I certainly couldn’t rank myself among one of The Evil Within’s biggest fans. I’m an old school survival horror fan and I know it. But the reliance on action and upgrades did nothing to excite me whatsoever in The Evil Within. The Assignment is the first of a two part story driven DLC that follows the story of Juli Kidman.
Gameplay takes a different approach from the action packed style of the main game and instead focuses attention entirely on stealth. Your only weapons are cover, distractions and the occasional attack that you can perform only when an enemy is looking away from you. You will absolutely be relying on avoiding engagements in The Assignment.
For the most part I preferred the pace of gameplay to the main game. Rather than wondering where the next upgrade was coming from and being required to kill all enemies before progressing I was instead reduced to crawling behind flower beds and sneaking through vents – where would video games be without vents? Generally speaking this provided a much more tense experience knowing full well that I couldn’t deal with the enemies if they discovered me.
Although to help her with these limitations Juli has a couple of all important improvements over Sebastian. The most obvious of which is probably her ability to regenerate health allowing her to say no to drugs and completely disregard syringes. Her other bonus is her ability to move better than Sebastian. After a few brief seconds of running Juli doesn’t have the need to bend over, grab her knees and breath as if she was just recovered from a lake – thankfully.
Her abilities are mitigated somewhat, however, by certain aspects of The Assignment’s design. While regenerating health would have been an unbelievable blessing during the main game it has far less relevance in The Assignment. If you get detected it will most likely be a game over. Enemies don’t like giving up the chase and they are out to kill you plain and simple. More often than not you will only be able to withstand 1 attack with the second being a fatal blow. Where the main game has the time for you to search around for syringes it would have completely killed the pace in The Assignment. Regenerating health is a pacing design choice rather than an added ability and it helps the flow of gameplay along nicely.
The only source of frustration I found was in executing movements between cover or round corners. On occasion The Evil Within (main game and DLC alike) can be an absolute pig to handle. It’s not such a problem when you’ve got an arsenal of weapons to fall back on but it’s a huge problem when you don’t. You’re only so called weapon in The Assignment is your ability to run away and hide which is awkward to use when you get stuck on a door frame or stuck in cover. Everything is just a little bit too clumsy for the stealth to ever really work as well as you’d like.
The 4 hours I played as Juli were brief but entirely enjoyable. The increased sense of vulnerability and threat from your lack of weapons is something that was clearly missing from the main game. It’s almost impossible to have any real fear of an enemy you kill with X amount of Y ammo. The gameplay can be a little frustrating with quick deaths and clunky controls but the tension is higher than in the main game because of it. With an interesting story to explore as the vaguely mysterious Juli (fantastically voice acted by Jennifer Carpenter) The Assignment is a great extension to The Evil Within.
