Evil West gets the digitalfoundry tech review treatment. It's a really cool shooter let down a touch by unsatisfying graphics/performance modes:
Evil West is a remarkably direct take on third-person action, a linear and propulsive combat game with no open-world diversions, no loot, no crafting, and no side quests. The combat system at its core is fast-paced, responsive, and fair, and the B-movie style plot is well-told through a series of high-quality cinematics.
What truly impresses here is the sheer variety on display. Each level takes place in a brand-new area with unique assets and a fresh visual language, which means that every thirty minutes to an hour or so you're transported to a unique location with novel sights and plenty of interesting artwork. Some of the vistas here look excellent and a lot of effort has clearly gone into making the game feel fresh, without really making any compromises on the quality of each area.
So what doesn't work? This is clearly a cross-gen project and a keen eye will spot all kinds of concessions to 2013-era hardware. Asset quality, for instance, looks good for the most part but there is slightly chunky geometry and low-resolution textures in places. This is par for the course for most games, but no particular effort seems to have been invested into making these areas well-suited for a ninth-generation console.
For example, baked global illumination solutions tend to struggle with dynamic objects and here, the player character sometimes exhibits a bright specular sheen on his backside in indirectly lit areas. This occurs on enemies and NPCs in the game too, though it's usually most noticeable on the player during typical gameplay.
Overall I'm pretty pleased with Evil West's graphics, but image quality and performance are a bit more fraught. According to Focus Entertainment, there are 4K30 and 1080p60 modes on Series X and PS5, with Series S limited to just 1080p30.
Outside of resolution, the consoles look very similar across all hardware and visual modes, with only slight differences to shadowmap filtering - on PS5, the shadows appear sharper with more defined edge detail. This does have the unfortunate side-effect of making the relatively low shadow resolution more obvious, so I tend to prefer the look of shadows on the Xbox platforms.
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