Played The Evil Within 2 the past few days. Truly awful game. Played on highest difficulty (both nightmare and unlockable "classic" mode)
- AI
The AI in this game is the worst I've seen for a game with "stealth" mechanics. Basically if you run past anything that obstructs sight, you win. The enemy will lose track of you, move to the corner they last spotted you at, look around and go back to their designated patrol route. On top of this their sight radius is pathetic, they can't see a crouched player more than around 20 feet in front of them. On top of this, if they notice you from a distance they'll go through a very obvious "looking harder at you as if they can't tell whether you're a target or not" phase that takes several seconds in which you can get out, or just lure them away from the group since they don't alert nearby enemies if they are just investigating.
- Enemies.
Even worse. Almost every enemy is slow and non-threatening. The basic enemy type that accounts for 90% of the enemy population will never hit you if you are walking away from them. Yes, WALKING. You have a run function with stamina cost, but simply walking away from enemies will always succeed as every attack hits air. On top of that they have slow attack animations and constantly take time off from chasing you to sit there and growl and shit, meaning eventually if you simply walk past a few buildings or into bushes, you'll get away. There's only 3 regular enemies in the game that can't be walked away from: L4D Witches (actually terrifying and not too uncommon, rather than being hit-stunned by your heavy weapons they get hit-aggroed harder and fuck you up), dogs (pretty simple, rarely encountered) and flamethrower guys (ranged AoE attacks, but there's only like 3 in the game and are easily avoidable or sneak-killed). Bosses? Wow, they overwhelmingly suffer the exact same issues! Just walking away from most of them will let you escape from their attacks. 10 foot tall multi-headed bitch with giant sawblade? Walking works fine. Giant endboss shooting line attacks at you? Strafe-walk.
- "Stealth"
Also the worst I've seen. Normal sneaking up behind someone and stabbing is kind of alright and takes some skill to get kills with. Bottles are incredibly overpowered (Throw them at enemy's heads to stun and get a "sneak" kill while in combat with them) because you can now carry 5 of them at a time. But the game doesn't even tell you that bottles work, which I also have to subtract points for for failing to explain game basics in the tutorial like TEW1 did (I only figured it out near the middle of my classic run). But then you get to the corner kill move. What the fuck. Basically any time you are behind cover and the enemy can't see you, you can instantly sneak attack them. What counts as not being seen? Well, almost anything apparently. If 3 enemies are chasing you then you can run behind a chest high wall and sneak kill all 3 of them. The bodies even end up hilariously nicely stacked since the canned kill animation puts them right on top of each other. Thankfully the corner-kill can't be used in "classic", which removes the XP unlocks from the game.
- Open World
Ruins survival horror, or at least as presented in TEW2. Because stealth is so powerful and every enemy drops XP and leads to a net resource gain, you have no incentive to not clear out whole areas. Basically rather than being the prey that is hunted, you're now the predator looking for things to kill. Add a cape and Sebastian might as well be the god damned batman, cleaning up riff-raff on the streets of his city. Then you end up with absurd amounts of crafting materials to ensure you never run dry of ammo (I finished the game with around 900 gunpowder) and the whole game becomes a joke. On Classic you still clear the first two easy open world areas for resources, then end up at the end of the game wondering why you wasted all that time when you still end with 600 gunpowder. Thankfully the open world takes a backseat in the 2nd half of the game, where the game actually starts to present some challenge (RE4-style cabin battle and the fire walking part), but ultimately when you have so much built up ammo on the crossbow to launch AoE-stun bolts it becomes trivialized.
Overall I can see exactly why so many people and especially "professional game journalists" think TEW2 is an massive improvement over TEW1: It dumbs everything down significantly and makes the player an overpowered god while still pretending to be a difficult and intense game. At least the plot is decent and ends on a good note rather than making the whole thing all a dream.
4/10 please god help me if the genre becomes this shit.