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| Evil Dead: A Fistful of Boomstick PS2 review | |
| developer | VIS Entertainment PLC |
| publisher | THQ |
| author | Drew Carmody |
| date | Jul. 14, 2003 |
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| sound | |
| gameplay | |
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| reviewer's toast | |
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Chromehounds
NA Review by Marcin
Oblivion-The First 3 Hours
PC Quicktake by walTer
Comic Quick Takes January 25, 2006
Feature by Mike
I had a bit of hope when I first started hearing about Evil Dead: A Fistful of Boomstick. Granted, games based on movies are usually mediocre at best, abysmally unplayable at worst, but I thought that this one might be worthwhile. I thought that, if nothing else, there would at least be a few cool Bruce Campbell one-liners in there to make me crack a smile. A few days ago, I headed to the local video store and picked the game up, thinking that if the game was good I’d consider buying it later. I’m glad that I rented it first. Even at the bargain price of 20 bucks, I think that if I had bought this game, I would have felt monumentally gypped, and you’d be reading a MUCH angrier review right now. As it is, I’m more than a little disappointed.
The Basics
The game is set in Dearborn, Michigan in four different eras. You play as Ash, the boomstick-toting, wisecracking, chainsaw-armed hero from the Evil Dead series. On a TV show, a professor plays an audiotape of the late Professor Knowby reading from The Book of the Dead, The Necronomicon. This, of course, causes all sorts of hell to break loose. Ash must once again slaughter his way through hordes of Deadites and try to repair the damage, traveling from present-day Dearborn through Colonial and Civil-War Era Dearborn, to a post-apocalyptic version where the Deadites have been in control for a long time. All in all, this is a fairly standard Action-Horror kind of setup. However, the game is not carried out as well as it could have been.
Gameplay
The gameplay in Evil Dead involves running around Dearborn in different eras, accomplishing tasks, solving puzzles, collecting weapons, and slaughtering countless Deadites. Each one of these gameplay areas has problems. Accomplishing various tasks given to you by NPCs in order to move the story forward is the main point in pretty much every adventure game - the problem with the goals in Evil Dead is that often they’re very vague. A perfect example of this would be a goal I had to complete in the Colonial Dearborn. You are told to “Find weapon parts for the blacksmith” - that’s it. It took me a good 45 minutes of running around looking in corners and next to buildings before I figured out what I was supposed to pick up and bring back to the blacksmith. Another problem is that the goals started to suffer from a degree of sameness after awhile. It eventually became, “Go get Thing X” and bring it to “Person Y” to get “Object Z” to take to “Location A”.
During all the running around, there’s also a fair amount of combat, and unfortunately, this brings us to another area where Evil Dead is a bit weak. There are many weapons in the game, but the combination of the chainsaw and shotgun are usually all you need to get through most situations, and using those weapons almost exclusively does get boring. There’s also a spell-casting element to the game, activated by the R1 shoulder button and a combination of the action buttons. Unfortunately, this is too clumsy to be of much use in combat situations when there’s more than one Deadite - which is most of the time. The only spell that is consistently useful is a spell that increases your strength for a limited amount of time. The game is pretty generous with shotgun ammunition, so most of the time you can safely blast away at the Deadites from a distance, and the only challenge lies in that ever-favorite undead tactic - the swarm. There are a few boss fights in the game, but using the “dodge the fireball and shoot back” technique will get you through them.
The game automatically saves at the end of every major chapter, but if you want to save while you’re in the game, you have to use Save Game Tokens that are scattered sparingly around each level. While it encourages you to be thrifty with your saves, it will annoy those that like to save their game after every major event. It can be incredibly frustrating to find yourself killed by a mob of Deadites only to realize that you haven’t remembered to save the game in about a half an hour. They should have just allowed you to save anyplace that you want. It’s not really too surprising, however, since PS2 games as a whole seem to be pretty stingy with saves.
Graphics
The graphics in Evil Dead: Fistful of Boomstick are decent. They’re not the greatest graphics in the world, and they’re not the worst - about average for a PS2 game is the best praise I can give. There was the occasional camera problem: if your character is too close to a wall, you end up shooting at things that you can’t see. It doesn't happen too often, and the graphics engine makes up for it by easily rendering lots of attacking Deadites with minimal slowdown or frame rate issues.
Sounds
The sounds are the area that this game really shines in, and that’s almost exclusively due to the fact that Bruce Campbell himself voices Ash. Still, as cool as it is to hear Bruce spiting out those catchphrases that have been copied by several other action game heroes, there are surprisingly few of them and they get rather old after a while. The sound effects of the chainsaw and the shotgun are very well done, and the yells of Ash and the Deadites when they get hit are also well done. However, even this area of the game has its problems as the music is a bit on the repetitive side.
The Bottom Line
Unfortunately, this game does nothing to improve the reputation of movie tie-in games. It has its fun points - mainly for Bruce Campbell fans - and even those wear thin before too long. I will admit that I couldn’t finish the game. When I found myself killed in Civil War Dearborn after 45 minutes of playing, not saving all that time, I found that I just really didn’t care anymore. Even with its low price, I can only recommend this game as a rental to big Bruce Campbell fans. Even with Bruce Campbell providing the voice, this game is a mediocre one that has nothing to make it stand out from any other mediocre third-person adventure game out there. If you absolutely have to play the game, rent it, play it for a few days, and then take it back. Trust me, you’ll be happier doing that than you would if you actually bought it.
We always attempt to completely finish a game before publishing a review. However, there are some instances where this may not happen, and we will always inform you when it does. In this case, we feel Drew played enough of the game to make a qualified opinion. - ED