Every Friday, AV club staffers start our weekly open thread discussing game plans and recent gaming glory, but the real action, of course, is in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What are you playing this weekend?
The moment I fell in love Evil Dead: the game is the moment i realized it was actually Sam Raimi Simulator 2022†
That is, I assumed that the new licensed multiplayer game was really just a fairly capable clone of the Friday the 13th game from a few years back – mixed with a bit of good, old, dead Evolve-until the exact moment I first played as the titular Evil. (Instead of the Survivor team, which consists of a lot from Bruce Campbells, and a few other characters from across the franchise). Then I discovered the genius idea that elevates this whole package above those gnarled roots: when you play as evil in The Evil Death, you don’t just play as a bunch of Deadites or evil clones or skeletons. You play if Raimi’s camera, racing like crazy through the forest to track down people, jump into their bodies and unleash chaos.
Genius. Genius!
In other respects, Evil Dead will remind you of those other asymmetric multiplayer games mentioned above; Survivors run around completing objectives (in this case collecting a magic blade and pages from the Necronomicon) while the evil is functional to the defense. The Survivor gameplay has a few interesting quirks, including a class-based structure to differentiate Evil DeadAshley Williams’s Support version of the Warrior version found in army of darkness† †Evil Dead 2 Ash is a fighter; there to be non-Ash characters, but are you really going to miss all those newly recorded Bruce Campbell quips by choosing them?) As with many of these types of games (which go back to the evolving tactics of the Left 4 Dead games), much of the focus is on taking out enemies so they can’t use grueling attacks to break up the party. It’s all good, probably.
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I wouldn’t really know though, because after a match on the Survivor side, I turned Evil and never looked back.
It’s just too damn pleasure: Racing through the forest as a makeshift Steadicam, setting ambushes and terrifying traps, then exploiting that fear by possessing the Survivors to make them attack each other. Saber Interactive may have only done such a job of recreating the feeling of Ash and his friends, but the feeling of being the invisible hand orchestrating all the chaos that happens in these movies is damn near perfect. (Includes an energy system that forces you to give your victims a breather before another burst of chaos begins.) I’ve clucked so many times while playing with my fresh flesh: spawning a bunch of Deadites to swarm a team, only to to have one back in an Evil Treetrap thrashing them, giving me the pathetic mortal fool possessing them so they can open fire on their buddies. Their friends run to get supplies from a chest to recover – boom, evil hand jumps out and strangles them.
If Raimi’s big revelation was to see the slapstick heart beating under so much slasher horror, then Evil Dead: the game embraces that principle. You always felt that Raimi was having just a little too much fun torturing his old friend Bruce, and the game successfully exports that thrill, encouraging you to be a monstrous bastard before Evil Ash starts stomping across the battlefield and summons his skeleton army. After just a few days on it, I have an absolute blast.
Shall I play it in two weeks? Hard to say. There are only a handful of (big) cards, and there may even be a limit to how many times I can chuckle maliciously when an enemy team falls into fear and despair. (God or Evil God or whoever saves us from a solved multiplayer meta.) But I’m having a damn good time with it now.
#Evil #Dead #game #perfectly #captures #joys #torturing #Bruce #Campbell
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