Adapting a film license to the cinema is not always easy. Very often, we end up with opportunistic apps that are content to surf on the license from which they come to grab a few greenbacks. However, there are some exceptions to the rule. Saber Interactive, for example, has already shown us in the past that it was possible to make faithful, honest and well-made games with its cooperative shooter World War Z. So when the studio announced to us that it was attacking At the Evil Dead license, a nugget of voluntarily cheap horror comedy, we could only be curious.
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Far from a Left 4 Dead-ian structure, Evil Dead: The Game features a fully multiplayer and asymmetrical experienceor 4 survivors must face an infernal entity and its demonic army. A genre that had the right to its heyday years ago, but whose only surviving representative is none other than Dead by Daylight. However, nothing is lost for Evil Dead since, unlike other apps that have tried the experiment and broken their teeth along the way, he casually opts for a very different approach to DBD.
The software covers the entire Evil Dead license (except the 2013 reboot), from the three films of the illustrious Sam Raimi, to the Ash vs Evil Dead series. In the survivors roster, we thus find the legendary Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell), Cheryl, Scott, Pablo or even Sir Arthur and Henry the Red. It is in total more thana dozen characters that are playable, including several variants of Ash Williams, all divided into different classes (fighter, hunter, support…). Supports will, for example, have the ability to share the benefits of the consumables they use to their comrades around them, while hunters natively use less stamina, or fighters have better natural hitting power.
Each character will also have the right to an active skill and two exclusive passives related to their role and will be able to take advantage of a wide selection of assets to unlock to improve their statistics.. Ash (Evil Dead) can, for example, boost his colleagues to make them less subject to fear, Cheryl can invoke healing, Kelly Maxwell can gain agility and damage… In the end, even if certain assets are shared by one character to character, each hero is different enough to be interesting. And that’s good because it’s essential to build a complementary team, both the game can be difficult, in particular thanks to game design ideas that encourage cooperation, such as the notion of fear.
It’s super cheap, clearly in the theme and as funny as it is effective
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In game, all our characters have a fear gauge marked with an indicator (an eye) which will increase if you remain isolated, far from your teammates, face monsters, or fall into traps.
The more the gauge increases, the more you will be weakened and may be the victim of crowd control (possession, fear, etc…), but above all, you will become easy prey for the demonic entity, as soon as your gauge reaches the indicator. You will therefore have to play as a team from start to finish to achieve your objectives and win the game.
Each match takes place in the same way: we are dropped into a huge open world map in which we must find 3 pieces of map (with no indication other than the name of the place where they are), then secure the area with two objects of ritual to finally exorcise and recover the Necronomicon. These objectives will be the same from one part to another.
It may seem redundant said like that, especially sincethere are only 2 cards at the moment (a third is coming for free very soon by the way), but in fact, you don’t get bored, even after several games. Already, because the regions are really large, to the point of having to travel there by car, and contain points of interest, some of which are also recognizable at first glance, such as the famous cabin of Evil Dead or the house of Brujo from Ash vs Evil Dead (season 1). They can also count on a particularly successful atmosphere, although often too darkand different weather effects that completely change their visuals (snow, rain, violent storm, fog, etc.).
Bonus, if the objectives are the same, the locations are randomly chosen each game and force exploration. In addition, some survival elements drawn from the battle royale are in the game and you will have to search to get your hands on equipment (weapons, life, shield, etc.). At last, the map is full of AI-controlled enemies and above all, we are constantly being persecuted by a completely invisible entity. You can only hear and see it interacting with the environment, which gives it a very special cachet and brings a certain pressure. Especially sincewe must not forget that it is a player who controls it and that he has a wide range of tools to hunt us down, and even really scare us.
Evil Dead: The Game is a successful and super nice game
Where Dead by Daylight or the late Friday the 13th offered to embody a bloodthirsty killer, in Evil Dead: The Game, you control an entity and its army. For now, we can only choose between 3 factions: The Cadaverous (Evil Dead 1&2), the Eligos (Ash vs Evil Dead) and the Army of Skeletons (Army of Darkness).– Here too, they are all different and have their own units (common monsters, elites and bosses) that can be summoned using demonic energy that can be harvested from the map or by confronting surviving players. In game, when one embodies the forces of darkness, one finds oneself in a subjective view at ground level, directly taken from the films, and it works like thunder. From then on, our goal is simple: kill all survivors and prevent them from retrieving the Necronomicon.
To do this, we have a full arsenal of actions to perform to persecute the survivors and send them a whole bunch of critters on the face. For example, we can summon creatures, set traps in chests, lay minions in ambush at strategic points and even startle players to increase their fear gauge. It will also be possible, and it’s very funny to do, to own a whole lot of things: a tree, a car, a monster or… a player why not. As a result, when one possesses a body or an object, one literally takes control of it. A possessed player for example, finds himself in spectator mode of his own body, if you take control of a car, the passengers are thrown on the side of the road and you can try to run them over, etc.
What’s also very funny is that on the survivor side, this kind of action takes us right back to the movies, surprises and can even startle. The monsters in ambush suddenly come out of invisible portals, the traps in the chests jump in the face, but above all, above all, the entity can downright throw a screamer at us that screams in our ears. It’s super cheap, clearly in the theme and as funny as it is effective.
Artistically the software is successful
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However, surviving under constant harassment is not always easy. Life points drop quickly, you can quickly get overwhelmed by the situation. You have to be constantly on the alert and react very, very quickly, which is not particularly easy with teammates who do as they please. Moreover, if the hand-to-hand fights are extremely bloody, visceral and offer executions as gory as they are successful, the camera tends to panic in tight places and the clashes turn into a real mess. The problem is that we constantly have to go in and out of the barracks. So we get used to it, it’s sometimes funny not knowing where we are, lost in sheaves of blood and guts, but it’s also often frustrating when we find ourselves on the ground because of a camera planted in a wall.
We can also criticize the software for being frankly dark and for having blacks so deep that it is impossible to dilute them even by playing with contrasts and brightness. This may be a bias here, but since the battery of our flashlight discharges quickly and cannot be recharged, we often find ourselves finishing the games in complete darkness (it all depends on the weather). ). We are not going to hide from you that beyond bringing a particular atmosphere, this overdose of black must certainly serve as a cache-miserie since if artistically the software is successful (it brings a real cachet and above all is faithful in all respects to the license), the textures stick out their tongue a little, just like the modeling of certain characters. However, the lighting effects are particularly well done, as is the sound design, very faithful to the original material, from the grunts to the music through all the sound effects of the entity. It is particularly effective and will certainly delight fans of the first hour.
Finally, note the presence of a “solo mode” which is actually a succession of not really crazy objectives and which has no other interest than to make us unlock new playable characters. He is there, why not, but did not go to the checkout for that, very clearly, Evil Dead: The Game is a successful and super nice game, but it’s a multiplayer game and nothing morehence its attractive price.
