Licensed horror games can’t help but follow the trend popularized by Dead by Daylight in their pursuit to go for asymmetrical multiplayer games over standard single-player affairs. Friday the 13th: The Game, Predator: Hunting Grounds, and the upcoming Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre are such entries in this niche, with Evil Dead: The Game being the newest of the bloody bunch. But instead of respectfully translating the coveted franchise to the online space, it clumsily cobbles together a handful of mundane, monotonous mechanics into an experience that’s barely even suitable fan service.
That’s not to say that there’s literally nothing for them, though. Evil Dead: The Game has plenty of references to the three Sam Raimi films and the ill-fated series, Ash vs Evil Dead. There are throwaway lines that reference specific events of the franchise, as well as notable landmarks like the Knowby cabin, El Brujo’s hut, and the trailer park Ash lived in. Being able to scour through said familiar locations with a different perspective is momentarily enjoyable, even if they are rather basic structures that can’t be interacted with, have little significance within the actual match, and are only worth looking through once. The digital tour is helped by the pervasive darkness and shockingly detailed visuals, two aspects that outmatch its rough-looking contemporaries and fit the spooky mood an Evil Dead game should strive for.
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Most of the actors have returned to reprise their roles, and while many of them are serviceable during their rare combat barks and brief audio diary monologs, Bruce Campbell is obviously the standout. His cocky, sarcastic wit is infectious as ever and his portrayal as the Boomstick Butcher with the Chainsaw Hand is still entertaining after all these years.
However, much like the dead-eyed, expressionless models for those characters that only vaguely resemble the actors, almost everything else is woefully inadequate. And the rot starts at the core gameplay loop. The four human survivors are tasked with piecing together a map, grabbing the Kandarian Dagger, and assembling the lost pages of the Necronomicon before finally blasting away the Dark Ones with a magical beam. Even though the locations differ, it’s a remarkably repetitive cycle that doesn’t vary from match to match. Great multiplayer games mask the repetition inherent to them and Evil Dead: The Game is simply not varied enough to do that and all of reasons why become even more apparent when closely examining its many flawed mechanics.
Finding the three pieces of the map is always extremely easy since the game tells players exactly what area it is in. A beacon hovers over the map fragment once a player is within 25 yards of it, which further cuts down on searching as the game thoughtlessly reveals its location. It’s boring every single time because it is too direct and the Kandarian Demon is too weak at this stage to interfere, so it can’t even depend on unpredictable humans to change up the flow.
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Getting the Kandarian Dagger and lost pages of the Necronomicon is just as dull. Both are King of the Hill-style objectives where hordes pour in as a small meter fills up. Mindlessly hacking away at the frail foes is already tiresome and the game unsurprisingly repeats this quest twice.
Firing beams into the cloaked Dark Ones is also a joke. Everyone can spread pretty far apart, so it’s difficult for the opposing Kandarian Demon to stop all four players from shooting their beam. Since wearing down their shields is basically a given, this means the final stage of defending the Necronomicon from the Deadites is as inevitable as it is easy. The measly two minutes the evil beings have to destroy it are laughable since that’s not nearly enough time.
A lot of these woes are due to its disastrous balancing. Survivors with the loosest understanding of the game can eke out an underserved victory. Light scavenging and periodically using each character’s ability will make almost every group unkillable since the weak A.I. isn’t smart enough to overtake four people with more than seven brain cells apiece. And if someone does fall, resurrecting them at one of the many altars is quick and painless and lets survivors easily undo the Kandarian Demon’s hard work.
Survivors may only seem overpowered because of how underpowered the Kandarian Demon is. Instead of manifesting as a singular character and stalking humans like a masked murderer or high-tech alien hunter, players fly around in spirit form and lay traps that are powered by a meter that fills from gathering orbs throughout the map. Setting traps and successful attacks yield skill points that can be dumped into different stats like trap effectiveness and minion health.
But it’s fundamentally unrewarding because of the disconnect that comes with summoning minions instead of manually doing the dirty work. Peppering the battlefield with fragile followers plays out like a real-time strategy game that’s unsatisfying because of how quickly they get sent back to Hell. It’s possible to possess them to play a more direct role in the action, but these corrupt souls die too quickly to do anything meaningful.
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The limited resource pool and lack of abilities also mean there’s almost no strategic cooldown management because the few powers the Kandarian Demon does have are held back by excruciatingly long-timers. Survivors often wait around with little to do as the Kandarian Demon’s moves recharge, only to immediately demolish the lone troop that trickles in after the first cooldown hits zero.
The A.I. doesn’t flood in great enough numbers to cause panic. They’re also too weak to do much, anyway. Direct combat falters for the same reason since those very same brittle units are the ones that have to be possessed and the small possession buffs they do get are imperceptible. Placing traps is usually useless because of the sheer size of the map. Spawning in units is distant and unengaging. The feckless Kandarian Demon is thoroughly inadequate and painfully unrewarding because of it.
Boosting its stats might do some good, but there are far more problems that plague both teams. Shooting is relatively sound due to its smooth and generously sticky aiming, but the more predominant melee combat is a drag. It’s supremely mashy and fights always degenerate to trains of characters clubbing away aimlessly. While the dodge is an attempt to add depth, it does little to dissuade users from gratuitously tapping the attack button and is a main reason why the game is as bland as it is; there’s basically nothing to master.
Instead of having rich mechanics that keep players coming back, Evil Dead: The Game tries to encourage replayability through its skill trees of persistent buffs that are as problematic as they sound. New players are at a disadvantage not only because of the ineffective tutorial but also because of the lower stats they’ll have when first jumping in. Adding RPG mechanics that interfere with the balance and punish newcomers is careless and a thoughtless attempt to add depth to a shallow game.
The bad design manifests in smaller ways, too. The Fear meter that builds when players are out in the woods is tedious and is only something survivors have to constantly babysit. The nagging tutorial pop-ups constantly interrupt the action. The aforementioned tutorial itself is gravely underdeveloped and doesn’t properly teach the intricacies of the two sides, much less the differences between each character and class. Console users can’t rebind the controls. Interaction prompts take too long, if they even register at all. It’s just full of small odds and ends that tamper with an experience that’s already quite poor.
Multiplayer is its biggest focus, yet the game also has some solo missions and they’re predictably all abysmal and lack the series’ personality and style. Instead of offering interesting “What if?” scenarios, gamifying famous scenes, or actually teaching players the game in ways the inept tutorial can’t, they end up all being meaningless, checkpoint-free vignettes with the same stale combat that drag on for far too long. Those who want access to every character will have to slog through these grueling, overly difficult tests of patience, which is yet another example of its backward view of unlocks.
Evil Dead has persisted because of its characters, lore, and mix of goofs and gore — most of which almost wholly absent — so it’s initially puzzling that it’s not a story-focused game with a robust campaign that could better highlight those strengths; the solo missions here obviously don’t cut it. Electing to chase the asymmetrical multiplayer horror trend over making something that would potentially better suit the franchise doesn’t automatically damn Evil Dead: The Game, though. Instead, the game is damned by its complete and utter lack of captivating multiplayer mechanics. With such a lackluster suite of systems, samey objectives, awful single-player missions, and underwhelming demon gameplay, Evil Dead: The Game is unlikely to live long enough to get a vacation down to Jacksonville and more likely to be dead by daylight.
SCORE: 4/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 4 equates to “Poor.” The negatives overweigh the positive aspects making it a struggle to get through.
