character. The story gestures at lore about vampire aristocracy and a shadowy conspiracy, but it never commits enough to be interesting and never lets go enough to be gloriously stupid. It exists in this awkward middle zone where you want it to either take itself more seriously or lean all the way into camp. The level design is also aggressively linear, with occasional treasure chests and collectibles that don't really reward curiosity. If you are coming in hoping for any meaningful choice, branching dialogue, or RPG depth worthy of that genre label, redirect now. The RPG tag on this one is generous. Co-op is available for the full campaign with a second player dropping in as Jesse's father, William. Playing with a friend smooths over the solo experience's occasional roughness and makes the spectacle more fun to share. Solo play is entirely viable but the encounters are clearly tuned with co-op chaos in mind, so some elite enemy fights feel punishing in a way that reads more like a balancing oversight than intentional difficulty design. Easily 10-12 hours to finish the campaign, maybe 14 if you hunt everything. At a full run it's a competent but unremarkable genre exercise. At a discount it becomes a pretty solid weekend game for anyone who wants to unplug their brain and watch a man in a duster coat throw vampires into each other. Just do not come looking for a story that rewards re-reads or a build system that opens up new playstyles at hour 40. What you see in the first two hours is essentially what the full game delivers, scaled up in enemy size.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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