Video Gamers Podcast - Evil West Review - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: December 12, 2022

Gaming gunslingers Michael, Josh and Paul are reviewing the long awaited Evil West. Our hopes for Evil West were high before its release, but will it live up to our lofty expectations, or will this be another gaming let down? We break it all down like no one else can in this awesome gaming Deep Dive.  Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: Dave G, Remi, MarbleMadness, Dr. Catatonic, Blackstar (DQ), Glapsuidir, Phelps, Michele B, Redletter, Nevo, Waynerman, TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is Carry the Fire. I'm your host, Lisa Laflamme. Carry the Fire, a podcast by the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation featuring inspiring personal stories about what happens when world-leading doctors, nurses, researchers, and their patients come together to ignite breakthroughs. Carry the Fire launches Monday, January 27th, wherever you get your podcasts. Howdy, partners, and welcome to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast.

We are three dads who are lifelong gamers, and today we are going to be deep diving the third-person supernatural cowboy shooter, Evil West. Please remember to rate our podcast five stars and leave a written review if your podcast app allows. We'd also love it if you would consider supporting us on Patreon. You can support the show starting at five bucks a month, and you'll unlock some awesome perks

like two bonus squad cast episodes monthly you can go sign up at multiplayer squad.com time for some introductions i am your host paul and joining me he's performing zapper pulls and performing melee combos on any vampire he runs across it's josh oh i'm the melee guy man yeah i mean that is fitting but that means that michael's the the the ranged guy he might be and so we're host we're we're we're in trouble paul the vampires will win luckily luckily michael's like you guys are throwing shade already we're 30 seconds into the episode you don't even have to aim in this game it aims for you i can do anything that's exactly what i was gonna say this game has the strongest aim assist i've ever seen all right we've got josh and joining us he's hoping to impress

president grover cleveland with his rifle crossbow and gatling gun skills it's michael i reckon y'all are looking for a good show today, and I'll tell you what, we're going to give it to you. Oh, man. All right. This is going to be an interesting one. This one's been a long time coming. We've been talking about Evil West for quite a while. All right. Before we get into the meat and potatoes of the episode, Josh, do you want to tell the people a little bit about how they can help support the show? I do indeed. So you're listening to us right now through the magic of technology, our soothing voices going into your ear holes. It's a glorious time to be a gamer.

And you know what? The only thing that's better than that is supporting your favorite podcast. And there's lots of ways that you can do that. You're probably listening for free. If you are supporting the show, then thank you very much. But if you are listening for free, thank you for listening. But do us a solid. Leave us a review. Tell a friend. Support the show. Help us grow. The world's a better place with more multiplayer gaming podcasts in it. And I feel like everybody that's listening wants to do their part for humanity, right? Yeah. Make the world a better place. Tell your friends, leave us a review. And you know, if you get a lot of entertainment out

of this show and you like hearing us three buffoons talk video games, you know, maybe, maybe occasionally think about heading over to multiplayer squad.com and throwing us a little fiver or a 15 or or or maybe maybe a benjamin you know but it helps and it keeps the show alive and it keeps the world a happy place we are but poor lost circus performers for less than a dollar a day you can support this show sorry by the way the beginning of that josh was the closest to asmr that you've ever gotten you were very soothing for a moment it's like hey listen come on down here hey everybody multiplayer squad.com to support this show oh goodness all right this episode started weird yeah yeah we're gonna cut all of this out um

nonsense no we always keep everything in all the episodes all right so we also wanted to share a little bit of a scheduling update because we are in the holiday season here we got christmas coming up every year we do take a two-week break that way we have a little bit more time to spend with our families. So just to let you guys know, this is actually our last deep dive of 2022. And then we will have a Twig episode on Thursday. Next week, we will have our annual end of the year wrap-up bonus round, and we'll have another Twig. And then basically in the two weeks that run from December 25th to January 7th, we will be re-releasing some of our favorite episodes. But you'll still want to tune in for those because the three of us are going to record some intros. We'll share a little bit about how we feel about that game or that episode.

So you'll still have a good five to ten minutes of new content. If you turn it off after that, that's great. Just at least help us keep our download numbers and there'll be a little bit of content in there for you, so you won't want to just completely ignore those. Plus, it's a good chance for us to re-release some of our favorite episodes. These are good ones. We selected some great ones this time, I think. I think so, too.

Yeah, it'll be a lot of fun. You know, since we're an international podcast, too, I know you said Christmas season, but I can't help but make sure I mention Kwanzaa, Yule, Hanukkah, Santa Lucia Day, Bodie Day. I don't know what that is, but it sounds awesome. Happy those days, too. Sure. Happy all of them. All right.

Well, this town isn't big enough for both us and Felicity. Let's put on our gauntlets and collect some vampire heads while tracking her down. Let's deep on our gauntlets and collect some vampire heads while tracking her down. Let's deep dive Evil West. Okay, here is Steam's description of the game. A dark menace consumes the Old West. In solo or co-op, fight with style in visceral explosive combat against bloodthirsty monstrosities. Eradicate the vampiric hordes with your lightning fueled gauntlet and become a wild west superhero okay and to tell you guys here up front we are

going to be sharing really no spoilers i mean there's really not much you can spoil about this game we will talk a little bit about the very beginning of the storyline that way we can just talk about the game we are going to be talking about all the abilities and the guns that you unlock over the course of the game. So there won't be any spoiler warning coming later. However, we'll make sure that we do not talk about some of the end game story reveals. We'll make sure not to spoil that stuff here. So that way you guys just kind of know what to expect all right so evil west was developed by flying wild hog and published by focus entertainment this is not a triple a title it fits squarely in the double a category and guys how is it that evil west landed on our radar

i don't even remember didn't we i remember. I just went with Michael. Oh, you remember a Twig episode? Wasn't on a Twig episode. We saw it. Oh, I can tell you guys. Yes, Paul, educate us, please. Oh, I thought you guys might remember. So ironically, we are recording this right now during the Game Awards. And during the Game Awards exactly a year ago, there was an announcement trailer for Evil West, which we watched, but we did not cover

for a Twig episode. But we did end up starting to cover it in June, because everybody kept calling it God of War with Guns. So we kept seeing that there's this new trailer out. This is like Cowboy God of War. And so we started watching the gameplay. We started sharing the trailer with each other. And we had to talk about it on a twig episode. Here we are now a full year later and we have played the game. It's now out. It has been released. Michael, you offered to get a tattoo if we were given early access keys.

How did that end up going? Well, I don't have a tattoo still. And yeah, I was still a little disappointed man like we called we called from the mountaintops we said flying wild hog please focus entertainment please we will get your logos tattooed all over our bodies and by our i mean me only because you guys did not want to do this if we just get we haven't we have not gotten an early access release a review, and we were just like, hey, that'd be great for the podcast. Let's do it. So I put it out there. And unfortunately,

it didn't happen. But maybe that was fortunate. Yeah, a little bit of a bummer. But now we've had a chance to play it. And it released back on November 22nd. And I think that what everyone is kind of calling the game now, instead of just like calling it God of War with guns, the phrase that I keep seeing in reviews and in user left comments is that this game feels like a throwback PS2 action game. And I was kind of curious to ask you guys, like, what do you think that means? And do you think that's a fair moniker? I 100% agree with that, to be honest with you.

I think it... So what I thought... The reason why I didn't play God of War 2018 when you guys were touting it is because I remember the other God of War games. Basically, there's one path that you go down. You can't really stray off of it. You're going from point A to point B, going around fighting whatever's in your way, and you just keep going. It's all action.

There's some story elements. It's all action. There's some story elements. It felt a lot like that. I really think it felt like a PS2 or even a PS3, in some cases, action game where it's just, hey, you're not going to have a lot of sidetracks. This is definitely not open world. It's just like, go through the levels, complete the level, go to the next level, kill the big bad, keep going. Yeah, it is a simple is the best way that I think I can describe the game. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. So simple doesn't mean bad. But in today's gaming, everybody wants to throw in 30 different systems, right? We picked on Skull & Bones a lot about how their game looks like it

sucks. And to try to fix that, they just keep going, well, let's throw in another mechanic. Let's throw in another system. Let's throw in something to try to beef this game up some. Not every game in the world needs that. And when you talk about PS2 games and kind of a throwback in that sense, games were just simpler back then. You know, I mean, you did one thing, you did it very well, and you hoped that people enjoyed that, and that was it.

And I feel like that is a lot of what Evil West is. And so I actually kind of agree with that. I did not, it's funny because I had, you know, we'll get into our opinions of the game a little bit later, but I had an opinion of this game. And then when you said that, Paul, it kind of made the light bulb go off a little bit. And I kind of went, yeah, that's actually like, that's actually like really on point for me. So I think it does help like kind of knowing what this game is going

into it and what it's supposed to be versus maybe what you thought it was going to be. Yeah, I think that back in PS2 days, it was system limitations that kind of made games that way. And now Flying Wild Hog made a choice to do it this way, which, like Josh said, isn't necessarily a bad thing. Yeah, I completely agree. In fact, in this case, I would say it's actually a really good thing because there's a lot of gaming trends that we are not really into these days. We poke fun at how every game has a crafting system. Guess what? Evil West, no crafting. There is no ammo. Everything is unlimited ammo or just on a cooldown. This game does not have any loot. It's a short campaign. The story is pretty minimal. It's really just there to give you a reason to keep fighting and there's no battle pass there is no dlc and i love the fact that it's just kind of short like

back in the day games would drop for the ps2 that you had never heard of like you'd walk in blockbuster you'd see a box and go oh that looks kind of neat you would rent it you'd beat it in a day and a half and then you just return. And it wasn't necessarily anything life-shattering, but you'd be like, you know what? That was a really fun game. That was a cool weekend. And you would just tell a buddy, and then you just kind of moved on. And this is a kind of game that feels like that. It's not trying to be live service gaming. It's just very simple. It does what it does. It leaves an impression, and then it just kind of gets out of the way, and you're done. And so I do think it's definitely fair to kind of compare it to like a throwback PlayStation game, because it's just kind of how it works.

Now, ironically, this is now the second Weird West genre game that we have covered this year. I love that. We covered Weird West a couple months ago. Now we're covering Evil West. So if anyone's unfamiliar with that genre, it is basically when you blend horror or supernatural elements during the time of the Wild West. So basically, we're looking at cowboys and werewolves and vampires, monsters, things like that put together. Do you guys like that mix? Do you like mixing cowboys with supernatural elements? It's a little weird to me. I like anything that's fantasy related, supernatural, like that kind of stuff. So I, you know, I enjoy that. It's just weird to have a cowboy with a revolver shooting a giant vampire beast thing. Like it is an odd mix odd mix. I'm not crazy about it. I'd much rather be shooting dragons or something like that, maybe, with fireballs or magic missiles. That's a little bit more up my specific alley. But it's fine. It is weird. And it's just weird

that we've played two of these games now in the last five months or something like that. Paul, did you make up that reference, Evil West or Weird West genre? Did you just make that up, or is that an actual term now? There is an entire Wikipedia page. This has existed in the form of books and radio shows for the last hundred years. So this is not something that's new but for whatever reason we're seeing multiple games pop up at the same time kind of like armageddon and deep impact like apparently weird west is kind of on everyone's mind so what you're saying is that uh abraham lincoln vampire

hunter the film was just like 10 years too early and it should have come out now would have been a huge hit maybe i think it was kind of like a modest. I think it did pretty well when it released. I had fun with it. It was fun. Yeah. It just seemed so goofy at the time. All right. So the story of Evil West, I already mentioned, it's relatively simple.

Michael, do you want to tell the people a little bit about the story of Evil West? Let's hear a story starts back in the 1800s where Jesse Rentier, depending on which character you're speaking to. I'm not going to keep doing this the whole time. By the way, there's no way I could. So, yeah, back in the 1800s, you basically are, you know, your hero character, typical hero character. Your father owns this, like, giant institute

that is supposed to be a big secret, although they seem to have a lot of loud weapons and loud noises going on. And basically, you're there to protect humans from vampires and monsters. And you get the feeling by this game that vampires are not really a new thing to this world. This has been going on for a very long time. Your father kind of invented the Institute and invented a lot of the futuristic weapons you use in the Old West. But basically, you know that you're almost like a secret agent,

like a James Bond type back in the day, and you're there to basically just bust up vampires and monsters. Well, this one day, big, mean Peter DeBano, big, evil, evil vampire comes around, and he basically wants all-out war with humans. He wants to wreck humans, take over everything. Really, his goal is to infiltrate humans learn everything about you know what we are and what our strategies are by essentially assimilating other vampires kind of like the borg in star trek where if you like bite and convert a person to a vampire you know their stuff you know all

their secrets and stuff well essentially his daughter Felicity leads an attack on the Rentier Institute. You'll hear that a lot, by the way. I'll try to keep to one or the other. The Rentier Institute. And almost kills everyone. And that kind of kicks off the meat and potatoes of the story where basically you're just like, hey, this Felicity, she's got to go. She's big and mean. mean actually she's tiny and mean um and we know that she means business and she's going after the highest levels of the united states government to try and learn our secrets our plans and take us down and we got to stop it because we are the rentiers rentiers yeah i think you pretty much got everything covered there uh overall without going into spoilers did you guys find the story to be interesting? Wait, this game had a story?

It did. It sure did, Josh. Wait, this game had a story? No, it did have a story, right? I was going to say the same thing. I'm like, it was cut scenes. They were cut scenes. My favorite part of the story in this game was nothing that Michael just said, although

Michael did cover the story but my favorite part of the story is basically that they're trying to accelerate the vampire conversion or something like that and so they find these ancient beasts that they use the blood from like that was the only part where i was like oh that's kind of cool oh the giant giant monster in the forest oh they're using that blood cool other than that the story in this game i could mike i could i'm glad you didn't ask me paul because i would not have been able to tell you what the story in this game was other than we shooting vampires yeah i mean and and that's i mean perhaps that's all it needs to be in this game the game did not

focus on the story like it was no yeah there was a story it was fun it kind of helped you along like the story basically all it did was bring you from different environments to different environments like oh so we got to go do this so we're going to go to this monster old you know like josh was just talking about environment that's all the the story really served as is just a way to kind of move us from place to place and get us to fight bosses. That's it. Let me ask you guys a question on this. So we mentioned the PS2, old school throwback action type game on this. Would this game have been better served if it did away with story altogether

and just focused on gameplay? That's literally what it already is. Yeah, I was like, is there... I don't know that you can focus less on story. I don't think you can have less story. I mean, there's a decent bit of cut scenes. There's a decent it already is. Yeah. I was like, is there, I don't know that you can focus less on stuff. There's a decent bit of cut scenes. There's a decent bit of talking. They try to throw some lore in there with things that you can find,

like stuff like that. I was just curious because for me, the story did absolutely nothing. Like, this is not a story that I'm ever going to be like, what'd you guys think about this story in evil West? Yeah, it leaves,

it leaves, it leaves zero impression. And there's like a couple moments when you're supposed to have like an emotional reaction right certain reveals or events and you do not care at all like i remember watching in one part and i was like am i supposed to feel weird about this happening because i literally don't care i've spent three minutes with this character over the course of this game that's the thing like there are no side missions you're not even really talking to characters

anytime two characters talk it's literally just where do we go next and who do we have to kill and then boom you're immediately teleported to that area and you just start fighting which honestly i found really refreshing this is almost like the anti red dead redemption 2 where like the red dead games are focused so much on story that the gunplay is serviceable but it's not great this is the exact reverse where it's like we're going to focus entirely on combat systems and we're going to stitch together the smallest story possible and that's really all it is. So yeah, I did not find the story to matter or to be interesting,

and I don't think it has to. I mean, even the one quote-unquote twist that happens, like at three quarters through, like we saw that coming from a mile away, and I still didn't care. I was like, oh, I get to kill another thing. Let's go kill that thing. Yeah.

Very nice. So Josh, would you agree that the combat is the bread and butter of evil west like do you want to give us a rundown of how combat works yeah let's get into the actual what this game is this game is a combat focused game um and you are you you play a tough guy vampire slayer cowboy uh jesse rentier and you basically have this giant gauntlet that's on your hand that becomes more powerful as you play the game. You start off with your revolver, you get a rifle, you acquire more and more weapons as you play the game. But the combat in this game is fast-paced. It is mostly melee. So this is the thing that caught me off guard. If you watch these videos and then you play the game, you see some melee in the videos,

but it looks like it's more just to charge up your electrical abilities and maybe your weapons. And it's actually kind of the exact opposite of that. This is more a melee-focused game. And then with some shooting and special abilities that... Shooting is not the primary thing in this game, in my opinion. Do you guys agree with that? You hear and see a circle and you shoot it and you go back to melee.

Yeah, exactly. So with the exception of maybe a couple of fights where you do need to use a little bit of range, but really, no, it's melee. Yeah, the ranged is more flavor. You uppercut a guy up into the air and then you unload your revolver into him. That's a neat combo kind of thing, but you're not really doing ranged attacks or a lot of damage until you charge up and then unleash a cool, powerful ability or a strong rifle shot or stick them with a grenade or something like that. Dodge special attacks from different kinds of vampires, punch things into TNT barrels. It's hectic. It's fast-paced. It it's fun combat you're not pulling off like crazy combos

this is not bayonetta or any of these type of button masher type games but this is a satisfying combat experience without too much complication or or frills i guess yeah anything that you would say josh left out there michael or does that sound about right no it's about right i mean there there definitely are some like boss fights where maybe you want to kind of adapt your style a little bit but that's about it really i mean it's it's definitely a lot more melee based i i do like uh we're not on this part yet but the uh the upgrades of weapons and stuff we won't get to that yet but. But essentially, it's just interesting because they do give you all of the, essentially, the staples of the Old West. You've got a shotgun.

You've got a rifle. You've got a crossbow, which I guess wouldn't really be a staple of the Old West. You've got the gauntlets, which actually across the front of them have stamped in big letters, Rentier Institute. So I can picture that if you punch something hard enough, you put the stamp in. Leave it in print. Yeah, which is funny. and then you've got you know you got dynamite stuff like that and you just kind of use all of it but almost all of it really is used essentially close range melee type if you're if you're going to be using the the rifle it's it's only because you just don't really have a choice at the time or it just happens to be there's a couple things range

the circle pops up or something like that but yeah uh that's about it yeah one thing that i think makes the combat really fun is that every enemy explodes when you kill them and they just erupt into just like blood raining down and you're just going monster to monster to monster killing all of them and i think the longer you play the game and the more stuff you unlock, the more fun the gameplay becomes. In the beginning, I thought it was fun and it was fine, but the revolvers get pretty boring after a while.

And then pretty soon, next thing you know, you're just managing all your cooldowns. So this game does start to give you more and more abilities. So it's not just like, well, if they're close, I'll use my revolver, and if they're far, I'll use my rifle. Like it is more complicated than that. You're managing in an energy system where you're picking up batteries and you can unleash power through your gauntlets. You've got an ability to like blind everybody in front of you on the map.

And whenever you blind and stun an enemy, you can do different types of combos with melee. And so you start to put all this together it starts to be super hectic it's incredibly satisfying i think to land all these big punches and hits i think there's nothing more fun than sprinting into a group of enemies uppercutting a guy hitting them with the revolver punch them straight into a pile of dynamite that explodes and kills everyone around them. And you're just kind of like run, rinse and repeat. But the game is giving you a new ability or a new weapon like once every hour.

And the game itself is what? Like a six to eight hour game somewhere? It's like 10 hours on average. Maybe 10 hours. Yeah, about 10 hours on average. Yeah. About 10 hours on average. Yeah. I, you know,

there is, this game does a good job of keeping the combat fun, which is a good thing because this game is really only about the combat. We already talked about the story being non-existent. Um, you know, levels are fairly linear. So like the combat is the main focus of this game.

And it's funny because initially, I approached combat as, let me just kill this thing as fast as I possibly can. Right? And it was almost too methodical at that point. And then I kind of went, let me have a little bit of fun with this combat. Like you said, Paul, let me uppercut this guy. Let me shoot him in the air, which juggles them a little bit with the revolver. Later on, like I said, there are skills and perks and that kind of thing and unlocks for your weapons, your gauntlet and stuff like that.

But you would get an ability where you can electrically grab them and then slam them back down to the ground, which then hurts monsters around them and stuff like that. So once you start to get creative with the combat, it gets drastically better, in my opinion. But if you just wade into combat and go, let me just kill things as fast as I possibly can, it's almost a little mundane at that point, because it's like you're limiting yourself. The game tries to give you all of these different abilities, and if you don't take advantage of them, you're kind of limiting that dance that you can do in combat. And not all abilities are equal by any means, but it's like you have the ability to use almost your entire repertoire at any given

time. It's very quick to switch weapons. It's very quick to activate abilities and things like that. So don't just button mash it like get creative like that's the fun part i thought i found myself giving myself like style points half the time exactly yeah like because when when when an enemy is like basically dead they will glow and pulse like gold and the game says they're ready for a finishing move and then you've got like three different ways you can do initiate a finishing move you don't just have to go up and like you know use the same mortal combat thing you know where you pull a spine out in a skull and do the same thing every time well my wife was watching me play this game and there was a monster that i just

i was having a tough time died multiple times to it and then finally at the end you know i i i you know the last time I fought this thing, I had the ability where basically you let out your... It's basically Kratos Rage. You use the exact same two buttons on the PlayStation 5, by the way. You click in both sticks. And you just kind of just go in this electric ball where you just go, boom, boom, boom, boom. At the very end, he's glowing.

And I was so mad at this thing that instead of using a finishing move, I just took out the dynamite, chucked it out of him, and blew him up. Because I was like, I'm so mad at you. I instead of using a finishing move i just took out the dynamite chucked it out of and blew him up because i was like i'm so mad at you i do not want you to be i just i won't even justify you with a finishing move because it just it just it's the style points that you give yourself you know there's all kinds of fun things you can do and some i forgot to mention earlier on the melee portion that i think plays into this as well this game somehow makes a revolver into almost a melee weapon not like john wick ask but like right when you get the revolver after like level two it literally tells you you don't have to aim this gun you just hold it down and it shoots at whatever's nearest to you

and so it it feels like a melee weapon because you're just using it in between punching combos it's hilarious and again more style points on how you want to initiate your finishing blow yeah like. Like, I don't know how many basketball fans we have out there, but I think everyone will get this analogy. Don't try to play it like a serious professional NBA team. You're the Harlem Globetrotters. Just have fun. Don't try to be every guy, like Josh said, with the same move over and over, you know, the shortest way to beat everyone. Just try different combos. You can punch enemies into other enemies. You can start to put different points and upgrades, because we're going to talk about that now, where you can start to now punch enemies into the ground where they explode, and now you can start to do like AoE damage. So the way that like upgrades

in this game work is that basically as you're running through these linear levels, every once in a while, there'll be a 12 foot branch that go off to the left and there's a chest you run over and talk about comparisons to God of war. You literally punch these chests open from the top and then pull out gold. It is exactly like God of war. Dude, we,

we, I got to mention that 100% this game purchased assets from, from God of war dude we i gotta mention that 100 this game purchased assets from from god of war the climbing of the chains yeah when you climb chains that is kratos climbing a chain man like the breaking of the chest like you can 100 tell that they bought animations and then just reskin them like i mean there's nothing wrong with that they're good animations but it was just very funny that you mentioned that because i was like this is kratos climbing this chain right now man like wait a minute this guy's punching through a treasure chest like it's very obvious it's a huge homage to god of war you can definitely see its dna all over this game so basically you get this gold which you can spend on upgrades which are for your weapons

so for or for different abilities so one thing we didn't mention is that the game also has a heal button and that works on a um a cooldown and so for example you can buy an upgrade that might be something like you're now invulnerable for five seconds when you heal so you're looking at upgrades kind of like that there's also a perk system where every time you level, you get a perk point and you have different skill trees, and then you can put a point basically into your gauntlet. And so it could be something like now when you dodge, because this game has dodging, you can dodge left or right, or you can roll. And now when you dodge, you no longer lose your combo while you're fighting. Now, I don't know that the game needed two completely different systems for upgrades. But how did you guys feel about the perk and upgrade system in this one?

It was one of my favorite parts of the game, honestly, because this game is focused on combat so much. The ability to customize your weapons and your abilities is what really helped set it apart for me because they're fairly robust. This is not a 50-point skill tree or anything like that. But basically, what it does is it says, hey, you like the revolver? The revolver can now do this. And some of the things are it has an extra bullet or it electrically charges the bullets. Or if you shoot a person while they're in the air, it does massive damage. And then if you time it right, you can juggle them and do stuff like that. And it's like, oh, okay, that's cool. Or, hey, I love the rifle. I like trying to pick things off at range. And so it's like, oh, you like the rifle? rifle well now the rifle does 20 extra damage or if you

hit a weak spot on somebody it refunds a bullet right away so these sorts of things right and so what this does is it affects your play style in how you approach things um you know and and you unlock a good bit of weapons i mean there's probably what six different weapons themselves somewhere around there technically 10 if you want to get technical okay so there's i mean there is a good variety and every time you unlock a weapon you open up the like the skill tree for that weapon and some of the stuff you have to be a like a level four to see what it is so the game definitely does a good job of pacing things but that's good because it gives you something to work for and if you find a weapon you love hey stick with it because it's only going to get better and then on

top of that you have the abilities which are like you know hey you can upgrade your gauntlet you can make it so that enemies only drop energy pickups or only drop health pickups instead so you can actually like kind of go with builds almost to where it's like i want to have full energy all the time so that my electric gauntlet can just wreck house i can teleport around the battlefield i can pull guys towards me and play the game that way or you can go into like bigger and longer and batter melee combos so that when you're sitting there just slugging something you're really wrecking this thing. Or control, like crowd control type abilities where it's like, hey, when I uppercut somebody, I can uppercut everybody that's in front of me. So now they all fly up in the air,

and then I can smash them to the ground and play that way. It's just, I really enjoyed the perks and ability system in this game because it gave the combat that flavor that I wanted. Yeah. I think that also, I know, Paul, you were talking about why is the reasoning to have two and ability system in this game because it gave the combat that flavor that i wanted yeah i think that also i know paul you were talking about why is the reasoning to have two different like perks and ability systems i appreciated that because one of them was based off of your level and one of them was based off of money so you upgrade your weapons with money and you upgrade your abilities kind of with your levels well we know in games like this that are very linear everybody's gonna finish the game between level 20 and 22 there's there's no like you know you don't get extra bonus points for like

going and spending more time on side quests there are no side quests you know and so as i was playing i was like okay i'm gonna only get the amount of points for my abilities as like what this game will allow me to do so you have to kind of plan for it like josh was saying how do i want to play what do i want to do you also got extra abilities by opening some of the secret chests which like paul was saying like 12 feet off but you could easily miss a couple of them like if you didn't look around a little bit you could definitely miss a whole ability that you didn't get but i found myself wanting to look around more because i was like man the next upgrade on this cool ability is $9,000.

I know every time I open a chest, I'm getting like $100 to $400. And so I know that I've got to look around if I want to upgrade this as fast as possible. But one of the things that I found hilarious is how the Rentier Institute, they incorporate supernatural elements into the things. By the end, my dynamite... Here's the progression tree of the dynamite, right? Yeah. And you know where I'm going with this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the progression on the dynamite is there's four different

levels of the dynamite. Level one, it throws dynamite. Level two, you get a bigger boom and a bigger blast radius. Level three, you get three sticks of dynamite you throw simultaneously. Level four, when you throw your dynamite on something, a magical freaking tornado comes out and starts wrecking the battlefield and you're like where is this coming from but it's hilarious and when i saw that ability on there i was like i have to get this it's expensive but i have to get it and i found myself saying okay

between the bow and the rifle i'm only going to really use one range weapon because i want to skill into the dynamite and i know that i'm only going to really use one range weapon because I want to skill into the dynamite. And I know that I'm not going to have enough money to get every single skill in the game. And so you have to kind of plan around that, which I thought was really refreshing. Like, I actually went through after I beat the game and started a new game plus because just so you guys know, listeners, this game does have a new game plus. So it does reward you for playing through the game again. Once you have all the abilities, you get to start over, maybe go on a harder difficulty level, which I love games that do that. If you're enjoying it, you can keep going.

It's the same game, but you just get to do more cool stuff at the beginning. And I found myself just kind of in a situation where I was like, I kind of want to start it again just so I can get and see what this rifle does when you hold it down and charge it because I never got that ability. So it's kind of cool. The beauty is you can respect it almost any time as well. Like every level has a respect station. It seems. Yeah. Yeah.

I was going to say, don't worry about any kind of choice paralysis. You have ample opportunities to reset both your upgrades and your perks at any time. And by the end of the game, you, you basically can get almost everything you want uh at least for me perk wise i i had everything i wanted to upgrade on my gauntlets

and abilities it's really just the gold that held me back from a couple of the upgrades but yeah they're they're a little bit magical you just take it for what it is like why does my revolver now ricochet bullets between enemies i don't know it's only because I bought an upgrade and it works. And it's really fun. That's all you need to know. Yeah. Don't think about it too hard. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express.

Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. All right. Now, what do you guys think about the game's visuals? So graphics, animations, the fact that Jesse looks like a mix between Arthur Morgan and John Marston. I mean, what do you guys want to talk about in regards to visuals? It was an odd mix for me, to be honest. the cut scenes in this game were atrocious they put so much film grain on the cut scenes like did you guys notice that like i felt like the cut scenes

in this game had so like lots of lots of people use film grain right but it's like it's like there was so much film grain in this that it was almost blurry and i don't know why they went that route other than like maybe they just didn't want to put the time into like the facial animations or the skin textures or something like that maybe to feel old-timey i mean maybe man you got they went overboard so it was this weird this it was just weird some of the levels i thought were beautiful like the swamp with all the glowing swamp gas and stuff. I was like, dude, this is really pretty. And then other times I was like,

this just doesn't look that good. Like, I don't know, man. Like they were not bad by any means, but it was weird because certain graphics would look really good and then other ones would look really bad. And I was like, are these different art teams? Like what's going on here?

I kind of noticed the same thing first of all i i did like the style of the game i thought it was really um it resembled a comic book quite a bit and what a comic book superhero like futuristic-esque or you know electrified cowboy would look and feel like so i did appreciate those choices but like josh so there was a couple of odd things like for instance there's a there's a part when you're in calio is it calico calio basically your main base it's the belfry of this game whatever you want to call it right and the light is shining through the windows very bright and it's very cool and you know when you look at someone when there's a really bright like morning you can kind of see translucence in their nose right and i'm like that's a really cool effect

they did that except in this case like you couldn't see like the whole nose of this character i was looking at was like translucent it looked like ballistics gel like when you see like the dummies that the mythbusters used you can just see through their nose and i'm like that's a cool idea but really kind of yeah exactly yep yeah and i was like i like what they're doing that being said there was some parts like there was a part when you're fighting um one of the like last like act three battles where there's like fire everywhere and the way the shadows grew as you walked away from the fires was really realistic i thought that the ground looked really good there was spots where you could see like your footprints in the mud i think it was fine they did a really good job with the graphics overall for not being a AAA title,

but there was some odd choices made. I thought for the most part, the game looked pretty good for a AA title. I had no issues at all with the resolution or how good the assets looked. What I did find kind of funny are some of the animations. What did you guys think about how Jesse swings on chains and on ropes like do you notice

how stiff he is oh yeah i found it to look so awkward where it was almost like almost like he had rigor mortis like while swinging on these ropes it was just very stiff yeah you know like we we've got to mention again this is not intended to be a triple a title uh this is a double a title um you know and and some of that shows through for sure yeah you know graphically wise my main complaint from the time we very very first saw the first gameplay in this game was all the stupid glowing chains everywhere man like honestly the best part of the game oh no best part oh my goodness man you never you never have to guess where to go the game points you in the right direction i they're gaudy they're tacky they're everywhere like i mean i i know like game developers try to dumb things down

to the lowest common denominator sometimes but dude you don't need white glowing and they're everywhere it doesn't change i'm in this dark swamp with glowing swamp gas that's beautiful looks like the aurora borealis or something going on and there's 30 glowing white markers everywhere it's like dude what a distraction like i don't know why they went that route okay so here's where i'm going to argue with you on that one um just because i i think that again like i said my wife watched me play this entire game we played after the kids were in bed because it's a little bit graphic you know obviously vampires are getting cut in half and blown up um but the whole thing is like this

game it doesn't say hey like god of war you've got to look around for secret things it's literally just like go this way do this my wife at one point was like oh did you miss something back there? I think I saw something. I'm like, no, the game pretty much tells me where I'm supposed to go and if there's a secret thing back there by putting a giant gold or silver X chain over it with a fist symbol in the middle of it. So I know that I'm supposed to punch that, go through it, and then I need to go back to killing things because the point of this game is not to be exploring, it's to kill things. So i was fine with the glowy stuff now in a fight though those glowy stuff would go away so you would always know if you can't progress yet the game makes you kill all the mobs or the monsters in the area before you can keep going out of the area so you'll know like oh that chain's not glowing

which means i've still got a bad guy somewhere i gotta find which in one case when i experienced the paul glitch i call it the paul glitch because he was the first person to find it I had accidentally punched someone over the edge of something and I couldn't kill this thing I had I had to go back and restart the game it was the only time it happened for me but I was like I can't go over this chain it's not glowing bright obnoxious white silvery and I saw there's a guy up in the corner I couldn't shoot him couldn't get him and I'm like okay well I know that the corner. I couldn't shoot him, couldn't get him. And I'm like, okay, well I know that I'm not supposed to progress yet,

but overall I kind of liked having the like, thank you for simplifying it because this game is about the combat. I'll take the simplification. So I'm not pulling what I pulled on God of War. Like when I was treating like fallout three, when I'm looking through every box. Yeah, I'm completely with you,

Michael. I, it did not bother me at all. I actually really appreciated it. I think the thing that bothered me the most is when you're in the quote open world for a minute between missions like when you're walking around the rentier institute yeah you will hear characters talk and their mouths are not moving yeah and that's clearly like limited budget smaller studio i get it but it's very funny to hear a character talk and they're just staring straight into

nothingness and you hear them talk um i did say this before when we were previewing the game the use of color is phenomenal this game loves to put you in a dark room with like tesla coils going off so there's blue shooting all over the room and you're fighting in like the dark. And then in other times you're fighting down an open street where seemingly the whole world is ablaze on fire and you're working through all the orange and the red. Like the game loves to give you these big, bright colors that you guys know. I hate dark games. It's like we have all these colors to use in the toolbox. Why are we not using them?

And I thought that they really used color really, really well. Now, the game does have a couple of major bosses. There's a lot of mini bosses along the way. I don't think there's a whole lot to say about it. Other than I do wish that there were more. Having only three big bosses is a little bit of a disappointment. And I one-shot the second and third bosses. So I felt like they probably could have been ramped up a little bit of a disappointment and i one shot the second and third bosses so like i felt like they probably could have been ramped up a little bit in difficulty and and i wish that there were more uh overall what'd you guys think about the length of the game and the difficulty it was not difficult now you can up the difficulty level um i just played on the default level this

time just because i wanted to see what is this game like. I had played God of War before when I played that, so I knew I enjoy the higher difficulty level. I mean, I think it was the right length, to be honest. I think if it had been longer, it would have needed a story or it would have needed more progression or something like that. And I think it was spot on as far as how long it was i'm with you paul i really do wish that they had more boss fights because those were fairly fun and there's only so much you can do with the mechanics of the game i mean you know you guys it's a melee combat type system yes you do have range but you know that's not super

effective dodge left or dodge right. Right, yeah, exactly. They do throw some mechanics later where there are going to be pinwheels of fire on the ground and you've got to run inside and make sure you don't get hit by the fire. I wanted more of that, though. All those worm things. All those stupid worm things. Yeah, I wanted more of that.

So I think they could have fleshed that out a little bit more, but yeah, the length of the game is fine for me. I think that overall, I think the length was great because the length also, it really coincided with how appropriately they let you upgrade your weapons and gave you new weapons. It feels like the pacing of when you got new abilities was really perfect. Just when you were starting to get used to or slash kind of tired of using one thing, they gave you a new thing. I think if the game was longer,

it would have been at the detriment of the great balance of timing they had with just having fun, beating things up, straight combat, that's all you're focused on, and then getting boring and tiresome. So I think that the length is great. That being said, the difficulty, I don't know what you guys are talking about. i thought the first two bosses were cakewalks the

last two bosses were super hard so you had like the monster boss that with like the arms super easy you had the first time you meet oh what's her name again felicity felicity you meet felicity and she puts out that ugly looking like yeah that one kicked my butt a few times. And then I thought those two, but I thought the last two fights, and I don't want to spoil it. I don't know if there's much to spoil anyways, but the last two fights where you fight the so-and-so with the worm things on the ground, which I hated, and then the big boss at the end with so much jumping.

Maybe I just didn't build properly for it, but I thought those fights were really hard. I think that about two hours before this game ends, the difficulty ramps up quite a bit because you get thrown in situations where you're basically fighting a conglomerate of every type of mob you've had. You've got the spider thing

that shoots the spider web stuff. You've got the on-the-wall thingy with the easy aim bot stuff. You've got all the stuff in between. And you're fighting them all at once. And I'm like, this is really hard. And I died a couple more times. Yeah.

Got to break the shields. And they all of a sudden just threw it at you. It hadn't really been happening to that degree. And then all of a sudden it happened, which I think was perfect. They made the end of the game a lot more difficult. I really liked that because you keep fighting the same enemy types again and again, but in harder situations. So like the first time you fight a guy where you have to break through the shield, that fight takes a while. And then by the end of the game, you're blasting through those guys and you're fighting three of them at the same time along with eight other mobs.

I totally agree with what you guys are saying. The pacing is absolutely spot on. I found this game to be incredibly charming. It continually gives you something new to play with. They're just handing you toys left and right, and then the game just ends and it doesn't stay too long. I wish it had more boss fights. That's almost a compliment to say. I wish they just gave me a little bit more. Sometimes you don't want to watch eight seasons of a TV show, right? You just want to watch a miniseries that's four episodes long, knock it out and be done. You don't want to watch all of Lost or something.

Right. And this game is like that. If you want to knock it out in one or two play sessions, you can. And for a $50 price tag, it is kind of high for being a short game. But I found as far as just strictly gameplay wise, I even said to you guys, we didn't talk very much about what we thought about the game. But I did say, I don't think I've had this much fun with combat in a game since Outriders. And that was April of last year. So for me, I found the combat of this game and the continual pacing to be pretty awesome.

Anything else you guys want to cover before we jump into community reviews? Yeah, I just want to cover two things real fast, and they'll both be quick. But one thing, when it comes to combat difficulty, I also, like Josh, considered stepping the combat up early in the game and going to a harder mode. And when I went in the menu to do it, it actually tells you in words underneath it, hey, just so you know, this game is designed to be played on normal difficulty. This is the way the game developers found was a perfect balance. So think about that before you go to a harder mode. And I was like, okay, I'll stay at normal. I'm glad it got harder at the end. The other thing that I have to talk about is the only thing that I absolutely hated about this game. I threw my controller one time during this game.

I got so mad. I told my wife. I said, I have to get up and walk away for a moment. I will come back later, and we'll finish this game. But I'm too mad to keep playing. And that was one of those fights we talked about where there's like a million things around you, right? And you're fighting so many things. There's spider webs coming down.

Well, there's that thingy floaty guy. There's a thingy floaty guy. The gotta kill the beehive yeah and you gotta kill the orbs i hate that yeah and you gotta kill the orbs around him the auto aim the auto aim in this game is so prevalent it is it is it made me angry because i'm literally trying to aim at the beehive pieces and shoot them off and the auto aim is making me aim at whatever's right in front of me. And I'm fighting the auto aim to try and aim at what I want to aim at. And I'm like, I want to shoot that. The game will not let me shoot that unless I dodge so many times to get away from all these mobs to shoot at that thing in the distance.

And it made me so mad. Wait, were you playing on console? Yeah. Oh, see, I played on pc you i turned off instantly did you that's a console controller or did you use mouse and keyboard and if you with auto aim off i could just aim perfectly with the mouse yes i turned auto aim off but i could not aim fast enough because the game is the game is not designed to be range and so like aiming is not it's kind of cumbersome so that's the one thing i would say that if you're going to choose this game on console versus pc maybe keyboard and mouse is the way to go and then one big praise that i had for it though is that if you're a console player and you play on a ps5 the haptic feedback

on the controller in this game is really really well done it did something i've never seen done before and that was as you're as you're using the rifle and like on the rifle, for instance, like on the bow and arrow or the crossbow, you can hold the trigger down and you will constantly shoot on the rifle. You have to pull it each time you pull the trigger. And if you pull it more times in rapid succession, every time you pull that trigger, it gets harder to pull the trigger. Like it tightens up until you have to reload and you can't even pull the trigger at all. And I think that what they were trying to do is simulate the fact that you would have a hard time in real life pulling the trigger repeatedly, like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I think they were like, let's make it harder to do this to make it more challenging. I love that choice.

I love the haptic feedback and the way they did it. So I just wanted to throw that out there, a couple things at the end on the... Anything to cover i don't normally have much to cover here but i did this time so there we go yeah no thanks for sharing i love tactile feedback with like haptic controllers the the ps5 controller i think is really incredible i can't wait to see other ways that they use like haptic feedback like that all right well let's uh share a little bit about what the community thought josh you got a couple of reviews for us? I sure do. We went to Steam for this one. We always pull a few reviews, a couple of positives, a couple of negatives, just to

give some other thoughts on the game and kind of what are some of the more general thoughts that people had on this. This first review is recommended 14 hours on record. So they beat the game. And it says, it's just a fun game. No modern gaming bull, just dumb fun. Yeah. And I know that's not good criticism to say, it's just fun, guys, go play it. But that's literally what this game is. Watch some videos, go play it, especially if you're on PC, you can always refund it. It's just a good, fun time.

I don't know what else to say. It's fun. All right. And then this next one is not recommended. 6.8 hours on record. And it says, ultra repetitive. We advance quite linearly. Linerally?

Linearly. Linearly. Words are hard. Oh, i know what's coming on that oh there it was we thought it'd be michael i get my own sound drop now josh used it oh man we find a rectangular area with a few boxes of explosives five minutes of combat then we advance advanced then arena, then combat at first. It's cool. But after that becomes boring, especially for $50. The game does tell you when you're about to have a big fight and in between,

it's just a straight line. Like I think the reason I pulled that one is that the levels are pretty, but man, it is a straight corridor with, you said maybe a 10 foot branch with a chest that's just out of sight and then it's a big open arena where you have a big fight and it is rinse and repeat after that. So if you're looking

to explore or any of that stuff, you're going to be disappointed. Like we said, PS2 action game. Yeah. This next one is not recommended five and a half hours on record. It is the Kmart God of War relatively uncreative boss fights so they just throw more bad guys at you during them that's not that's not necessarily

that bad though like god of war is so good you can have a poor man's god of war and it's still fun i do i remember thinking that this game was God of War meets Red Dead. And it is not God of War to me. No, no, no. I remember this game is vastly different than what I thought it was going to be. You know what I mean? Versus the trailers and the animations and the camera style and all that. We legitimately thought this was going to be God of War Western.

And it's not. This is, like you said, PS2 combat action brawler type game instead. So, all right. And then this last one is recommended 35 hours on record. So this person has played through a few times and it says, this game is great fun. No idea what all the negative press is about. Not every game needs a story that changes your life. Not every game needs cutting edge graphics to prove its point. Not every game needs cutting-edge graphics to prove its point. Not every game needs to innovate and take gaming in new directions.

Sometimes a game just needs tried and true mechanics at work. Sometimes a game just needs to let you blow stuff up. Sometimes a game just needs to be fun, and this game, my friends, is fun. Play it. Written by Paul. Of the Multiplayer Podcast.

Totally agree. So there's a good mix of a couple things people didn't seem to like, a couple things that people did like. Now, we always play a little game where we try to guess the overall rating, the Steam scores of a game to see who can get closest to that Steam score on a scale of 0 to 100. I'll go first this time since i didn't get to participate last time because i accidentally knew the score on that one about that my guess was 82

okay i i don't mind going second since i i won last time uh i think 82 is really a good guess josh i'm gonna say 84 i think it's just a tad higher okay oh now i gotta pull a paul and just say 85 because actually no i i really thought it was gonna be closer to an 87 so i'm gonna say 87 i'm not gonna say 85 just to try and win i'm gonna say 87 well you went the wrong direction michael you should have undercut me. You should have undercut me. I'm going to say 67. You should have undercut me because the actual score is 77% on Steam, which I think still qualifies as mostly positive at that point. You think it's the money? You think it's the 50 bucks?

It is 100% the 50 bucks. Or it's the fact that God of War came out right before this. Everybody played god of war and they're just comparing all games to god of war it's recency biased well well well let's save that thought michael because it's time to move into the next segment which is called make love marry or murder paul hit that music i believe it's up to me take it away josh hey not felicity but the other lady in the game i can't remember your name because the characters the characters in this game are not memorable at all um but there is

another lady in this game and so uh yeah you uh with the glasses that that does something i can't remember because the story in this game doesn't exist either um you want to go fight some vampires oh this this is not not not your best pickup game i i didn't expect to win this one to be honest with you and let's be honest there's nobody in this game that i really want to take out anywhere either so fair enough all right so this segment is called make love marry or murder this is where we are going to rate the game um based on our personal opinions um we don't always agree. We do factor in cost of game, fun factor, that kind of stuff.

Paul, I think you've already kind of hinted how you feel about this. So why don't you lead us off on this one? Yeah, I'm going to say it's marriage material. But I will say the $50 price tag really makes it close to being make love territory. The thing is, I think the combat in this game, I had more fun playing this than the combat of God of War. Now,

God of War Ragnarok, the story is a million times better than anything Evil West has to offer. But I had probably more fun, strictly speaking, with just the combat in Evil West has to offer. But I had probably more fun, strictly speaking, with just the combat in Evil West. I think if you watch a video and it looks at all appealing, then you should absolutely buy it and play it. If you don't like the first two hours, refund it on Steam. No problem. No harm, no foul.

I loved playing it. I'm going to say Mary. Mary, what about you, Michael? What are you'm going to say Mary. Mary, for all. What about you, Michael? What are you thinking? I will be the meat in this sandwich. I will give my... I was going to say meaty take, but I said it anyways.

That's really strange. Let's move on. Because you guys are the bread. I'm the one in the middle. Everybody gets that. I don't know why I'm explaining this. It's like I'm a glowing chain in the middle of a... Yeah, it's like I'm a glowing chain in the middle of a...

I'm just telling you guys things you already know where to go anyways um i am also going to marry this game i i thought that this was very refreshing and fun um i ironically enough like the the review where the guy said that he found the combat repetitive i think they gave you just enough fun stuff every here and there that changed the way you play the game your combat for the very beginning of the game vastly different from how you're playing combat at the end of the game and the middle it's the same as well you change the whole way you go i think god of wars combat is actually more repetitive honestly i agree um and and i just i really and again without comparing this game to god of war in a lot of ways sometimes it's just refreshing to say no bs i'm gonna just kill a bunch of stuff and focus

on combat and focus on action the story was fine it was fine i i didn't get a lot from it i'm glad there was a story to give me reasons to hate these vampires even more as i was electrocuting them smashing them and blowing them up with explosive tornadoes and i really appreciated it and individuals were and storing their heads in a giant warehouse storing their heads in a giant way that's interesting we're not supposed to do that i gotta go um no but like but like the graphics were good they were they were actually i mean i would say the graphics are great compared to a lot of things you see nowadays it was it was was fun. The colors were amazing. The world building, as far as just looking at it, was great.

I had a great time with this game, and I think that people should play it. Again, I was hinging as well on the idea between Make Love or Marry because it is a $50 game. But I really think that every once in a while... Here's what made me stick to Make Love. I look forward to playing the second one. If there's a second one, I will absolutely buy it. I will play it. I'm going to have a good time doing it.

Wait. Now, did you marry it or did you make love to it? Because I thought you said married. I married it. You married it. Yeah. Oh, but you said here's what made me stick to Make Love, so I wasn't sure. No. Here's what made me teeter over Make Love. Oh, okay. I got you. For those that want to go back and rewind, push the podcast button back a couple times. Replace the Make Love part with Mary.

I'm marrying this game. Done. Okay, got you. All right, so that's two Marys so far. Oh, my goodness. I hate to be the voice of reason here, guys. Number one, I don't know how you guys compare this combat to God of War's combat. God of War's combat, and I know this combat to God of Wars combat.

God of Wars combat. And I know I'm a God of War fan boy, but God of Wars combat to me is massively, massively better than, than, uh, evil West is. It was the same as 2018 though. I mean,

yeah, but like it was good. Why change it? It's amazing. This was the new, this was the new hotness. God of War Ragnarok. The combat was great,

but I had already done it before. And yes, there's some, and I could do that for things like it added later. This was the new hotness. God of War Ragnarok, the combat was great, but I had already done it before. And yes, there's some things I could add later. This was something that was new and completely original. So here's my thoughts on this. Now, I'm going to caveat this because I don't want both of you guys going like, Josh, you're crazy. But we played this game immediately after God of War Ragnarok. I went one day after finishing God of War Ragnarok before I

dove into Evil West. Now, I'm sorry, Evil West, but that's a tough game to follow up. I found this game to be very, very bland and simple. The levels, graphics look good, but you are walking down a straight, straight corridor until you get to a big box arena. And then you know you're about to fight a bunch of vampires. That part's fun. And then you hop over a little wall or wherever the little shiny chains tell you to go. And then you wander in a straight line until you get to the next one. So the level design I found to be thoroughly, thoroughly boring other than the graphics on the levels.

The combat is fine. It's fun. It's, you know, they give you a lot of weapons to play with and you get some perks. And I mentioned that I love the perk system and the ability system and all that because I like doing builds and stuff like that. But I found the combat to get fairly repetitive. The boss fights, there was only three of them. One of them wasn't even really that much fun. One of them was kind

of hard. I died like four or five times. So that was fun for me because I enjoy difficulty and dying and stuff like that. I'm having a hard time with this game because I found it to just be simply mediocre all around, honestly. I've really struggled between murdering this game and making love to this game because there is some fun to be had. I certainly didn't hate my time with it. It's just, it's a $50 game and there's nothing groundbreaking about this game at all anywhere. And I know nothing, not everything has to be groundbreaking.

I'm going to give it a very tentative make love. I don't want to murder it because I don't think that's fair, but I had fun playing it. Then I feel like it should be made. I had fun playing it, then I feel like it should be make-up. I had fun playing the combat portion. The problem was 50% of this game is wandering through a straight hallway level, and 50% of this game, or the other 50%, math is hard, guys, the other percentage is being in the stupid headquarters.

There's no point being in the headquarters in this game. You're in the headquarters 10 seconds they make you how many times did you have to open the stupid keg to walk into the headquarters part of it four times yeah yeah why do i have to do that so between the linear level design that keeps sending me back to this stupid headquarters thing if this game was a hundred percent combat like it should have been it would have been a lot more enjoyable i found the other stuff really detracted from the game. This is about as close as I can get to a murder without actually murdering the game. I feel like this should have been a $25 game.

All right. So here's the thing. And this is something that I think people need to get off of this. And I might be calling you out on this too, Josh. This game is not a top five game. We're not going to put this top five on our leaderboard. It's $10 cheaper than a AAA title, though. This game is $10 less than God of War Ragnarok.

Well, $20 less than Ragnarok. $20 less than Ragnarok. Oh, wait. Was it $50 on the 70? Ragnarok was $70. Yeah, this is $50 Ragnarok was $70. It was $50 on console? But here's...

Okay. I mean, I'd gladly pay the other $20 to have a better game. But here's the thing, is that there's something for everyone. There's a lot of people out there. I thought it was a breath of fresh air. It was really fun. I had a great time. I'm not going to sit here and compare every game that we review for the next two years

to God of War, because I think that's unfair to other games. God of War stands in an upper echelon on its own maybe with a select few games there are a lot of games that i have a lot of fun playing that are not god of war and this game is not god of war it's not i agree yeah and i married this game because i truly had a blast playing it and the 10 hours i put into it i loved them and i think everyone should play this game if they like have an action fun and that that's where kind of put it, is that we sit here, we want to put everything in that. Let's compare it to this. Let's talk about a AAA title.

$50, it was worth $50. I had a great time. If I go to the movies and I'm paying $20 for a movie ticket for a couple of hours, this game is worth $50 for 10 hours to me. Yeah, and I feel like the percentage of time fighting i don't know i mean there's no point in like quibbling over numbers but i feel like i spent 75 to 80 percent of this game fighting or solving a puzzle like there's a couple light oh the puzzles suck couple mazes they're all really yeah i mean they're not difficult at all uh yeah i mean it might just be one of a case of different strokes for different folks but i found it to be utterly charming and a huge throwback in like the best way it would be like complaining

about shredder's revenge and being like oh well it's not like an open world fighting game and it's like well yeah because it's just a throwback i just wanted nostalgic the problem like my biggest problem is if your game is about combat and the the combat is fun. Like I said, I enjoyed the fights in this game. Just give me a game where it's nothing but fighting, man. You know what I mean? But they basically did. No, they didn't. I don't know if you can get more. They tried to have story and characters

and it was terrible. All together the cutscenes are what? Like 40 minutes? I don't know. Maybe. And you can skip 100% of them. That's almost 10%. I can't skip the cut scenes because we got to review the game. I know. You know what I mean?

I feel like all your complaints here, I don't know. I'm not seeing what you're saying. I mean, you both said that you enjoyed this combat more than God of War. I don't see that in a million years. Now, yes, we cannot compare every game to God of War. I agree with you 100% on that. I just found this game to be thoroughly mediocre, like almost all around.

The combat is fun. I'm not murdering it, but man, is it close for me. I will correct, though. I didn't say the combat was better than God of War. I said I felt like God of War's combat got more repetitive. Yeah. Not that it's better or worse yeah but uh yeah it's different in a fun way like i like that they're different combat you know

yeah i respect your opinion josh and i'm just keeping it real for the people all right well let's move into our last segment here let's go to our leaderboard and see where this game stacks up okay if anyone's new to our show we have an overall leaderboard at our website which is multiplayerpodcast.com anytime we do a deep dive as a three-man consensus we have to agree where do we put it on our overall list we're comparing all kinds of different games different genres we're trying to compare them to one another uh highly subjective just based on our own experience we've got games in our top five like red dead redemption 2 god of war 2018

overwatch cyberpunk 2077 and disco elysium further down the, we got stuff like down in the 40s, games like RimWorld, Far Cry 5, Shovel Knight, Operation Tango. Toward the bottom, we've got some stuff like Minecraft Dungeons, Hood Outlaws and Legends, Battlefield 2042. So if you want to see what we have on our leaderboard, you can do that through the website and then since we're looking at two marys that kind of teeter on make love and we've got one kind of teetering between make love and murder uh certainly this is not like a top 20 or a bottom 20 game this is gonna go like somewhere kind of in the middle right yeah yeah yeah any any gut reactions what if we compare it to like like weird west we have all the way up at 22 i feel like this is going to be lower west is a better game in my opinion i think it's funny

because i i've got a i've got an interesting comparison to make that there's such similar games in very very different ways and i don't i don't think necessarily this belongs this high because of our group rating but i look at the forgotten city both games are relatively short eight to ten hours right forgotten city zero combat well there's one little part where half an hour you kind of do combat but you can skip it yeah this game zero story yeah all combat but they both kind of satisfied the same thing it's like the one thing you did i really think you did a good job with that like the forgotten forgotten city really great job with

the story it made me cry this game would not make me cry i did throw my controller once but i think for me it belongs kind of in that realm i know it's gonna probably end up a little bit lower but i think it's kind of like hey you did that one thing really well you did combat really well i had a lot of fun forgotten forgotten city did combat really well i had a lot of fun forgotten city did story really well i had a lot of fun similar gut reaction me just looking i'd have it somewhere around 20 to 25 um kind of like what range would you have it personally josh oh mid 40s for me i am i think y'all are crazy to put this game that high i mean you're, you're putting this around games like Hollow Knight. Oh, it's way better than Hollow Knight for me.

Resident Evil Village, you're putting it above that. I stopped playing that one. Yeah, I mean, I would have a serious problem putting it that high. The reason that we put Resident Evil Village, which is now at 32, is because it was so short and an inexpensive game. This has exactly the same criticisms. Yeah, I don't know. So if you're thinking 40s, Josh, I'm thinking 20s.

Let's kind of look like in that 30-ish range? I'm just like, I'm looking at like Broforce for me is kind of like the, would I rather play Broforce or would I rather play Evil West? I think I would rather play Evil West, but then I get up to like Deep Rock Galactic, which I know you are not a fan of, Paul, but I would much rather play Deep Rock Galactic than Evil West west you want to keep it below deep rock galactic and put it in at 34 that's the range like i'm comfortable with like i would i will fight you guys for days if you want to put this in like the mid-20s because i do not think this game has that much redeeming quality to it sure same way i would fight you if you're trying to put it below lost ark and uh yeah which is that's why i say i think that's a fair spot i i think it's a happy medium to put it below lost ark and uh yeah which is that's why i say i think that's a fair spot i i

think it's a happy medium to put it in the in the low 30s or high 30s we still have early 30s early early 30s early 30s yeah so so below near automata resident evil village and deep rock galactic i could see putting it yeah but above i'd like to put it above Deep Rock Galactic, but Josh won't let me. I mean, if you both. Josh really loves Deep Rock. If you both want it at 33, I'll concede to that. I liked Deep Rock Galactic.

I just, I fizzled out after a couple hours. Here's the reason I say this, right? People that go to the leaderboard that have never played these games, I get that Deep Rock Galactic gets old at a certain point, but that game game is super fun initially only if you have a group of friends to play right yeah but i'm just saying like at that point it's like oh this is great man you know and then it kind of falls off later on because you start grinding for weapons and stuff like that that don't really matter at that point evil west is a one and done experience I just feel like you're not never going to.

Yeah, you're never going to play it again. I still have I have an issue with it being $50. It does some things very well. This is not a I hate this game by any means. It's just I just found it to be mediocre. If you have Gamefly or if Redbox still exists anywhere, because we don't have any in Phoenix anymore, seemingly, if they still had games at Redbox, this would be the perfect game to rent for console, beat it in two days, and return it.

And you'd pay $4 or whatever. Absolutely. Yeah. That's where it would shine most. Okay. So are we all okay at $34? You guys can put it at $33 if you want. That's up to you. No, let's keep it. I'm remarkably indifferent between $33 at 33 if you want that's up to you i'm i'm remarkably

between 33 and 34 so that's fine all right so we'll lock that in at at 34 uh and i think that's totally fair uh i just wanted to make sure it wasn't going to be in the 40s or 50s i think that'd be a little little too low and it's not in the 20s for you josh so i think we're okay with it look at this we all know how to rate games around here that's how you negotiate without calling each other names i reckon this here would be i reckon this here would be one of them everybody wins your video games they suck guys yeah right yeah all right so guys we are done deep diving games in 2022 this one's in the box we're done wow wow i will say this this episode releases on monday tomorrow high on life comes

out please don't let that game suck i will be so disappointed i like now let me ask you guys something real quick as we're closing out the show. Did you expect more from Evil West? Absolutely not. No. I think that's part of my problem is I went into it expecting more. And then I kind of got disappointed. I started seeing like the flaws, like the story sucks. These level design is not very good.

Oh, it's all super linear. And like I started to really crash, but then the combat got fun. And that's the point I talked about earlier in the episode, right? Where it's like, I was just wailing through things, trying to kill them as fast as possible. And then I went, let me have some fun with this. Let me get some flair in this combat. Let me get fancy. You know what I mean?

And that's where the game really started to climb back up for me at that point. So again, some of that is just I think my expectations going into it were different than what the game actually was. And then I didn't kind of figure that out until about halfway through. And that's where I went, I'm just supposed to have dumb fun on this. I'm not supposed to worry about anything else. Just get fantastical and slaughtering these vampires. And then it got better. I'm so happy this game didn't have like 50 hours worth of side quests that i had to trek through again like so many of those

games now that's why i liked about it linear great combat fun if you are doing what josh said not to do which is just try to get through it as fast as you can what are you doing that for to see the end of the story yeah not much happens right have fun have fun with this game yeah stop and smell the flowers uh along the vampire blood yeah smell the vampire blood and and uh and and heads that are all over the ground all right so yes we are all done with deep dives for this year please come back for our last three new episodes and stick with us through our holiday break. As a reminder,

you can sign up on Patreon to support our show and get bonus episodes. You can do that at multiplayer squad.com. You can follow us everywhere on socials at multiplayer pod. And we just want to say another thank you to everyone out there for listening. I hope you guys are all having a great week and we hope that you'll join us here next time. And until then, happy gaming. Reckon I'll see y'all on a deep dive

sometime around 2023. In the meantime, pick your poison, stranger, and cheers. Bye, everybody!