Amid Evil (Completed)

Okay, so like, legitimately I was furious when I played this game. I was so mad at how terrible the mechanics were, that I could feel the entirety of my mood draining out of my feet each time I sat down to play it. However, due to the sunk cost fallacy, I kept thinking, “surely, I must be close to finishing this… right?!” Baffling still to me, are the “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews this game has. Amid Evil is a piece of garbage.

*sigh* Okay, here’s the thing. Let’s get the good out of the way because I can already hear the screaming fan boys. Yes–100%–the game has very distinct and “beautiful” visuals. I hate them, personally, but that doesn’t stop me from understanding that a lot of work went into the game’s look to make it distinct, bright with this weird retro/new-age look that combines pixelated textures with impressive lighting. If you are the kind of person that doesn’t care about gameplay at all and you just want to look at something pretty, then fine, knock yourself out. You’ll probably love Amid Evil. I mean, I feel like you’d probably also be the kind of person that enjoys holding geometric shapes under a blacklight and staring at them for an inordinate amount of time, but whatever, as long as it makes you happy.

When you scrape away the game’s visuals, there’s just SO much at issue here. The levels are “massive” but completely empty. The “secrets” are little more than going over to some odd geometric shape, jumping on another geometric shape and then walking over to a third geometric shape, that has a floating geometric shape that is a power up that you don’t need. Of course, that’s if you’re lucky. Sometimes the secrets are just “walk under this thing,” or “go into this slightly darkened corner.” It’s baffling. You lack any kind of button that interacts with the environment (not even an “open door” button) so it’s not possible to meaningfully interact with anything you see. “Walking over to it,” is about all you got.

The game boasts exciting and powerful weapons, but that’s laughable at best. Each weapon is just a different flavor of “click until the enemy is dead.” True, each functions in a unique way, but the damage output for each is nearly identical and while you’ll probably find yourself preferring some weapons over others in specific situations, most of the time I felt like my weapon was irrelevant. It’s not helped by the mana system–something that was introduced in Heretic, by the time it made its way to Hexen, it was a clever way of populating a level with ammunition for any of the three separate classes without actually having to code in different ammunition themselves. All weapons were powered by mana, so all characters’ ammunition was interchangeable. In Amid Evil however, it’s a mockery of the mana system’s former design.

There are technically 7 weapons, but one of them is a melee weapon, and because you will be absolutely swimming in mana of every color, it is an incredibly pointless tool in your otherwise ranged weapons arsenal. So of the 6 remaining, they use 4 colors of mana. The “BFG” gun (brainless, click to kill everything on the screen) uses its own rarest pool of mana, so the fact that it uses mana at all is irrelevant. It’s use isn’t so much “clever design” as it is “I don’t really feel like playing this part of the level right now.” The Rocket Launcher (some thing that shoots planets) is horrendously weak while somehow simultaneously threatening a dangerous amount of splash damage against the player. It too uses its own mana pool. Of the 4 remaining weapons, our green mana weapons are the “very delayed shotgun” in the form of a spiky mace that shoots needles and a sword that shoots a wave of energy. The spiky mace consumes bullets *ahem, mana* at twice the rate of the sword, and while admittedly powerful, is really only best used against slow, distant targets. The sword on the other hand is what I feel to be the game’s only truly distinct and interesting weapon. Serving as a defensive option, the wide beam of the blade can intercept projectiles and destroy them. Clipping an enemy with the thinner parts of the beam, allows the beam to keep going, allowing you to hit two or three enemies at a time, if you’re aiming well. The rate of fire is a bit slow but seems fair for the effect. Overall, the sword was great–but because it shares mana with the shotgun, I rarely used the shotgun.

Lastly is the “homing bullet pistol wand” and “chain lightning trident” that share blue mana. The wand is probably the most busted weapon in the game–not due to its damage or anything, but simply because of its ability to home in on enemies. If I could have given up all of my weapons and gotten infinite bullets for it, I would have. It was so brainlessly effective that it disgusted me. As for the trident, my opinion seems to be in line with most people’s–it’s a worthless piece of trash compared to the wand. It requires you to overkill (continue to shoot long past the death of) a target, which due to the frantic nature of the gameplay, requires you to purposefully aim (often in a stationary position) at just one enemy for an extended period of time. This will cause the enemy to erupt with lightning, killing all nearby enemies. The problem is… if you’re using it in this way, then you’re probably surrounded by a lot of enemies, since that’s the ideal time to use it. If you’re surrounded by a lot of enemies… then hitting just one of them for an extended period of time while stationary is not only difficult to do, it’s usually just a death sentence. So no, there’s really only one blue mana weapon. It’s the wand.

Effectively, this makes it so the 7 weapons that the game advertises is more just 4, and because the BFG gun isn’t a weapon so much as it is a “please developers, I don’t want to play this game anymore” button, it’s really just 3 weapons. This really makes the game dull. It also makes the whole “mana” system identical to simple ammunition. It’s no longer creative like its predecessors, it’s just a new coat of paint over an old system. Hexen wasn’t a perfect game, but it at least approached the mana system in more interesting ways. Each class’s weapons not only cost different amounts of mana within the class itself, but also comparative to the other classes. The wizards “blue mana” weapon was costed differently than the warrior’s or the cleric’s. Additionally, certain weapons pulled on both green and blue mana at the same time. This is already more exciting than just picking up tootie-frootie colored bullets in the shape of cubes.

The level design itself isn’t helped by the developers constant need to throw more and more enemy types at you. Each world has unique enemies dispersed about the levels, and while that may sound good on paper in practice it’s terrible. They are all ugly, imperceptible geometric blobs that float after you with shoddy animations. Each of them has some kind of gimmick but the gimmick is shallow and can almost always be thwarted by “strafing to the left,” or *gasp* “strafing to the right.” The quirks aren’t meaningful and just make each level unfamiliar and frustrating. Part of what made the old Doom, Hexen etc. games so fun was that the enemy pool was (while small) unique and solid. The player was familiar with the kinds of enemies they could expect, and so the game was about interesting placement of them within an interesting level. In Amid Evil, they’re just constantly throwing them at you, but you dispatch them just as quickly. They all blend together into a meaningless blur–once you’ve beaten the world an enemy is in, you quickly delete them from your memory because you never need to solve that puzzle again.

The plot is non-existent. There are no characters, save for a disembodied British woman prattling on about evil and saving the world or some nonsense. There are cryptic messages scribbled on the walls of every level that are meaningless, pretentious and have the depth of an elementary-schooler’s essay paper about “why I think the color green is the best color.” The game feels like an insulting joke intended to waste your time. This game is lucky to get out at a Tier 3 rating. The first time I went to fight the game’s final boss, I asked my wife jokingly, “Hey, do you want to see me defeat the last boss in this game I hate?” The thing is, I didn’t need to joke. I sat still in one place and just shot the boss until it died. I didn’t even move or aim at a certain part or do anything clever. Just holy crap–I can’t believe that the same company that made a game as great as Dusk made this. Unless you like turning your brain off and looking at shiny objects and nothing else (and if you do, again, please see blacklight comment) I would only recommend this game to my greatest enemies. And even then I might not. I mean, I have some sympathy for humanity, you know?

Steam Link