Evil Dead - Shop S-Mart with a 4-player co-op zombie game

Welp.

Love this game, and here’s my first game as each role. Lots of room for growth here imo.

Demon Game

Survivor Game

I picked it up earlier and will check it out tonight

I looked this up on Steam and I was astonished at how good the graphics are:

Evil Dead Not The Game

But as I tabbed through the screenshots, I realized those weren’t graphics and this was no game. It’s the TV show, which is the first hit on the Steam store when you seach “evil dead”:

Apparently the Evil Dead game is an Epic exclusive. Doh.

-Tom

So it’s basically another Left 4 Dead clone? That’s a little disappointing. Is it at least a decent one?

If you scroll up three posts, someone sure thinks so! Otherwise, since it just came out today, I’m not sure anyone here can say.

-Tom

$31 on greenmangaming, so I caved.

“Well, Hello Mr. Fancy Pants”

So it turns out this is one of those games that’s useless without other people playing alongside you.

There is no single-player* and there are no bots. You’re either on a team with other players, or you’re not playing at all. Which is odd, because you can play against bots, but you still need multiple people to do it. I think this is the first co-op shooter I’ve played in a while that didn’t offer some way to play or at least practice without other players.

So I ran through the tutorial and looked over the different characters, but this seems awfully chintzy and unpolished so far. I have no idea why anyone would play this over something more established like Hunt: Showdown, but I obviously haven’t fully understood what it’s doing yet. @Harkonis, please chime in here! What am I missing? You say “lots of room for growth here”, and I agree, but probably not for the reasons you intended when you wrote that. :)

-Tom

* There are six single-player “missions”, but based on my attempts to play the first one, they’re a piss-poor way to sample the gameplay.

there are bots. you can play with friends vs bot demon, or with bot survivors vs bot demon. Only thing you can’t do with all ai is play demon. Also the gameplay is in no way similar to hunt showdown. not even the same genre

I did notice that Bruce Campbell has a credit in the game on imdb, in assuming this is voice acting, which had me wanting it more.

Still too deep into elden ring tho…

he voices all four ashes ;) (not sure he does evil ash)

Well, once again, you’d think I would know better than to make snap judgements after playing a tutorial. To be fair, the tutorial is literally just a bright red line walking you through a few of the basic gameplay mechanics. It was dumb of me to infer much from it. Thanks to @Harkonis for pushing back and making me thinking I was missing something. I was. The actual game!

I got to see it in action last night with @Jason_McMaster, @mono, and @KellyWand69. And it wasn’t nearly as bad as I was worried it would be! It’s a bit rough in some areas, so I’m almost tempted to put it down for six months and let the developers bang out some of the rough edges. Widescreen support, for instance, would be nice. And maybe add a bit more content? (I think all of us are concerned about replayability given the current roster and map rotation.)

But it’s really just a 4v1 game – not a shooter, since gunplay is just an ancillary system that not all characters will use – with some cute Evil Dead theming, and if you want, you can play against an AI instead of a 1. I disagree with @Harkonis, who thinks it’s not even in the same genre as Hunt. On the contrary, I would suggest it’s very much in the same vein as Hunt, but minus some of that game’s notable features, such as Hunt’s extreme polish (Evil Dead really feels beta-ish at some points). There’s also none of hunt’s PvP among the survivors, which is arguably Hunt’s main gameplay. So while I agree that it’s not quite a fair comparison to Hunt, I do think it’s helpful to compare and contrast.

For instance, the PvP element in Evil Dead can be optionally played against a player controlling the demon deployments, and there’s no counterpart to that in Hunt. This is where it actually looks like it might have some longevity (and where it basically requires five players). I’m reminded of ZombiU, on the WiiU. Do you guys remember that game? The human player is on the main television screen, playing a survival game against zombies. Pretty vanilla, until you get to ZombiU’s multiplayer. Now the zombie player is using the WiiU’s separate controller screen to level up and deploy zombies, traps, and so forth. To basically use the level and monsters to try to defeat the human player, with the advantage of 100% awareness while the human player is limited to what he can see onscreen. It was very nearly an RTS for the immediacy, excitement, and especially asymmetry of player interaction.

Well that’s how the 4v1 works in Evil Dead. It’s very nearly an RTS as the human players work through the usual and unvarying cycle to win the map: within a 20-mminute time limit on a huge open map, reach five randomly distributed collection points and then fight a boss (I don’t think this ever changes, hence our concerns about replayability). Meanwhile, the demon player can either set up a powerful battle at one of the points, or he can harry the humans as they deal with the wandering trash mobs on the map, or he can divide his time between both.

The demon players’ default form is to play as Sam Raimi’s camera in the Evil Dead movies (for some reason, I has mistakenly thought Barry Sonnenfeld shot Sam Raimi’s early movies, so I was calling it the Sonnenfeld camera while we were playing; I have about a 70% success rate when it comes to showing off with obscure movie trivia). You know that roving camera close to the ground that appears when people read Kandarian incantations in an Evil Dead movie? That’s the demon player. You fly around and scoop up Evil Juice, which is just laying around on the maps. The demon player then spends his Evil Juice to summon demons and make traps to slow the humans.

Among the demon player’s options is possessing a monster or a player or a car, at which point he’s controlling that and can fight the players directly. Meanwhile, the players have a sanity mechanic that will drain as they travel through darkness; they have to pause in well lit areas to replenish from time to time. There are elements of this system that still aren’t clear after several games (what is the eye icon? how does it interact with possession? how does it interact with traps? what is the downside of maxxed out fear?), but it seems pretty integral to the gameplay.

The combat itself was especially rough at first, but I think you have to accept that this isn’t a brawler, despite the presence of brawling. Just like it’s not a shooter, despite the fact that you might be shooting. The actual combat looks rough, but once you get into the rhythm of things, it plays fine. But still…rough. It looks like a really awkward indie version of State of Decay or Back 4 Blood. The bottom line, which I consider a pro rather than a con, is that this is a game you play for the strategy, not the action.

So I think we all plan to play more. I would say @mono summed up most of our reactions with the words, “Pleasantly surprised.”

-Tom

only similarity to hunt showdown to me is the horror theme. also since I play on console hunt has zero polish there but that doesn’t really matter to this discussion. Not sure I find the content complaint relevant yet since we have more than a dozen characters to choose from on one side and 3 on the other which is pretty solid for launch. DBD launched with less choices and the survivors there are identical other than cosmetic

Wait, have you played Hunt: The Showdown? It sounds like you haven’t. In case you’re not aware, both Hunt and Evil Dead have parties of players pursuing non-linear goals on a wide-open map; both games minimize the moment-to-moment impact of combat to focus on the larger tactical level gameplay; the battle royale element of zeroing in on a boss in the cornerstone of both games. I bet you’d like Hunt if you’re digging Evil Dead.

Okay, so I’m not following you. You’re saying you do play Hunt? But only on the console and it’s unpolished, so you don’t care if Evil Dead is unpolished?

At any rate, there’s a ton of technical jank in the PC version of Evil Dead. It really feels like an inexperienced developer fumbling around with problems that have been solved in other games. And I don’t know what engine they’re using, but it’s a terrible showcase for it.

Ah, so you consider the content the characters? I guess it is published by the World War Z guys, and there’s a ton of grinding in that game to unlock skills trees for the different characters. That certainly seems to be the paradigm here, but I’m not really sold on the 2% here and 3% there drips-and-drabs on the skill trees. I mean, I like character progression as much as the next guy, but this looks like some pretty glacial pacing if the characters are the content. :(

But my concern about replayability – and therefore content – is that every match plays out exactly the same. The players grab the three map pieces, they then have two battles with the demon for the next two pieces, and if no one has won yet, there’s the big battle with the three goofy “bosses” standing in a huddle waiting to be laser-beamed to death. It seems to me every single match plays out that way.

But it sounds like you’re saying you don’t mind because of the characters? Or you’re saying there’s more variety than what I’ve described? I’ve only played about a half dozen full matches so far.

And I’ve only seen two maps so far. Are there more? Because that’s also part of my concern about replayability.

I’m not following you here either. Are you saying complaints about Evil Dead aren’t “relevant” because Dead by Daylight is a worse game? You’re going to have to show me your work on that one. :)

-Tom

I would wish for it to make that sweet menacing wooshing sound but I’ll bet that would get old fast.

If you’re looking for sound effects that get old fast, look no further than Evil Dead. There’s a kind of ringing tinnitus effect when your sanity is low. It is appropriately maddening. :(

-Tom

I never said Evil Dead does not have a lack of polish, it has a ton of issues in that area. what I said was that so does hunt so it’s a wash for me. Evil Dead is a lot more like Evolve than Hunt. I do see what you are referring to as the similarities but to me that’s not that close. Hunt plays a lot more like a BR with PvE and objectives to me.

Dead by daylight has tons of players and has had a long lifespan. People are fine with matches being similar to each other. Might not be something you don’t get bored with, but some people just enjoy good gameplay without it needing to be ‘new’ everytime. probably not phrasing it right,

I can definitely say that if the gamepad controls were not so beyond f’d on console, I’d play Hunt daily for sure. Love the game.

From the perspective of someone who has not played any of the mentioned games (Hunt, Evolve, Dead by Daylight), but who has read/watched a fair bit of game play: If a family member or friend asked me about Evil Dead I would talk about Dead by Daylight and Evolve as examples of similar games.

Hunt would not have entered my mind at all.

it’s very similar to Evolve in most ways