The Evil Within review – now with The Consequence DLC

THE ASSIGNMENT DLC

The Evil Within left a lot of questions unanswered at its conclusion, not least those surrounding Sebastian’s teammate Julie Kidman, who vanishes and emerges mysteriously several times throughout the plot. The first set of DLC, the Assignment, puts players in control of Kidman, which we hoped would fill in a few of the gaps.

Kidman’s chapters take place mid-way through the game and explain some of her backstory, as well as going into more detail about the Organisation’s aims. This means the majority of the DLC takes place in office buildings and hospital corridors, rather than the more obscure and nightmare-inducing locations seen in the main game. There’s a small amount of crossover, but for the most part the areas are all new – it’s just a shame that they are mostly linear, with few options for exploration beyond the occasional optional puzzle room.

The Assignment almost exclusively concentrates on stealth rather than action, which unfortunately means it loses much of what made the main game fun. Sebastian might have given up after a few hits, but Electric crossbow bolts and high powered sniper rifle bullets made you feel powerful, if only for a brief moment until you ran out of the very limited supplies of ammunition and your enemies chased you down. Kidman’s melee attacks are virtually useless, meaning you have no way of fighting back at all once an enemy spots you. As a result, you spend the majority of the DLC hidden under tables and waiting for enemies to complete their patrol route before moving onwards.

There are a few action set-pieces where you finally get your hands on a pistol, but these are over quickly and little more than on-rails duck shoots. Otherwise, enemies are best avoided, distracted by broken bottles or locked in rooms so they can’t chase you.

You can’t upgrade Kidman’s skills like you could with Sebastian either, meaning you’re incredibly vulnerable; your stamina runs out after only a few paces when running, you only have enough health to survive two enemy encounters before being forced back to a checkpoint, and you have no weapons for a significant portion of the Episode. It’s understandable that this was done to raise the level of tension, as getting spotted just once means a high chance of dying, but this feels like a rapid change of pace after the action-oriented main game.

With no need to travel back to the Asylum through broken mirrors to upgrade your abilities, you now save the game by taking a seat on a comfy sofa and stroking a cat (no, really). These are at least sensibly spaced out across the two chapters, meaning a minimal amount of back-tracking should you die, but overall there’s very little peril at any point in the campaign.

The whole thing is over in less than two hours and fails to answer many of the questions we had at the outset. Of course, a second DLC chapter due later this year has already been teased to fill in some of the blanks, and there are plenty of optional collectibles for completionists to find, but if your favourite parts of the main game were the gun battle and action sequences, this DLC is probably best avoided.