If you haven't watched Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, and Army of Darkness, you need to immediately get up, go rent/buy them, and watch them consecutively...then you can join the rest of us super rad people here. Trust me, you'll thank me. For those of you who are unfamiliar, the Evil Dead trilogy is a series of 3 films written and directed by Sam Raimi that star cult classic Bruce Campbell. Unfortunately, this is a video game blog so I'm not going to go into detail explaining how incredible the movies are, but what I will go into detail about is the first Evil Dead game for Playstation, Evil Dead: Hail to the King.
First of all, take a look at the packaging, pictured above. You don't have to know shit about Evil Dead, you don't have to know who the hell Ashley J Williams is, you don't need to know the first thing about Deadites, Boomsticks, cabins, or time travel. All you need to see is Ash on the cover of the game, covered in blood, holding a chainsaw over his head and you know this game is going to be super duper badass. Well, hopefully. At this point we can only assume it's going to be awesome. Upon starting up the game you'll notice that Bruce Campbell lends his voice to create a very convincing Ash. The game takes place after Army of Darkness so Ash is already a seasoned Deadite killing machine at this point and has plenty of sweet one-liners to top it off. In fact, pressing triangle actually just makes Ash say a one-liner at any time. Definitely a nice touch.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start from the beginning. You have to watch a little movie explaining the premise blah blah blah. When you get to take control of Ash the very first thing you're going to notice is...well, the control setup. I should probably mention right now that this game is a major Resident Evil clone. It's pretty shameless sometimes. The controls are the same so you have to rotate Ash and press up to move forward. The game also uses prerendered backgrounds, limited inventory, item boxes, and an identical save system to Resident Evil. And I'm not saying this as a bad thing; I love Resident Evil. Obviously the backgrounds still look pretty good by today's standards because they're prerendered, but any 3d model looks exactly how you'd expect it to look for a game that's just about a decade old.
So you start off in the original cabin which looks amazing, and you have a chainsaw and an axe. So far everything I've said sounds pretty cool...but then I actually played the game...and unfortunately it kinda sucks. As much as I want to love it, it's not very good. The nostalgia will wear off quickly as you become unbelievably frustrated by the awful fighting mechanics and constant onslaught of enemies. Everything awesome about this game is offset by how annoying it is to fight. As soon as you start to explore the cabin, some sort of flying demon appears that can swipe at you from pretty far as well as spit across a room. Unfortunately the fixed camera and sub par control response made my first attempt at this game a complete failure. I could not get a bearing on where the stupid demon was so I could attack it. So I basically ran in circles wildly and died within 45 seconds. I restarted and ran into a smaller room where I could plainly see where everything was and proceeded to button mash square to chop the stupid fucking thing nearly 20 times before it died. SHITTY.
And that's just one enemy. If you can force yourself to keep going, probably for the sheer fact that Bruce Campbell does an awesome job with the voice acting, then you'll eventually be swarmed by enemies that you can only attack one at a time. You have a goddamned chainsaw for a hand...that's fucking awesome. Unfortunately it's pointless using it when up against more than one enemy because you're completely vulnerable when you do. There are other little things to nitpick about, but again, any problem you have with the fundamental mechanics of the first 3 Resident Evil games is going to transfer over. Don't like the inventory system or the save system from RE? Then you won't like the inventory or save system in Evil Dead either. Either way, nothing can top how awful the fighting is, so really nothing else even matters.
The bottom line is, if you love Evil Dead, you should own this game just because. You can find it pretty easily on eBay or in stores that sell used Playstation games. The Dreamcast version seems slightly harder to come by, but most DC stuff is these days it seems. If you're not familiar with Evil Dead, then you probably don't need to waste your time. It's not the worst game I've ever played, but it's not good either. Believe it or not though, I still like it a lot more than either of the Evil Dead games on PS2 or XBOX.
-Brian T
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