Evil West Final Preview: I Punched A Vampire So Hard It Exploded

thegamer.com:

Cowboy-horror-action-brawler Evil West has been on my radar since it was first revealed at The Game Awards in 2020. It ticks a lot of boxes for me, not least of which is its striking resemblance to my beloved Darkwatch, and studio Flying Wild Hog has a decent track record with both the Shadow Warrior trilogy and this year’s Trek to Yomi. Earlier this year, I played through the very beginning of Evil West and battled the first boss, a towering bat monster you find in a tomb beneath a ghost town. For this final preview, I got to jump into a later level to see how the combat evolves once you get some more tools to work with. Managing the battlefield is a balletic bloodbath of quick thinking and even quicker reacting. Unfortunately, everything else feels an unnecessary barrier between you and the next big fight.

When I started this paragraph it occurred to me that I don’t even know our protagonist’s name, and frankly, it doesn’t feel like it matters that much. Playing fragmented missions in previews doesn’t serve the story very well, but these demos are meant to represent Evil West’s best qualities, which is undoubtedly the combat. Our hero has a wide assortment of weapons and abilities to face the forces of hell with, and his arsenal only gets more impressive as you go. Evil West takes a lot of the action game conventions of the Dark Souls era and adds some interesting twists.

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Take parrying for example. A well-timed block can counter an attacking ghoul just as you would expect, but instead of simply retaliating with a scripted attack, you have a few options about how you follow up. A parried enemy is left stunned and surrounded by bright blue