Now, onto Evil Dead: The Game. It plays similarly to both Friday the 13th and Dead by Daylight, so you pretty much know what you’re getting - those games, but with Evil Dead’s groovy style, and this game is a huge love letter to the series, everything from locations, characters and weapons have all been lovingly recreated, if you are a big fan of the franchise, you will have a field day.
You take on the role of either four survivors or a demon in a game of cat-and-mouse. As the survivors, you will need to find certain objects to banish all evil from the map, and as a demon - you hunt down all survivors. When playing as the survivors you can defend yourself, you pick up both melee weapons and guns, so, unlike others of its type, you don’t spend your time running from encounters. You don’t have to spend all of your time hiding in a wardrobe, now you can take it to the enemy!
Obviously, to balance this out the demon has a few tricks up its sleeves, it can set traps, possess cars and demonic trees, summon minions to patrol areas and attack survivors on sight. It has a nice balance between what the demon can do and what survivors can do. I enjoyed playing as the survivors more so, as the tensions as a survivor are palpable and you really do have to work as a team, or you will be hunted down quickly.
Some downsides in the gameplay – first, a bit of clunkiness all around, and the animations aren’t the smoothest; it’s not the most highly polished of games. Also, certain landscapes that you should easily be able to traverse - you can’t; small inclines, certain rocks etc. It did cause me to shake my head several times, especially when you have a demon hurtling towards you.
How you complete the mission is also a bit lacking, you do the same thing each time - gather items and then perform a ritual. I liked that in Friday the 13th you could call the cops, or escape, or kill Jason - it felt like you had a number of options and could try different ways, and even if they went wrong - you always had a backup plan to fall on.
There is a single-player campaign you can go through, it’s a few levels using stuff from the films, admittedly not the meatiest of modes, but it’s nice to have. After a few high-intensity online rounds it was nice to play through an odd level of the single-player mode, I don’t think many will get much out of it and you certainly won’t go back to it once you finished, but I used them almost as a palate cleanser.
The music in this game is really wonderful, it’s not a soundtrack I would want to listen to on a lazy Sunday but when playing the game, it’s so atmospheric and ratches up when necessary, the music alone was causing me to become unstuck and very nervous, it really does a great job of getting under your skin.
One thing that is noticeable early in your time with the game and does grind as the game moves on is the dialogue. It’s cool that they got the actors to record new dialogue for the game, but they didn’t get them to record enough, everyone loves Bruce Campbell, but hearing the same quip every time you turn your flashlight on becomes excruciating.
Also, they sound like they have been recorded in different places and it's noticeable. I imagine that this was due to Covid, but you can tell. The lack of engaging characters other than Ash is noticeable, many rounds were just various versions of Ash, I understand why - but something like Dead by Daylight definitely has the advantage here, hopefully with DLC this will be expanded upon.
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