Okay, so I’ve had Evil Dead: The Game for a week now and I’m ready to speak my piece on it. I could just tell you I love it and we roll credits, but that’s no fun for any of us, is it? Do you know what is fun though? Teaming up with 3 others to fight the Evil Dead or go it alone as the titular Kandarian demons and swallow the souls of anyone that shall oppose you. I’ll give some pros and cons of both, but a major spoiler, I LOVE this game. However, I fully feel that you should be able to make your own opinion, so I will try to be as unslanted as possible.
If you read “Something Old, Something New: Part 2, Slasher Edition”, you already know that I love the Evil Dead franchise and anything that furthers the property. If you haven’t, shame on you. Now, this game does not push the story any forward as the show ends with Ash waking up in the far future and this game features playable versions of characters that died on screen. What it does do is capture the essence of Evil Dead oh so well. There are two game modes, Survivor Vs Demon and Missions. Survivor Vs Demon is the meat and potatoes of the game. You can play online as either a team of demon slayers or the demons themselves. There are also choices for a team of four vs AI or solo vs AI for those of you with a real death wish. They even threw in Private Mode which allows you to get a group of five together and do four against one with just your friends. So far I have mostly played the online Survivor Vs Demon as the hero squad itself and only dabbled in the Demon side. I gotta tell you, both are very fun.
In Survivor Vs Demon, you get to choose from fifteen (so far) characters across the franchise, unfortunately the 2013 re-quel is ignored for now, but there’s already a bunch of talk about it online and let me tell you, Saber has let it be known that they are paying attention to us. While there are only 3 different demon classes currently they are a very hard challenge to take and I’ve never had two games play alike at all. With Different costumes for most characters, you can choose your characters, all separated into classes to try and maximize your play quality. For the Leader Class, we have “Old Man” Ash from the Ash vs Evil Dead TV series, Annie Knowby from Evil Dead 2, and Lord Arthur from Army of Darkness. The Hunter category gives you Evil Dead 2 Ash, Amanda Fisher, and Kelly Maxwell from the TV series, and Ed Getley from Evil Dead 2. The Support characters are Ash and Cheryl Williams from the original movie and Pablo Simon Bolivar from the TV series, and the Warrior class brings us Hero Ash and Henry the Red from Army of Darkness, along with Scotty from the original movie. Not to mention there is promised DLC on the horizon, with a possibility of adding even more characters to the roster.
In this mode, the team of four has to work together to gather weapons and ammo, along with the quest items of Map pages, the Kandarian Dagger, and the missing pages to be able to fight the hordes of darkness. A lot of this mode is luck with skill still a factor but if you’re lacking weapons and healing items, you might just fail to meet your objective. You are timed but the timer ends once you get the required items and triggers the Dark Ones. This is the big battle as by then whoever has the best build wins. If you’re a survivor and you still have basic equipment, you can still win it here… but to quote South Park, “You’re gonna have a bad time”. By now the Demons usually have a decent amount of power and can throw anything and everything in their arsenal at you. Nothing hurts more than getting all the way to the final countdown, only to be overrun. Once, in all the games I’ve played, I was the sole survivor and stood my ground. The Demon has a lot they can do here. In addition to throwing basic and heavy units at you, the demon usually has a strong Boss build by then or they can just possess you and totally wreck your teammates with your bulked-up character. I have been butt hurt by a demon possessing me just to use up all of my ammo and release me, but hey, demons aren’t supposed to play fair.
I’ll be Blunt about the missions mode. They are freakin’ hard. One of the main topics in the discussion group for this game that I belong to is how hard this mode is. No checkpoints, no guidance, no chance in hell. I, have made it to the last one and made a decent dent in the progression, only to be swarmed in the endgame and not even make it to the final boss battle. Such is life, but it wouldn’t be a real challenge if it were that easy. The only frustrating part of the difficulty of this mode is that it’s how you unlock certain characters. “Old man” Ash, Amanda, Pablo, and Lord Arthur are all kept behind a challenge wall, which in turn could keep you from earning certain trophies/achievements. I don’t think I’m going to use Arthur a whole lot, but I want him and I want him now. This is going to be a grind for sure.
Overall, I quite enjoy this game and am glad Saber took so long to work on it. Considering that they sold half of a million copies the first week, I think a lot of people agree with me. That being said there are a surprisingly large amount of people playing that have not seen the movies or are just horror gamers and not horror movie watchers. I’ve spent several games with randoms, explaining the lore and characters. Nevertheless, I went all in and got the Collector’s edition. You can see my unboxing video here. If you are interested in how the game itself plays, you can also catch me playing Evil Dead: The Game on our Twitch channel Twitch.tv/thedomaingpce on Tuesday and Thursday evenings or catch me in the archive section. It’s a bloody good time and I hope to see you there.
Have any thoughts, comments, questions, or concerns? Let us know in the comments and we will answer you right back. Until Next Time ‘I’ll be right baaaaack”
