To date, video game adaptations of the Evil Dead series have focused on jughead protagonist Ash Williams fighting Deadites across story-driven, single-player campaigns of varying degrees of quality. As such, Evil Dead: The Game is a notable departure, as it uses the films and Ash vs Evil Dead TV series as the basis for an asymmetrical multiplayer game featuring a single demon pitted against a team of four characters.
While the game boasts a stellar cast of playable characters from across the entire franchise, developer Saber Interactive was well aware that Ash is the one that anyone approaching an Evil Dead video game would want to play as, subsequently including four unique versions of the character. Each iteration represents him at a distinct point in his hapless life, possessing skills and abilities that creatively embody one of the game’s distinct character classes: Hunter and Warrior, which are focused around combat; Leader, which boosts the skills of other players; and Support, which offers a group additional healing, among other abilities.
The eldest Ash, drawn from Ash vs Evil Dead, is a Leader character, whose skills provide team-wide benefits, similar to his role in the series guiding Pablo and Kelly against the Deadites. This contrasts with the warworn Ash of Army of Darkness, whose combat-heavy Warrior class boasts the most powerful attacks and skills that cause extra damage.
As such, the game has an amusing, if flimsy, in-universe excuse for why four Ashes might be running around its world, quipping up a storm as they fight demons. This also overcomes an issue common to previous asymmetrical multiplayer titles, namely Friday the 13th: The Game, where players who couldn’t play as the character they desired simply quit the game.
Each match favors recognizable iconography and a smart amalgamation of settings from across the Evil Dead series, and in ways that throw realism to the wind. Playing as the demon elevates the gameplay beyond the asymmetrical multiplayer game’s slasher origins, namely via a powerful and engaging series of mechanics. The demon can set traps, spawn enemies, and possess both Deadites and survivors, all while cruising around the map in a perfect replication of the camera-on-a-motorcycle first-person-perspective from the film series.
But while the game captures both the brutality and campiness that made Evil Dead popular, its faithfulness to the source material isn’t enough to make up for a litany of bugs and problems. The game also features a single-player mission mode that allows you to relive key moments from the films, but it lacks for a checkpoint system, meaning that any failure results in you having to replay an entire chapter. Worse are the technical problems that can bring a multiplayer match down in an instant, even preventing the player from gaining any XP.
Updates, fixes, and expansions have been promised by the developer. Both Friday the 13th: The Game and Dead by Daylight launched in similar states, and it took an extended post-launch period of updates for them to be considered finished products. Both continue to thrive with active communities of players, but it remains to be seen whether Evil Dead: The Game will find a similar dedicated audience that will see it reach its full potential.
This game was reviewed using a code provided by Sandbox Strategies.
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