Thankfully, Evil Dead: The Game is not a mediocre game glued together solely by its use of a beloved license.
Evil Dead is an undeniable classic. An important piece of independent film-making. Its sequel a brilliant swirl of grotesque horror and slapstick comedy. The third film, Army of Darkness, is a middle finger to big budget films and a wonderful twist on the fantasy genre.
Directed by Sam Raimi and propped up by the undeniably charismatic Bruce Campbell, the Evil Dead franchise has managed to remain relevant 40 years later. Though a handful of video games related to the property have graced consoles, I doubt anyone remembers much about them. Hell, my uncle bought a PlayStation just so he could play Evil Dead: Hail to the King and I don’t think he went past the opening level.
Evil Dead: The Game isn’t a chainsaw sculpture made of Ash Williams fodder, it’s a surprisingly competent, confident title that succeeds at being fun. My love for all things Evil Dead started at an early age–I went to a signing of Bruce Campbell’s autobiography when it released–but I surprisingly lack much experience in asymmetrical multiplayer. I didn’t have enough friends for Evolve. I downloaded Dead by Daylight when it was free but never touched it. So on, so forth.
Honestly, if the Evil Dead name wasn’t attached, it would never be a blip in my endless log of games I want and need to play. Yet here we are, playing Evil Dead: The Game. A game where players raise their current stats by consuming Pink Fs, a drink from Ash vs. Evil Dead that’s actually called a Pink Fuck and laced with Ketamine and created by a guy named Chet played by Sam Raimi’s brother Ted. That’s a deep pull. And that’s the kind of shit I eat up.
Four players versus one. Survivors versus a demon. The premise is simple. Up to four survivors must collect three map fragments to reveal the location of the Kandarian Dagger and pages of the Necronomicon. Once both are collected, players seek out The Dark Ones, kill them with the Dagger, and try to survive and defend the Necronomicon while a portal to hell closes and banishes evil from the world. For Ash, it’s a pretty average day. Meanwhile, a demon is focused on doing anything in its power to kill all the survivors before the ritual can be completed.
The core loop in Evil Dead: The Game is unashamedly simple. At the beginning, all four players are grouped together and tips provide an idea where on the map pages are located. Players will spend time running and driving across the map to complete these objectives, spending a majority of the time rummaging through dilapidated houses and buildings for loot. Guns, melee, weapons, Shemp’s Cola for health, amulets for shields, ammo, and matchsticks can be collected to give players a fighting chance against the Kandarian Demon forces. Guns and melee weapons come in a few varieties and rarities that change up their viability. A meat cleaver is fast to swing but not as strong as a medieval sword. A pistol can fire fast but won’t come close to the stopping power of a boomstick.
Wearing third-person action game inspiration on its sleeve, I was immediately comfortable with Evil Dead: The Game‘s movement and fighting. Aiming and firing a gun has a fair bit of leniency for how fast and frantic demons can run and for how dark the map usually is. Dodging is snappy while light and heavy attacks feel genuine enough with the weapons a player wields. That being said, I loathed the lack of a lock-on mechanic, especially when a fast-moving target would run past me.
The game is responsive but often has a few clumsy interactions that will hopefully be weeded out with a patch. Several times I would go to interact with a vehicle, supply box, or bonfire and have my input not register. At times, halfway through holding down the button, the prompt would reset itself or require me to hold down the button again. Not great at all. Once my character got stuck after a teammate hit me with a car while I was in the middle of healing a downed player. I could dodge backwards and point my camera a direction and move forward by swinging my melee weapon. I broke free from the invisible confines after my team completed a sequence and I grabbed an item.
Yes, there are many points where Evil Dead: The Game is rough around the edges and a gun that fell out of a box just hides underground. Players will get stuck on knee-high geometry and have to find a way around because there’s no jump button. A player will disconnect and your team is basically screwed because the game doesn’t fill that spot back up. Environments might be a tad dark for their own good. But more often than not, Evil Dead: The Game subdued those issues with its simple gameplay loop and quick rounds.
The simple act of player survivors strengthening up relies on quick objective completion and decent exploration. When collecting Pink Fs, players can level up their health, stamina, fear threshold, shield total, and weapon damage for that round. Additionally, finding higher rarity items allows for improved raw damage. But completing objectives relies on survivors staying together or moving across the map efficiently. When players spend time in the dark or alone, their fear rapidly rises. The more fear a player accumulates, the easier they can become possessed and will show up on the map for the demon player. When a player becomes possessed by the AI or another human, they can attack fellow survivors or do other devious things like burn through ammo and induce a bit of road rage. Other survivors must attack the possessed player to release them from possession. Across the map are spots where players can use matchsticks to start a fire and burn off some fear and the same logic applies to lit buildings or lanterns that might be around. Strangely, being in the car doesn’t reduce fear and a few times my entire group was taxiing to an objective full of fear and dreading the close quarters.
After finding the map fragments, collecting the Pages and the Dagger mostly boils down to point control as players stand in a forgiving area and wait while demons attack them. Survivors who have a leg up on the demon player may be able to complete both objectives at the same time. Each demon has a stagger meter that, when depleted, allows a survivor to unleash a damaging cinematic attack that often results in a gory finisher that covers the screen and character in blood.
So what does the demon do? Well, that player spends a lot of time moving around in first-person much like the ominous presences that rush characters in the Evil Dead movies. It’s a delightful implementation of the source material. The demon player spends a lot of time trying their best to torment and maim survivors while collecting Infernal Energy that exists as floating red orbs all over the map. Infernal Energy is spent by doing things like setting fear traps that act as jump scares for the player and ways to increase a survivor’s fear; possessing basic enemies, possessing cars and driving them off cliffs; and spawning tiers of demons to hinder the survivors.
As time progresses in a match, the player automatically gains levels that reward experience points to drastically expand their capabilities. Survivors want to end a match as soon as possible to prevent the demon player from getting stronger. While the demon player wants to be as much of a nuisance as possible and hopefully do a bit of killing. If a survivor is killed, the other players are capable of resurrecting them at an altar but this takes time away from the objective. However, it becomes increasingly more difficult to combat with the growing demon forces without the extra help.
Evil Dead: The Game does a fantastic job at balancing out the strengths and weaknesses of each side of the battle. Naturally, survivors are rewarded through mutual cooperation and working as a pack. Despite being individually weak, multiple damage sources allows demon healthbars to melt faster. While the demon player is initially weak, there are benefits towards constantly harassing and wasting survivors’ time to aid in the power crawl. If enough time has passed, the demon player will have the skill investment to potentially do some damage when the opposing team is grouped together at an objective. During these moments, survivor players should hunker down in doorways and windows while the demon player is granted faster Infernal Energy recovery to send more forces.
Match completion rewards experience points for the player’s overall level and for the specific survivor or demon the player was using. Evil Dead: The Game gives players variety with 13 survivors spread across four classes and three different demons. Each survivor and demon has their own unique skill trees (with some crossover skills) and a special ability that activates with a cooldown. Getting a character to their maximum level isn’t an easy task, even when some XP can be cashed in as skill points for any character. But each demon and each survivor feels fairly balanced. Want to have four Ashes running around? Do it because there’s one for every class.
The leader class emits a constant aura that boosts nearby characters, support classes can hold more healing items and often have abilities that help out the team, hunters have utility with ranged weapons, and warriors often take the brunt of the attacks and deal out most of the damage. Meanwhile, demon players have a combination of boss units, elite units, and grunts that are further buffered through skill trees. A lot of players I went against focused on Eligos because of his possession abilities and use of electric attacks. Though I enjoyed Evil Ash and his sheer power and Henrietta for her ability to emit poison which was especially terrifying during zone control sections. Maxing out every character is likely going to take a lot of time or extreme amount of skill but it wouldn’t surprise me to see players find a handful of favorites and stick with them.
Smartly, not all survivors are available from the start. To unlock them all, players will have to engage with the single-player content that are small story chunks with narration. For franchise fans, these missions are fun callbacks but as gameplay experiences, they fall flat. Players are literally doing the same activities solo that they would in multiplayer. But for some reason, there are no checkpoints during these missions, meaning that a death at the end could result in 15 to 20 minutes of lost time, it sucks. Maybe there is potential for Saber to do something enjoyable with this content but I feel that multiplayer is the main focus.
Yet it’s hard to ignore the Evil Dead lining behind Evil Dead: The Game. As much as I would love a survival horror, narrative-driven title in this universe, I think the avenue taken by Saber Interactive was smart. Getting much of the original voice cast is a smart way to show that you actually give a shit about a few decades worth of beloved content. Better yet is having Bruce Campbell attached to the game and giving it his all. Packed with Easter eggs and nods, I’m really happy with how this game turned out.
Evil Dead: The Game needs to have a content rollout that is consistent and meaty to keep people interested in the game past the opening weeks. If not, I’m worried the game will disappear from the mindset outside of an extremely small, dedicated fanbase. Evil Dead doesn’t deserve that and, honestly, The Game doesn’t deserve that. Saber Interactive has created a surprisingly balanced and entertaining asymmetrical multiplayer title that throws enough systems in so matches don’t get stale. Finding favorite survivors and demons to play as is a joy and fingers crossed the annoying bugs and issues are ironed out soon to detract less from the quality presented here. Thankfully, Evil Dead: The Game is a groovy blast and not a bloody bust.
