Customer Reviews

Evil Dead: Hail to the King

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

Okay, let's start with the good points of the game: It's essentially Evil Dead 4!; Bruce Campbell as Ash!!!; a button just for one-liners (even though they're somewhat few in number); locations and a few surprise characters from the movies; good game graphics that have a certain amount of graininess to them that helps to recreate the atmosphere of the original Evil Dead (with a few great touches like the moving shadows of trees outside the windows in the cabin); Nice music and sound effects for the most part; Chainsaws and boomsticks; decent cutscenes; a few good puzzles..

Despite all of those good points..and regardless of the fact that I'm a huge fan of the Evil Dead trilogy as well as something of a survival horror veteran...I have to give this game a mere 3 stars.. Why? That's easy..the gameplay. You have some of the stiffest and least responsive survival horror controls I've ever experienced. Then you have fixed camera angles where, at times, you're down at the end of the screen and so small you can't even tell which direction you're facing. Couple that with the lack of an auto-aiming feature and it adds up to dozens of deaths just because you can't tell if you're facing whatever it is you're trying to hit.

Next I have to mention the constantly respawning enemies. You kill an enemy and another one pops right out of the ground to take its place... Battles are often unavoidable as the various enemies usually either chase you down or block your way. Each enemy you encounter has the ability to kill you, usually very quickly. You'll find yourself using healing items after every battle, or every 2 if you're lucky. During boss battles, you'll find yourself going into the inventory screen to heal yourself every couple seconds, which really kills the atmosphere of the game and makes things fairly tedious. If he really used that many healing kits, Ash would have looked like a mummy within the first 10 minutes of the game. The respawning enemies are also annoying as they sort of take away your ability to explore the game. There were areas from the movies in the game that I would have liked to have walked around and checked out, but it was really impossible to do with enemies popping out of the ground 2 at a time and chasing you down. You really don't get a chance to take in the atmosphere of it all, and that really is a shame.

Basically, with the deadly respawning enemies and poor control, the game becomes annoyingly difficult, and playing through it is basically just a matter of playing a section over and over until you can survive to the next save point (note: save points are fairly sparse, especially on the first disc).. It's really not fun at all, and it boiled down to more or less just a matter of suffering through the frustrating gameplay to follow the storyline and see a few cool locations from the movies.

Also note that the game is very short.. I only clocked about 3 hours game time (about 5 hours less than I normally do my first time through an average survival horror game).. Apparently the high level of difficulty and frustration is just to cover up for the fact that there isn't much game there to play through.

In the end, if you're an Evil Dead fan, you have to get it just because it's more or less Evil Dead 4 and stars Bruce Campbell. If you're not an Evil Dead fan, but are just a survival horror gamer looking for something new, stay away. This has to be the least enjoyable survival horror game I've played, and it's definitely not worth the high price. I'm a HUGE Evil Dead and survival horror fan, and even I thought about playing frisbee with the disc and a wall once or twice..

I almost didn't get this game because of some of the reviews here. I'm glad I didn't listen because this is a LOT of fun!

If you are a gamer, you might not like this game for it's "game quality" However I never saw it as a typical game, I saw it as Evil Dead 4, and I was required to pick up a controller rather than a remote control to enjoy it.

As Evil Dead 4, It's great! Bruce Campbell is.. as always, terrific! As a first attempt by the creators of evil dead to move into game format, what it lacks in game quality, it makes up for in storyline and voiceovers. I'm sure the next installment will have revised gaming quality and hopefully keep Bruce's great talent.

Unlike most other games, which go on to become bad movies (like tomb raider.. although sexy Angelina Jolie might be able to save that flop) this game is coming from one of the most loved trilogies in movie history. It carries that quality and fun with it.. Evil Dead fans will not be dissapointed

Fair warning - This game is very short, having only half a dozen maps and if it was for the stupidly difficult game-play, you would work your way through this game in an hour. So why is it on two Cd's? To make us think there is actually a game here? Baffling.
Also there isn't any good adventure game play or FPS-type game-play. You are picking up pieces of a book but that just means you go around picking up pages when you see them.
The worst part is the fighting. It seems to make up for the ludicrously short game they made it so you can't take one step without fighting deadites. I thought my game had a bug or something. You just stand there losing health trying to chop away at deadites who (sometimes) drop health but you won't have time to pick it up. It's just boring. Add to that the very annoying controls and you have a very sub-standard game that is way too expensive in my book.

All of the movies were excellent films but the game is somewhat lacking. The story is good, Bruce Cambell's voice overs are great. The gameplay is ok.The graphics and sound are pretty good. But there is no 360 turns and auto aim which are necessities in survival horor games. The enemy design is good, and the game is decently long. But all the enemies regenerate which is annoying and sometimes frusterating, sometimes your not given good enough direction on where to go. It's a decent game and a must have for huge Evil Dead fans. But I was just a tad bit dissapointed.

What a great concept they had. And what a shoddy pile of junk the resultant game turned out to be. Evil Dead: Hail to the King held my attention for precisely 10 minutes before the novelty wore off and I was left with nothing except a great sadness, knowing I had spent my hard-earned cash on one of the worst games ever to grace the Playstation.

The game gets an F on all fronts. Its main drawing card was that it got Bruce Campbell involved to do voice work and help with concept, but the fact is, there isn't nearly enough variety in the wisecracks, comic situations and Ash's activities. There's nothing here that hasn't been done infinitely better in the Evil Dead movies. The computerized graphical representations of the Evil Dead characters are just pathetic (check out that pale graphic imitation of the title sequence of Army of Darkness). And though Bruce Campbell is still one of the most delightfully hammy comic presences out there, after about an hour of hearing him repeat the same half-dozen one-liners every half minute, you're bound to get bored.

This would be okay if the game had been well designed in terms of action, aesthetics, and feel. Noooo. As with so many other games with a strong license/franchise behind it, Evil Dead: Hail to the King abuses this license, using it to attempt to cover up atrocious design. First, the control scheme. It's bad enough that this game features the single worst use of "camera angles" I've ever seen (move over, Fighting Force 2), but why, oh why would they force a first-person-view control scheme onto a third-person-perspective game? Imagine having to play Double Dragon using the controls for Medal of Honor, and you get the ludicrous nature of Evil Dead's controls. And oh yes, the camera angles -- what makes the designers think it's a good idea to fix the camera on top of a tree looking down on Ash when you're trying to fight the undead? And even while fighting, if you move past the edge of the screen, the action stops so that the game can load a new, closer "angle", which completely kills the flow of the action. Then again, there isn't much in the action anyway -- swing your chainsaw and hope for a hit, twist and turn and mash those buttons. And there are so many enemies, all of whom react in pretty much the same way, that it becomes excessive monotony before long. The fact that the enemies "respawn" simply adds to the boredom. The only plus? Some of the environments look tolerably like the movie. If only you weren't forced to look from those weird eyesores they call "camera angles". This is the worst case of game programmers trying to be filmmakers I've seen yet.

All this adds up to an experience akin to waiting in a doctor's office for your turn with no magazines and the heat turned up to the max. I don't care when I kill an enemy, I don't care when I find a page out of the Necronomicon, and I don't care when I get slaughtered. The apathy this game gives me is even worse than an ultra-tough game that hangs me out to dry. Stick with the movies; one minute of Evil Dead 2 contains more action, fun and engagement than an hour spent with this sewer rat of a game.

I bought this for my (twin) sons birthday along with a DVD of the movie as requested. The movie is great, but we knew right away that this game wasn't worth the exorbitant price. I took it back to the store and complained. Games like this just shouldn't be released at any price. There are so many problems, the game is short, shoddily made, and the controls are horrendous.

The last time I'm trusting a game by THQ.

I really, really tried to like this game but...

Play control is God-awful. The two handed weapon system would be cool if it had ANY accuracy what-so-ever. Even the simple process of opening a door becomes tedious. Walk up to the door, hit O, nothing happens. Walk up to the same door at a different angle, press O, still nothing. Repeat about 5 times until success...and all the while constantly respawning Deadites are pounding on you. That is of course if you can find any doors aside from those in the cabin. You may just give up after wandering aimlessly around the woods for two hours without any hints of where you should be and what you should be doing. The annoying camera angles and mundane backgrounds don't help...often times there will be a path or item right in front of you and you can't even see it!! Ash's taunts are neat at first, but how many times can you hear even Bruce Cambell say "Yo" and "Come get some" over a two hour period before it gets irratating. 200? 300? Go play...

This game has nice graphics and nicely picturesque scenes, but the controls are so horrid that the fight sequences are unexacting. I found it annoying and annoyingly overpriced.

Evil Dead. When you hear those words you think true horror, deadites, or even good acting. This game features only one of those and im sad to say that the deadites are it. The game takes place sometime after the events in Army Of Darkness. Ash returns to the cabin with his new girlfriend. Just when it seems that things are going ok, Ash's hand returns and turns on the tape by Professor Knoby. The evil is unleashed and the game begins. The first thing i noticed was the bad camera angles that made me feel like i was in a third rate Resident Evil. The next thing was the incredible difficulty, even at the beginning. Lets take my least favorite part, leaving the cabin. Now as you walk outside you are immediatly confronted by a few "deadites". Ok so lets say you [destroy] them and decide to make sure there's nothing left in the cabin. You go back to the cabin and are confronted by the same deadites. The fights are repititious, boring, and far too difficult. This game is a true dissapointment.

The story is something like this: after the Army Of Darkness movie, Ash gets a new girlfriend. But he has nightmares, and he decides to go back to the cabin (which was destructed in Evil Dead II), to end this once and for all. The cabin is well-clean and everything (where's the connection with Evil Dead II, partners?). But Ash's girlfriend is kidnapped by Bad Ash (more like Evil Dead II's then Army Of Darkness'). Your objective is to find six Necronomicon pages throughout the game, a boring task, I must say. And you also have to save your girlfriend. That's what you have to do... While you move on, you might notice that, if you're a hard fan like myself, the game is only fun while you're walking inside or around the cabin, those familiar scenaries. All the rest is boring... The graphics are OK for a PSOne game, for all I've played.. Trees move, the fog moves.. No big deal, but it's ok... The sound is good too, Bruce Campbell does great voice acting (as seen in other games too). But it's not fun. And that's a big problem. Deadites keep coming and coming, some enemies are really tough, and you don't feel like you've finnished a masterpiece when you beat this game... It was a try, but I wish THQ can learn from its mistakes to make a cool sequel. In the educational point the game is not approved.. It's Mature-classified, you see.. There is a little blood, violence.. But no big things, you can let your grown-up children play it...
Unless you are a hard Evil Dead fan and you want to have one more item for your collection, don't buy this game. It's my opinion.