Evil Dead: The Game

I said in my review of "Evil Dead Rise" that I love everything to do with the "Evil Dead" franchise and, whilst that's generally true, it's fair to say that I don't love this particular game, released in 2022 and made free on Playstation Plus in early 2023.

"Evil Dead" is an asymmetric combat game, where a small group of player or AI controlled characters from across the "Evil Dead" series of films battle against a hoard of AI or Player controlled Deadites. The human players aim to collect various items that unlock a villain and an exit, the Deadites aim to kill them before that happens. The Humans can loot various weapons and items on their quests and the Deadites can set traps and interaction with various aspects of the map.

Let's start with the good. The dedication to the franchise is very admirable. There are plenty of heroes and villains from the four films (at the time) and TV series that are rendered here as playable characters. There are four variations of Ash to chose from, five if you include Evil-Ash and various weapons, items, and the Delta Oldsmobile from across the series. The levels look nice. Ermm.....

So, on to the bad. One of these is my preferences I accept, but I don't like playing online with people (particularly when I'm supposed to be in a team with them, shooting randos is fine) and so this being yet another game with no real story mode, but only multiplayer is disappointing. You can play the multiplayer mode with bot teammates but in my experience, they had a tendency to just keep running endless loops around me and it felt more distracting than helpful. The actual game wasn't particularly fun to play either. There's third person shooting which is OK, but then it's mashing buttons for awkward melee combat, which is OK if it's one on one, but quite annoying to be surrounded by three Deadites that you can't fight off properly because you can only swing in one direction.

I do understand that some people have liked this more than me, and I do also get that more play unlocks different moves and attacks that might get rid of my problem with the melee attacking but ultimately, it's not fun enough for me to want to commit the time to it to unlock those aspects. I don't have any friends who are playing this now (indeed I couldn't start a team game with actual humans due to lack of players) and I just came away wishing that they had committed this much time to a single player experience.