However, when you do take on enemies, blasting them away with a shotgun is satisfying and smashing their heads open with an ax is hilariously gruesome. This feels cheap since, in other situations, you can usually choose your play style. Occasionally, The Evil Within 2 railroads you into a fight. Of course, you can also upgrade your combat abilities (less kickback from shooting, for instance) and to give yourself more health.

You can use these to give yourself a larger stamina bar so you can run for longer or to improve your stealth so that you move quieter. As in the first game, you collect vials of green gel from downed enemies. Fortunately, the controls make it fairly easy to duck under cover and you can upgrade how sneaky you are or your stamina bar so you can get out of tricky situations. There’s a system that alerts you to when an enemy has noticed you or is suspicious of the sound you’re making. Resources are slim pickings, so sometimes stealth is the only option. The combat isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty easy to grasp. Though you won’t find anything super shocking on these side quests, it’s nice to have the option to explore more if you feel like it.

If you decide to go into the church on a lark, you’ll find a nasty surprise. Another gives you a chance to save a Union citizen from an untimely death. One early on leads you to retrieve sniper rifle parts. They flesh out the world, give hints about where you can find weapons stashes, and add some flavor to the pseudo-zombie infestation. These residual memories are pretty cool, though they can be a little repetitive. As Sebastian shoots, sneaks, and shouts “Lily!” over and over around town, his communicator picks up resonance points, which are signals that usually lead him to areas where something traumatic has happened either to an operative or a Union citizen. There’s a semi-open world feel in the first half of the game, and you can choose whether or not to simply go after the main quest or to investigate how everything went to hell (again). Suffice it to say, by the time Sebastian gets to Union, it’s overrun with gross creatures. I guess their head honcho never got around to doing a post-mortem on what happened in the previous game at Beacon Hospital or to adding a failsafe for this kind of situation. Most of Mobius’s operatives in Union are dead. Check out our Reviews Vault for past game reviews.

The evil within 2 gameplay