The Evil Within - Cinematic Lies

Is this a sick joke on PC gamers?

The game looks and performs horribly. It's just terrible given it uses the same Engine as Wolfenstein: TNO. The idTech 5 engine was designed to run at 1080p 60fps on previous generation consoles, yet they butched it to stay at 30fps. The character models looks very out dated, the game has almost no graphical options, while the FOV is so narrow I get nausea from it.

There's so much input lag that it feels like there's heavy mouse acceleration, and your mouse pointer just glides about aimlessly.

The controls are a mess, mostly due to the bad input lag, but also because it seems somewhat tied to the fps. There's micro stutter, jerkiness, and the character handles horriblly. Trying to take 1 step forward, and your character stumbles 2 steps, from a single button press. Makes disarming traps hell. The save system is punishing to say the least. There's only 1 checkpoint every 20+ minutes unless you find a magical mirror that takes you to the save and upgrade zone. Enemies kill you instantly, or at best two hits, and if they chase you I hope you enjoy kiting them forever. You can stealth kill them with a knife from behind, but you can never use that knife for anything else. It takes 2-3 well places head shots to take down the basic enemy, despite them having a railroad spike through their heads, and stabbing them in the back of the head with the knife kills them. The camera control is dire, and you can't look around corners unless you move out of cover and it feels as if you're going along for a piggyback ride on the detective's shoulder as the camera is always against it. Enemy pathing gets stuck, so you can't sneak by them as they're stuck staring in your direction, and they're not patrolling. Best bet, hope you can kill them, or just reload and hope it works now. Loot that's vital to finishing chapters is horrible RNG, and the game often sets you up for failure as well So then you're back 20+ minutes to your last check point. There's also some chance of either you or an enemy partially clipping through a wall. So that enemy then goes ape as they've seen you. because of that glitch. It's not scary, it's just frustrating, and annoying at best. The plot is nonexistent so far in the game To make matters worse their touting of the game using the cinematic aspect ratio was a lie. I have a 3440x1440 21:9 aspect ratio monitor and I don't just have letterboxing, but I have pillar boxing.

Note I did unlock the fps, and remove the black letter boxing. That's still what I get. Sadly the game is locked at 16:9, and refuses to render properly in full screen at 3440x1440. Also using the dev console commands disables Steam's Achievements and game tracking. Even with two AMD D700's at that tiny window, the game has issues maintaining 30fps. It's just horribly optimized and makes you wonder just how the hell they could have gone and messed up so badly when Wolfenstein looked amazing, and ran brilliantly. The Evil Within uses 4.8GB of VRAM on my GPU, and the usage is around 80-99% as well. That screams lack of optimization.

The game will also fail to even start unless you have the Steam overlay enabled. It lacks any detailed graphical options, and you can't even change the FOV, even through the cvars. The Graphics Menu

The game needs a hell of a lot of patching to get it sorted, and I've got my fingers crossed the folks at Flawless Widescreen can fix the silly resolution and aspect ratio issues. So far gameplay wise it's a mixed bag. It starts of slow, gives you a little jolt of what is supposed to be excitement, and than just limping about again slowly, and then que scary noise and some excitement. Hide in a locker Outlast style, and try to sneak by insane butcher, or sneak by torch wielding zombie, or try and place 3 good headshots on an enemy while your character aims like drunkard with parkinson's Boring. That's the pace so far of the game, along with an horrendous save system that just wastes time. I find it boring and tedious; which is a shame because it actually looked good until I touched it.