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I have a confession to make: When I picked up this game from my favorite video rental store, I knew nothing about it. I didn't know who Ash was, or Bruce Campbell, or a Deadite. After playing for a bit, I looked on the net for some background on the publisher and discovered that I had tripped into this whole cult film thing. So, if you are looking to find out how faithful to the movie trilogy this game is, I have no idea. Yet. Check back with me in a week or so.
Ash will battle the Deadites (undead) for the fate of the world across six maps. Three take place in modern day Dearborn, two in the past, and the final map is in the future. Along the way you will spill buckets and buckets of blood, send limbs flying and wade through hordes of deadites.
You take on the role of Ashley (or Ash). An erstwhile one-handed hero. (Ash had to amputate his own hand at the end of the second movie because it was possessed by a demon, ok?) He uses the stump of his right hand as a hardpoint for the attachement of a variety of weapons, such as a chainsaw, gatling gun, flamethrower, etc. (You start out with a chainsaw). In his left hand he wields a double-barrelled shotgun initially. There are also pistols and melee weapons to be found. All of the weapons are upgradeable by either picking up items, or accomplishing missions. Ash also will aquire a spell book, and by finding new spells he can possess deadites (something you will have to do in order to progress through the game) or use a handful of offensive spells such as stun or rain of fire.
The control layout for handling gunplay and hand-to-hand is nicely done and simple to use. A single button is assigned to left and right hand attacks. There is another button assigned to blocking and the final button is the action button. The shoulder buttons are used for activating a lock-on camera and reading from the spell book. The lock-on camera can be nice if you are trying to escape from a horde of baddies, because Ash will look over his shoulder and can shoot at Deadites behind him. The use of the spell book is interesting and frustrating at the same time. You have to stop dead in your tracks and execute a combination of button presses while reading from the spell book to launch spells. While this is an interesting system, getting off an offensive spell when you need it most is pretty much a useless endeavour since being hit will interrupt the spell.
The voice over by Bruce Campbell was absolutely the highlight of this game. The tongue-in-cheek campy humor had me laughing at several spots. In a nice touch, they have tied Ash's vocabulary to the maps, so you won't be hearing the same lines over and over through the whole game. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the sound effects in the game. Many are difficult to even identify, much less appreciate. It is possible these sounds were intentionally left second rate in an effort to capture the B movie atmosphere, but even allowing for that, I wasn't impressed.
While Bruce's voice work was my favorite part, the maps were the opposite end of the spectrum. They are dark and dreary to the point of being depressing. While this kind of fits with the motif of the game, it wouldn't have killed the map designers to add a little color here and there. This is a minor issue compared to the map layouts, which were absolutely terrible. Confusing and frustrating are two words that come to mind. The decision not to include an auto-map function is a mistake that is the single biggest fault of the game. Not only is navigating the levels annoying, you are faced with numerous fetch type missions that become pure frustration because of the nature of the maps.
In addition to the story mode, there is also a challenge mode which allows you to replay the maps with different objectives such as retrieving objects and killing all of the enemies in a variety of methods. Unfortunately, these add little to no replay value to the game.
While the underlaying mechanics of this game offer the potential for a good game, the execution here is just not up to par. If you are a big fan of the Evil Dead series this game is worth checking out for the voicework of Bruce Campbell, otherwise don't bother.
