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Evil Dead: The Game is something I would consider a passion project when it comes to how faithful it adapts the source material and the clear love for the IP. It’s rare to see both creator and studio come together so perfectly that I don’t know if I could have expected a better final product out of the beloved cult franchise. While there are certainly a few rough edges, Saber Interactive absolutely nails the very essence of what makes Evil Dead such a classic.
With several actors returning to their prominent roles, some of them for the first time since the original films, it’s hard to not get excited to see not only Bruce Campbell step back into the role of Ash Willams, but also that of Ellen Sandweiss, Betsy Baker, and even newcomers Dana DeLorenzo, and Ray Santiago, given the pair’s important roles in the Evil Dead TV series. Going the extra route to ensure these characters were voiced via their actual actors adds an authenticity to the game that I don’t think most studios would have gone the extra mile for.
Before I go too much into detail about the core experience, let’s dive into what Evil Dead offers you as a solo player first, because it’s not as much as I think some people were hoping for. The game has a total of 13 survivors, split across the archetypes of Leader, Warrior, Hunter, and Support, but several of them are locked behind a few story missions. These include the older Ash Williams from Ash vs. Evil Dead, Amanda Fisher, Pablo Simon Bolivar, and Lord Arthur. These missions all take place within the same map present for multiplayer and thankfully it is massive enough to accommodate each and every mission and not feel like you are retreading over well-explored areas.
Completing these five missions is not a walk in the park as any wrong move will end your progress as there are no checkpoints. These require you to understand the fundamentals in ensuring you have ample healing items, amulets, and weaponry by searching nearby structures that may be off the beaten path. Each mission has its own bite-size story relative to specific parts of the franchise and are extremely enjoyable and equally challenging. If you are only looking at Evil Dead from a solo perspective, I don't know if there is enough here to justify the purchase despite how well put together each of these five missions are.
Evil Dead: The Game is an asymmetrical multiplayer experience where four survivors look to complete objectives while a fifth player attempts to stop them. While I’ve seen comparisons made to Dead by Daylight, Left 4 Dead, and Friday the 13th, I find that Resident Evil: Project Resistance is a far better comparison. Games like Friday and Dead by Daylight often have you hiding and attempting to complete objectives without much combat, whereas like Project Resistance, you have a wide assortment of combat options available to you as well as a villain component where you are placing enemies down to combat the heroes, as well as taking control of popular villains from the series to deal some hand to hand justice.
The game has you running the same overall loop from match to match, and thankfully, the randomness of where objectives pop up upon the massive map shakes things up so that no two matches really feel the same. With various weather systems at play to blanket the field in some snow or rain, there is a good amount of variety amongst its environment with well over a dozen locations to keep you occupied until new maps eventually come out. As a Survivor, you’ll be tasked with tracking down three pieces of a map that will eventually lead to the Kandarian Dagger, and a page from the fabled Necronomicon. After you’ve collected those within the half-hour time limit, you’ll have a showdown with the Dark Ones and attempt to keep the enemy player from destroying the demonic book. You’ll also want to keep an eye out as the map will slowly shrink inwards towards the book as the demonic storm all around you is not a place you’ll want to hang out in.
What I love most about the map is how so many of its locations pull from the films and the TV show. The Knowby Cabin is there in all its glory with even Henrietta moaning from the basement, rocking the trap door as you wander around the perfectly recreated structure. I also appreciated that Ash’s home from the TV show was there, even if I don’t know too many people that actually watched it, which is a shame as it was rather good. The map itself is massive and you can rely on variable transportation to get around, including the classic car that Ash somehow still has. Vehicles can be a bit unwieldy to control, but they are also great for mowing down deadites that stand in your way but can also be possessed by the Demon while you’re driving it, booting you out and attempt to run you over.
While you’ll make your way across the map, each house, gas station, or structure can hold a variety of items you’ll need to survive, such as Shemp’s cola, amulets that grant you a protective shield, to tier-based chests that hold weapons as well as the Pink F cocktail that can be used to boost stats like health, stamina, and damage, even if they only last for that particular round. What I love about these chests as well is that as the Demon, you can sabotage them to contain either Ash’s dismembered hand from Evil Dead 2, or Tiny Ash’s from Army of Darkness.
Evil Dead: The Game ships with 13 characters, as mentioned previously. Spread out across four classes, you’ll have various versions of Ash from Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, Army of Darkness, and Ash vs. The Evil Dead with the character models that are rendered perfectly to capture each era. You’ll have characters from both of the first two Evil Dead films in Cheryl Willams, Scotty, Annie Knowby, and Ed Getley, as well as both Henry the Red and Lord Arthur from Army of Darkness. From the Ash vs. The Evil Dead STARZ TV series are Kelly Maxwell, Pablo Simon Bolivar, and Amanda Fisher. This first batch of characters covers a lot of bases with obviously some gaps that will be filled in the form of future DLC. Still, it’s a solid collection of some of the series’ most well-known characters and offers a wealth of variety across each era.
While some players may end up picking their favorite, choosing a Survivor to balance your team out is a must so that you have a team equipped for the fight ahead. While I started out with Kelly, who was my favorite of the bunch, I ended up working more on Cheryl to provide support when we needed it most. As Cheryl, I can heal my teammates if they are nearby, and working through her skill tree, I can unlock permanent boosts such as carrying more healing items, or having those healing items reduce the fear of nearby teammates. Each class has a specific skill that can aid the team in unique ways such as the Leader can increase the fear resistance for the team while also boosting their damage to the Warrior becoming an absolute tank to dish out some extreme brutality.
These upgrades are earned when you level up and gain experience during online matches. Winning will obviously grant you more, but even losing a battle will see some beneficial gains. Sadly, any progress made during AI battles will not result in any experience earnings, but those matches do serve a good purpose for learning more of the game with somewhat lower stakes. Still, leveling up and sinking points into each character can see you gain more health, more stamina, and being able to dish out more damage or making it easier and quicker to pick up crucial items all around you. Each character has about two dozen skills that can be enhanced even more so to make you into quite the durable killing machine.
One unique component to the game that is rather interesting is that while you can lay waste to Deadite after Deadite, being alone or in the dark, or spooked by something set up by the Demon can cause your character to cower in fear, raising a bar that can make them susceptible to being possessed or experience a pulsating tunnel vision and warbled sound. It also makes it far more difficult to combat enemies around you. While there are skills that teammates can use to calm those fears or even sticking close to a teammate can help as well, you’ll look to rely on using matches to light fires at key points around the map, reducing your fear level quickly whereas other natural light sources will do so, but at a drastically slower pace, which is something that can also be upgraded.
Combat within Evil Dead is rather simple but very effective. You can carry a single melee weapon or gun and these come in all shapes and sizes, each with variable stats such as speed, ammo capacity, or damage. Your melee skills have the most diversity as you have a light or heavy attack as well as prompts that appear above an enemy’s head that can have you perform a melee combo or finisher on them, complete with being invincible while you do so. Thankfully, weapons do not break, but you’ll likely replace them with what you can find that is faster, better, and stronger. Chopping down an enemy with an axe or a shot to the face with a good ol’ Boomstick is a damn gory affair and honestly never gets old. In fact, each melee weapon has its own kill animations, such as slamming a shovel through their mouth and then giving it one last solid oompf to clear it clean off; it’s amazing.
While playing as one of the classic characters is solid fun, taking on the role of the Demon is pretty interesting and can be a good time, especially if you are playing against friends. You’ll cruise around the map in the same camera motion present in the series and while it can take a bit to get used to, I do wish it was a tad less floaty and a bit easier to maneuver. While I’ll address it later on, there are no accessibility options here to make controlling the Demon easier, which is a tad unfortunate.
As the Kandarian Demon, you get to control a mass army of Deadites and you have three selections currently to wield; Warlord, which has you commanding Henrietta as well as several other similarly looking monstrosities, the grotesque puppeteers who explode upon defeat, to likely everyone’s favorite in Evil Ash the Necromancer and his army of the undead. Each faction comes with it its own class of underlings as well as a whole massive skill tree to work towards, boosting your demonic powers to unheard-of heights. Want to wield a true Army of Darkness? Well, now you finally can.
Using Infernal Energy, which you’ll find pretty much everywhere you roam the camera around, you can possess random Deadites and lay waste to the Survivors yourself, or use that energy to summon more powerful elite enemies to thwart their attempts at completing objectives. You can set traps in supply boxes or possess cars or even the very trees littered around the forest. If you save enough of this energy up, you can summon a boss, such as Henrietta, Evil Ash, or Eligos, the Puppeteer leader. Each character you possess or summon has its own range of attacks and chatter, which really gives them fun and often hilarious dialogue and personalities. These bosses can truly wreck a team that is unprepared and especially if they are alone and overwhelmed.
What I enjoy the most of what Evil Dead does is that it makes each side equally fun to play. If you could only place enemies and not embody them, then the Demon side of the game would certainly be less appealing, but being able to take control of Evil Ash is a riot and the same goes for any of the variable forces you have at your whim. Chopping and slicing away at Deadites is brutally fun as the Survivor and the fact I can make progress to make my chosen hero stronger, gives me something to work towards, and honestly, that is something that will certainly have me coming back again and again. However; as fun as this game is, it will also come down to being able to play with a team that knows how to communicate as playing with non-mic randoms can often lead to a very broken and uncooperative experience. Obviously, any game can be more fun with friends, but proper teamwork is the only way Evil Dead truly succeeds in being as fun as it is, so make sure to keep that in mind.
Evil Dead is a damn good-looking game. Characters resemble their actor counterparts fairly well and the better part of the cast from previous Evil Dead films and the TV show have returned to add their voices into the mix, even if I wish there were just a few more quips as you'll hear a lot of the same one-liners far more than you'll like. The game’s atmosphere is spot on with the most faithful recreation of the cabin and its world we've seen so far. The map itself is full of tons of nods to the expanded series and offers a great deal of variety in locations and weather effects to continue to give even some 20+ matches in. The dark moody forests and nail-biting score all combine into making Evil Dead a pitch-perfect recreation of the franchise and a vastly enjoyable experience for fans and newcomers alike.
During my entire time with the game, I’ve never had a match drop or any significant server issue. Considering this game has crossplay, It’s felt like a miracle that the game has been reliably steady the entire time I’ve spent with it. While that has been smooth sailing, I’ve had a few glitches that have made short work of me and my team that I do hope gets addressed in an upcoming patch. During a few rounds, we’ve had moments where you cannot move or attack, and while using your special has sometimes fixed it, there are times where you just couldn’t swing your weapon or even interact with a car to at least get in and act as a target while your teammate protects you. This glitch happened about a half dozen times and when it happens to you, it truly sucks.
While not a technical issue, one of my biggest complaints is that you cannot jump. Now, this wouldn’t be an issue if your character could simply walk up a small incline, but they cannot in most cases as nearly every house has a deck that is partially off the ground, and while you do have a mantle maneuver, it only works for fences or objects of that height, nothing shorter. This has caused a lot of getting trapped or stuck while trying to escape a boss and you’ll frantically scramble for the stairs. While that can in some ways look to mimic what you would see in an average horror movie, as a game; however, it doesn’t generally favor the actual act of playing the game.
I briefly mentioned it before, but Evil Dead has a total lack of any accessibility options. You cannot change controller sensitivity or remap any controls at all, making it impossible for some disabled fans of the series to take in even a single match. There are no text changes, UI settings, colorblind settings, or anything to allow some aspects of the game to be easier to see and make sense of. This is an issue with being unable to see most enemies when the game is damn near pitch black. While there are contrast and brightness settings, they only do so much. You do have outlines around your teammates in some instances, but oddly enough, no names above them, so when your entire time is made up of each Ash Willams, and they ask you to follow them, you have to take the time to figure out which Ash is which. If you were looking forward to Evil Dead: The Game and require the use of accessibility options to even play your games, I would recommend waiting until the developer has indicated if they plan on adding them.
Despite the few issues I have with it. Evil Dead might be the best licensed game I’ve played in years. The embodiment of its IP is damn impressive and the care and attention Saber has taken to replicate it here is second to none. The look and feel of its world, its characters, and even the camera when controlling the Kandarian Demon is a damn near-perfect recreation. There are certainly a few balancing issues to work out and a few glitches, accessibility, and technical problems, but these are all fixable things that can be patched. With a season pass to provide content in the long run, and more characters to hopefully see show up, such as Lucy Lawless’s Ruby, there is a strong potential for this game to really succeed. Still, Saber has hit a supernatural homerun with Evil Dead and while it might be the last we see of Bruce Campbell as Ash, it’s one hell of a final sendoff.
Developer - Saber Interactive. Publisher - Saber Interactive. Released - May 13th, 2022. Available On - Xbox One/Series X/S, PS4/PS5, Nintendo Switch (Coming Soon!), Windows PC. Rated - (M) Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Language, Partial Nudity. Platform Reviewed - Xbox Series X. Review Access - A review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
Screenshots are a combination of both taken off the console as well as provided by the publisher. Any and all action shots were far too blurry to show off, so please, check out the trailer to see combat in action!