HHW Gaming Review: ‘Evil Dead: The Game’ Is A Groovy Love Letter To Fans of Movie Franchise

Evil Dead is a 40-year-old movie franchise that still resonates with pop culture, especially horror fanatics. It also spawned multiple video game incarnations, all not memorable, until now with the arrival of Evil Dead: The Game.

Evil Dead: The Game takes a formula used by other titles such as Friday The 13: The Game and Dead By Daylight and is enjoyable for longtime players and welcomes newbies by keeping the gameplay quite simple.

A Good Ole Fashion Good vs. Evil Battle

Saber Interactive and Boss Teams Games’ video game spin on the Evil Dead movie franchise is an asymmetrical multiplayer survival horror game, say that ten times fast. In the game, players can team up to take on bots or against each other. Teams are split into Survivors (humans) and Demons, and each has tasks to accomplish to ensure victory.

Players can choose between Ash (Bruce Campbell) and different characters from the three films and Starz television series as the survivors. You have to find the Necronomicon and Kandarian Dagger to exorcise the demons from the land. As a demon, you simply have to prevent that from happening.

The Survivors occupy four classes, leader, warrior, hunter, and support. Players can level up every character in each category with the experience they earn after winning or losing matches. Players can also spend points to help them unlock perks and skills to make their favorite character to make you a deadite killing machine.

Players who choose to take on the role of the Demons get to choose from three different monster types from the films. Demon gameplay requires more finesse and planning.

You can set traps around the map that increases survivors’ fear levels allowing them to be susceptible to being possessed. As the demon, you can also unleash deadites and a big bad boss to stop the Survivors dead in their tracks.

Matches are not long, but we did notice it’s rather challenging to come out on top as the Survivors. But, it is rewarding if you do manage to defeat the Demon player.

This Is My Boomstick

The developers really went out of their way to bring insanity and ambiance from the films into the game. Ash and the survivor’s flashlight is very important to keep your fear level down and light up the eerie and dimmly lit areas. The sound is superb, giving you the feeling that you’re in an Evil Dead movie. If you got a great pair of gaming headphones, we highly recommend throwing them on while playing.

The action is on point. We can’t tell you how satisfying it is seeing the survivors go ham on the deadites in various ways with different weapons conveniently scattered across the map.

The character designs are well done, and fans will truly appreciate the different versions of Ash as well as the classic monsters from the films.

Not So Groovy

If you don’t feel like playing with anyone online, there are single-player missions you can partake in. The missions aren’t as enjoyable as the PvP matches but do serve a purpose.

Upon completing them, you can unlock other playable characters. Still, you will quickly find the missions to be ridiculously difficult and spend an absurd amount of time trying to complete them. We feel this is one aspect where the cooperative play would have been clutch.

Another thing we feel the game could have benefited from is a dedicated jump button. There were plenty of times during our playthrough wishing we could simply jump over a fence instead of having to press a button to vault over it.

The game can also get boring very quickly for some players with its lack of maps at launch.

Yeah, Truly Amazing

Saber Interactive delivered a love letter to fans of Sam Raimi’s excellent Evil Dead films by accurately capturing the feel of the movies and bringing them to the game.

Ash’s catchy one-liners, the gore, the action, the monsters, the locations, and the boomstick action are all there. For $39.99, you are truly getting your bang for your buck. With the promise of more content and maps coming, spending extra on the season pass is not bad.

Yes, Evil Dead: The Game can get old pretty quickly, but it’s one of those games you can always hit up your friends and tell them to log on and start playing.

Evil Dead: The Game is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC via the Epic Games Store.

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Photo: Saber Interactive & Boss Team Games / Evil Dead: The Game

*Evil Dead: The Game was reviewed on PS5 with a code provided by Saber Interactive*