Evil Dead The Game - Review

Alright you primitive screwheads, listen up! See this? This is… my BOOMSTICK! It’s a 12 gauge double barrelled Remington.

Evil Dead: The Game is an asymmetrical multiplayer third person survival shooter, where you can play as either a survivor or the Kandarian demons. The Evil Dead series is a long-standing cult favourite spanning generations, with Bruce Campbell as Ash Williams at the helm. Evil Dead: The Game is filled with iconic voice lines, familiar demons like Henrietta and Evil Ash, and every variation of Ash Williams from Evil Dead through to Army of Darkness and even Ash vs Evil Dead of episodic TV fame.

Unlike many other games of the multiplayer shooter genre, such as Back 4 Blood, Left 4 Dead and GTFO, Evil Dead has attempted to cater as much to a single player base as they have a multiplayer audience. You’re given 5 missions to play, which take iconic scenes and images from different Evil Dead media and turn it into an intense short action sequence. The most iconic being the first, with Ash having to get his girlfriend’s necklace, then digging up her head, which speaks to you for the rest of mission, before crushing her in a vice. The difficulty of these missions range from super easy and quick, to punishingly difficult and lengthy. Particularly missions 3 and 5, which can end your life super quickly. The missions are made more difficult by not having any form of checkpoint system.

That means if you die at any point you’re going to have to start again. This can be incredibly frustrating at times, as a couple of them will take you close to 20 to 30 minutes to complete. A death will reset you completely and make you start from square one again. Problematically still with these missions, is that game has space for 6, but only currently has 5 available. Even the worst of shooter players such as myself will find a severe lack of actual in-depth gameplay here. Three hours at most will be all the content you’ll get out of these single player missions. The upside from completing them, is almost all of the missions unlock another character for you to play as. The one that seemed most important for me, was the first one, which unlocked the Ash vs Evil Dead version of Ash Williams.

Ash Williams is probably the most rounded character in the game. There is 4 types of characters you can play as, and all get their own unique abilities, and skill tree for that class type. Leaders, Warriors, Hunters and Support. Ash vs Evil Dead Ash is a leader, Army of Darkness Ash being a warrior, Evil Dead 2 Ash being a hunter and Evil Dead Ash being a support. There is a few other characters here that may stick out, in particular Pablo and the one true king, King Arthur. The survivor variation is quite good, and every survivor has their experience bars to level, so you’ll likely want to pick one or two to main as you play the game.

Unfortunately, the survivors will ONLY gain experience when you play a PvP match. So, if you’re intending to play with an AI team vs an AI demon, you’re going to be severely restricted in the amount of progress you can make. Further still, whilst the queue times for playing as a Survivor vs a player-controlled Demon were almost instant, the Survivor vs AI Demon queue times were obnoxiously long. So long in fact, that I do not know if playing them will grant you experience or not.

Being an asymmetrical multiplayer game, you can also choose to play as the demon. The tutorial for survivor does a generally good job of explaining what to do. The tutorial for the demon does an incredibly abysmal job of explaining what to do. Currently the game feels very heavily skewed towards the demon, particularly in a random team. Whilst the game will pair you up with people, I found communication is going to be absolutely integral. So, playing online solo as a survivor is going to be a stretch. In the few instances I did, we were destroyed before we even got halfway through the stage, with the demon seemingly throwing mobs of enemies towards us.

Evil Dead: The Game is going to be one that you can sink hours upon hours into, to get good at it. The more you play, the more likely you’ll be to be able to carry bad players and improve the gameplay. There are a few quality-of-life choices for survivors, for example if you pick up a long gun, then you’ll only automatically pick up long gun ammo. You can also mark supply crates, weapons and ammo types, so that other members on your team can grab what they are after. There appears to be only two or three variations of weapons per type, but in keeping it simple the game doesn’t feel unnecessarily inaccessible. The rarity system seems more like a guideline, as typically I found blue versions of weapons seemed better than a lot of purple versions, but as you might expect Legendaries were always far and beyond the best. Where Evil Dead: The Game truly shines however, is in the melee weapons and particularly the executions.

The melee weapons consist of axes, meat hammers, shovels, spears, swords, cleavers, knives and nail filled bats. Every single weapon has the chance to dismember enemies (some better than others) as well as break their balance gauge which allows you to use an execution style attack. The gore factor here is huge. Every weapon has many different execution style attacks it can do, the will also vary depending on what enemy type you are fighting. These range from simply cutting a demons head off with the axe, to getting it lodged in its neck, and then making its head explode with a spinning back elbow. The bat can knock a head clean off the shoulders, and skeletons can have their skull exploded by having it slammed into the handle of the shovel. The amount of blood and gore flying across the screen keeps the game feeling intense and interesting, without ever seeming unnecessary.

This extends into enemies running at you with their intestines flopping around or spitting puke on you because you’ve cut their arms off. There is a certain level of detail and care that has really been put into ensuring the game feels very alive and true to the gore of the Evil Dead universe, whilst maintaining that zany comedic effect with ridiculous attacks like Henrietta smothering you with her chest. It works just as well in the game, as it has in the movies and show over the years.

Whilst Evil Dead: The Game will definitely appeal to a wide audience, and especially Evil Dead diehards, the severe lack of deeper single player content, whilst also denying solo players the ability to progress their characters will hinder the game. PvP feels very unbalanced currently, whilst being heavily skewed towards the demon player who can bombard a newer group mercilessly. There is a definite learning curve, but new players may never get over the first hurdle before feeling like the game is unenjoyable as they cannot ever get a win. Evil Dead: The Game is going to be one to watch and appears to have at least one more single player mission to come, so hopefully future updates will get it some more to enjoy.

The Score

7.5

Review code provided by Sabre Interactive

The Pros

+Lots of Ash Williams to play

+Flavour talk is amusing

+A plethora of execution animations to sink your gore loving teeth into

The Cons

-Abhorrent lack of solo player care

-Unfairly skewed competitive matches

-Solo play will get boring quick due to lack of advancement