Considering how much I love good horror Xbox games, it’s no surprise that I couldn’t wait to jump straight into writing this Evil Dead: The Game review. Especially since I have always been a big fan of ‘The Evil Dead’ movie franchise.
In fact, it was one of the first horror movies I encountered growing up as a wee nipper. So, you can imagine how hopeful I was for Evil Dead: The Game to be just as good.
If you haven’t had the pleasure of watching The Evil Dead, the series is a good mix of horror and comedy. But, the main reason why I still periodically rewatch the original trilogy is because of the amazing Bruce Campbell. Like for real, he is that good.
Over the years, I have played most of the series themed games. From Evil Dead: Hail to the King on PlayStation to Evil Dead: Regeneration on Xbox, my collection is strong. I skipped the mobile games but did manage to find time to enjoy Ash’s cameo appearance in Dead by Daylight. But let’s face it, Dead By Daylight is a game you simply cannot pass on.
However, whereas the movies scraped by as solid hits despite everything going against them, all of the previous The Evil Dead games unfortunately could not achieve the same fate. In fact, they were pretty bad.
But what about some of the specifics of The Evil Dead: The Game?
Will this brand new multiplayer survival horror game with asymmetric gameplay that could be mistaken for Dead By Daylight follow the same fate as its predecessors?
Or will it become the worthy hit that the legendary trilogy has deserved for many years now? Scroll down to read my extensive The Evil Dead: The Game review to find out all you need to before you buy!
This Evil Dead: The Game review will cover the following:
Evil Dead: The Game – Storyline
The Evil Dead: The Game doesn’t have a compelling story, but rather provides just a general idea of what you’re doing throughout the game. The focus is on the asymmetrical gameplay rather than a storyline. After all, the storyline has already been covered by the movie franchise and previous spin off games.
Playing as Ash, or one of the many other characters that have appeared in the Evil Dead movies, the premise of the game is to find a map that leads to the pages of the Necronomicon. Of which, the Book of the Dead is the source of the power of local demons—the Deadites. Which by the way, are pretty frightening.
Working your way to collect all of the parts of the Necronomicon, you will then need to take the Kandarian Dagger and close the gap through which evil spirits climb into our world. That’s literally all there is to complete!
But by no means does the game make that easy for you.
As for a specific story mode, The Evil Dead: The Game does kind of deliver one for you. Undoubtedly this game is not on the same level as story-driven games such as Until Dawn. However, the story mode goes out of its way to recreate many of the best moments from the trilogy and the movie series which is quite fun to play with.
For example, when Ash is stalking his girlfriend Linda after he chopped off his arm and replaced it with the iconic chainsaw, the player controls one of the characters which gives you other perspectives. Besides that, there is not much to look forward to with the story mode. It’s good, it’s smooth but it’s not exactly a storyline.
Ultimately, Evil Dead: The Game is a game that builds its world around isolated moments, choosing not to delve into them too much, which is generally disappointing.
Evil Dead: The Game – Gameplay
When playing as any of the characters available, the gameplay revolves around the same 5 main objectives each match you encounter:
- Finding map pieces
- Finding the pages of the Necronomicon
- Finding the Kandarian Dagger
- Destroying the Kandarian demons.
- Destroying the Book of the Dead.
You can also collect firearms and melee weapons, divided into 4 quality levels.
Of which, everything is fairly standard here such as the higher the quality of weapon, the higher the damage. So don’t go expecting customisation tools.
Scattered around the map, Pink F bottles can be used to improve your in-game stats such as melee, firearms, shield, health, fear resistance, and stamina, which reset after each match. It’s quite a nice touch but without that functionality,
When playing as Deadite, your mission is to collect red soul orbs to summon more demons into the match, possess characters and become a kind of boss, like Evil Ash from Army of Darkness. However, these are just the basics. As you gain more and more experience, you level up your skill trees, making your characters and demons stronger and stronger.
There are a few unlockable heroes, but they are all Leader-class characters.
Class System
Before each match, you can choose which character you will play. Of which, characters from The Evil Dead and Ash vs. The Evil Dead are available to enjoy.
In turn, they are divided into Leaders, a class that buffs other players while having an increased resistance to fear. The Warriors specialise in hand-to-hand combat and have additional health and Hunters enjoy firearms and are pleased to have increased stamina and support. Don’t worry, there is an Ash for every class, but this has a downside.
They play almost equally effectively, making the rest of the characters somewhat useless.
This is one of those games that forces you to play and grind as much as possible. The grind is outrageously inflated. It takes quite a bit of time to unlock something really worthwhile in the skill tree, so you need to keep going online to play more and more to achieve anything significant.
In the game with bots, you get less experience, and the AI itself is incredibly stupid, unlike the Demon, which will unleash you through the forest at the first opportunity. However, if you are a big fan of hanging out on one project for a long time, there will be almost no problems with the grind
Multiplayer Mode
At its core, multiplayer fighting with four players against one, a team of characters must work together to forge the Necronomicon and destroy the Kandarian demons that this book has brought into our world.
Compared to games like Dead By Daylight, there are a lot more variables in The Evil Dead. Survivors need to find weapons, ammo, first-aid kits, shields. This also includes finding items in the correct order to shed some light on what is happening. Not to mention that victory depends on the well-coordinated teamwork of random people, which, as everyone knows, does not happen often with games like these.
With supplies in hand, you and your team will need to first find three map pieces, which will then lead to a Kandarian Dagger and the missing Necronomicon pages. Collecting map pieces is pretty easy. Once you’re more or less close, they’ll be marked, but the last two are always heavily guarded.
You will have to give a hard fight and fight everything that the antagonist player throws at you. As soon as you collect the map and equip yourself with the highest quality weapons, you need to get through to special demons and destroy them with a dagger, dodging numerous projectiles along the way.
Then it remains only to keep the defense at the Necronomicon up while the sealing ritual is in progress. Ideally, your team should move as fast as possible to get the job done before the demon player gets too strong
Evil Dead: The Game Review Verdict
Look, I’m going to be honest with you. The Evil Dead: The Game is very entertaining. However, it’s marred with flaws that I seriously hope are patched soon.
Straight from the start screen, you can see that the developers are big fans of the franchise. They put a lot of effort into making the characters and locations from the movies and TV shows as authentic as possible. There’s no question that this is an Ash Williams Misadventures game and that’s a bonus.
However, the game looks like a more specialised version of Dead by Daylight, with only characters from the Evil Dead as choices. And, the gameplay needs some serious work.
From characters sometimes getting stuck on objects just a few millimetres off the ground to a storyline that’s no really a storyline but more a lip service to the franchises fans, if the developers do not release new content in the near future, I fear that The Evil Dead: The Game will start to die very quickly.
That said, overall, The Evil Dead: The Game is a great concept that does well to respect the move franchise and is still worth buying. There’s a lot of potential and within a few patches time, this game could actually be superb. However, for now, it makes the same mistake that other games by focussing so much on dethroning Dead by Daylight.
If you are a fan of Dead by Daylight, Friday the 13th, and other games with asymmetric multiplayer, then I can well advise playing the game even at the start. However, be warned that this game is nowhere near the finished article and without some patching, you might get a little frustrated.
