The Evil Within Critic Reviews

The Evil Within excels at keeping your palms sweaty while delivering a harrowingly rewarding gameplay trial. Watching the credits roll with a sigh of relief doesn’t feel like winning; it feels like surviving.

The Evil Within is a true return to form. Not just for Shinji Mikami, but for the whole survival horror genre this is a great title. Anyone that grew up with games like Resident Evil or Silent Hill will be enjoying this game to the fullest.

Mikami is back, with a game that reminds of Resident Evil 4, with a touch of Silent Hill and The Last of Us. It's long, hard, fun and challenging, a game you cannot miss if you enjoyed RE4.

Tango Gameworks have successfully ticked all the right boxes when it comes to the survival-horror genre and The Evil Within is one of those must play titles.

A brutal, challenging, and remarkably fun game. Its eerie world and imaginative enemies are genuinely frightening, and the scares are heightened significantly by the scarcity of resources at your disposal.

It’s not easy, today, to scare the gamers offering a real survival horror experience. The Evil Within can sometimes achieve this goal adding in the mix the atypical Japanese flavour.

The Evil Within is a great rollercoaster ride with every location you expect from a horror movie. Brutal, crazy and full of action.

With its dirty and stressful universe, its wonderful artistic direction and the impressive bosses, Tango Gameworks' game teaches a lesson to Capcom's Resident Evil. A true sequel to Resident Evil 4, believe us.

With The Evil Within, Shinji Mikami hits the spot once more. It rises as the best option in both next and past generation horror games. It fulfills the expectation that had been building up, with no fear of looking back to retrieve that successful formula that gave birth to genre classics like Resident Evil or Silent Hill.

It's a powerful survival horror experience that I won't soon forget.

This is undoubtedly a divisive game, with players likely to adore and hate it in equal measure. However, that's The Evil Within's strength: it's pitched perfectly at fans of the horror genre.

It's worth playing through at least once — and if you're into it, again with New Game +.

Bold and brutal, it has the guts to stay true to its horror roots without feeling outdated.

It's a game that expertly sustains a feeling of dread, and knows when to ratchet up the feeling of being utterly overwhelmed, first slowly then suddenly in a way that induces sheer panic, much like Resi 4 before it. But detective Sebastian Castellanos is no Leon S. Kennedy.

Hard, dirty, but definitively brilliant, The Evil Within marks Shinji Mikami's return in Survial Horror genre, with talent. Prepare yourselves: you will suffer.

If not for the unfortunate frustrating points, which really take you out of the bleak atmosphere, I would say this would set the bar for horror excellence. Unfortunately, these small drawbacks will cause you to frequently put the game down, and that simply doesn’t mesh with a horror tone.

The horrible feeling that creeps over your skin as you play makes you want to stop, but the gameplay is good enough that you’ll keep going regardless. If you’re fed up of where Resident Evil is at, then The Evil Within might be the foul-smelling breath of fetid air you are craving, even if it might have benefited from being a tighter, leaner affair.

While The Evil Within doesn’t quite reach the iconic Resident Evil 4‘s level of brilliance or scariness, this is a satisfyingly gruesome adventure.

Smartly aiming for psychological horror over cheap jump scares, it gets under the skin and effects the psyche. Unfortunately, it falls into the modern trappings of boasting too much firepower (Sebastian can look more like Rambo than a detective) at the cost of stealth and intelligence. Still, this is a bold and seductive experience that is seen too infrequently from major publishers these days.

Despite borrowing a lot of well-worn themes from other games and movies (Hello, creepy shop mannequins from Silent Hill), The Evil Within feels fresh and exciting. It’s easy to recommend to fans of the original Dead Space and the earlier Resident Evil games.