The Evil Within 2 guide: Workbenches and weapon upgrades

You can upgrade your weapons at The Evil Within 2’s workbenches. That’s the easy part. Figuring out which weapons to upgrade? That’s a bit harder. In this guide, we’ll give you some advice (and tell you how to avoid the mistake that we made).

How to upgrade your weapons

You need a workbench to upgrade your weapons. You also need weapon parts. You can find the former in Sebastian’s office and in safe rooms throughout the game. You can find the latter scattered throughout the landscape and, occasionally, from enemies you kill and in crates you open or destroy.

Like every other item in The Evil Within 2, weapon parts are scarce. That’s why exploring is so important. If you see something shiny, pick it up. Before long, you’ll have collected plenty. Then it’ll be time to figure out what to upgrade. We have some advice about that.

Upgrade your weapons early

Tango Gameworks/Bethesda Softworks

We labored for hours under the assumption that it would be a waste of weapon parts to upgrade the pistol we began with in The Evil Within 2. We spent far too much time thinking, “I hate this pistol and its stupid rubber bullets. Let’s save these weapon parts for better stuff later.”

We were wrong. Don’t hoard your weapon parts like we did.

Every weapon upgrade you buy applies to every weapon of the same category — every handgun, every shotgun and so on. Put differently, if you upgrade your starting pistol early in the game and find a new pistol later, your new pistol will inherit the upgrade.

So there it is: Upgrade your weapons early. But which weapons should you upgrade? Good question!

Upgrade the weapons you like the best and use the most

The Evil Within 2 allows you to play as you see fit. If you’re into stealth, it’ll accommodate you. If you just want to run and shoot, it’s cool with that, too. So the weapons you decide to upgrade largely depend on the kind of game you want to play.

If you find yourself favoring the pistol, focus on that. If you’re a big fan of the sawed-off shotgun, too, spend some weapon parts there. Same goes for the warden crossbow (though we have to admit that, as much as we love it, it has the weakest of upgrade paths). In other words, put your weapon parts where your trigger finger is.

There’s another good reason to do this, too. If you spread your upgrades around, bringing all of your weapons up to a slightly higher level, you’ll waste weapon parts on weapons you’ll barely use. The sniper rifle is a great example. It’s super powerful, but its use is limited. Your pistol and your shotgun are better investments (at least in the first several hours of The Evil Within 2).

Our advice: Pick your favorite weapons, and upgrade them as soon as possible. Especially the pistol. For all our grumbling about it feeling like a peashooter, investing a few hundred weapon parts shut us up. Likewise with the sawed-off shotgun, which isn’t nearly as powerful as we expected this kind of weapon to be in a survival horror game. But sinking some weapon parts into its power slots made it feel like we expected (and wanted).

Also, without spoiling things, let’s just say that it may be a while before you get a new weapon. There’s no sense in waiting.