Evil Dead: The Game review

Lore? Well, watch all the movies and then come back. Evil Dead is straight-up a multiplayer game without any snippets or fancy animation to walk you through its lore. For fans, there are single-player mission modes, but that’s just a rinse and repeat of what you already do in the multiplayer. Although, it does reward you with some new characters.

That’s pretty much it. You get through the tutorial to get accustomed to the third-person shooter-style gameplay mechanics for the survivors. As for the demons, there’s a different approach to hunting the survivors. Rest assured, it’s evil in ways that only suit the Evil Dead franchise. Quirky and at times laughable, the core essence of the franchise is conveyed well even for a multiplayer game.

You have a healthy list of playable characters. Some with unique class differences and each with special abilities. It’s very important to have a balanced team to increase your chance of winning. The main objective, however, is straightforward. Scurry around and loot resources like health, power-ups and weapons to help defend against the evil forces. 

If you’ve played any battle royal in recent years, the looting feels similar, if not identical. You can find better-tier weapons by opening crates and searching houses. Energy drinks restore health, amulets offer protection and red bottles (we forgot what it’s called) power up skills like stamina, melee and so on for the duration of the game.

On the diabolic side, things are a bit comical. You float around the map collecting orbs to spend on deploying your demonic minions – skeletons and all. The Demons have a lot more to do than just HR management in this game. You can possess cars and deter survivors from taking the Uber comfort across the map. 

You can set traps to scare survivors, and if the scare meter goes off the rails then you can possess a survivor for a short period of time and whack their pals senseless. It’s way too much fun messing around with the survivors in this game.

The main objectives stay the same across the two maps. The four survivors must gather three pieces of the maps, then gather an ancient weapon to defeat the forces of evil using it and then protect a book from hordes of enemies for a time period. Manage all of this and you’re a winner as a survivor. Fail to do so and the demon wins. Simple enough? It is and then it gets boring after a few hours of repeating the same process.

Evil Dead relies on atmospheric lighting and mood to keep you on your toes. It’s also a survival game so horror elements are palpable. It runs smoothly on entry-level systems with Nvidia RTX 3050 — laptops and all. The DLSS integration also bumps up the frame rate without melting your gaming PCs. However, it’s not really a massive bump unless you scoot down the graphics settings to medium or low.

Our test bench with Zotac Nvidia RTX 3080 was able to churn a stable frame rate, but DLSS needs a bit of patchwork here. Where we usually get a nearly 50% increase in frame rate, Evil Dead barely pushed up frames by 15%. Still, all is not lost. Since the sense of dread is always looming around the corner. Especially when everything is so dark and your flashlight can only run for so long. Dark swamps and creepy cabins are littered throughout the map. Our only gripe is that the movement mechanics are a bit wonky. Jumping over obstacles and larger rocks is a challenge in more ways than one.

This is a faithful recreation of the classic Evil Dead franchise into video game format. We thoroughly enjoyed teaming up with friends and strangers and using our noggins to outwit the enemy — both as survivors and as a demon. 

Alas, Evil Dead loses its grip after a few rounds. It’s surprisingly balanced, but there’s only one game mode and after a while, you’ve seen it all. The sense of dread through atmospheric mood, the urgency to race against time before all is doomed and the panicked search for loot add a satisfying layer of immersion to its multiplayer. It’s only when you’ve crossed 10 hours into it that the charm wears off.