I can’t think of any movie franchises that I wanted to be made into a game more than Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series. Hell, with the films’ over-the-top action, distinctive designs, and Bruce Campbell being the king of video game voice work, the project was already half made. Of course, that’s far from true. A good game needs more than just a killer premise and a great star to make it work. It needs functional game mechanics, clever level designs, and above all it has to be fun to play. I’m sorry to say that Hail to the King has none of those things. It starts out with plenty of promise, but after just a short while after taking up the controller, I realized I was in for a pretty torturous ride. If you come away with one thing from this review then let it be this: You can be the biggest Evil Dead fan in the world, but it won’t make this game any more tolerable. I won’t spend a lot of time on the story here, because it’s not important. Your Ash. There are Deadites that need killing. Groovy.
HttK draws from the very popular survival horror formula as laid down by Capcom in their Resident Evil franchise. You run around pre-rendered environments fighting enemies, collecting ammo and other items, and solving some pretty simple puzzles. And while Resident Evil’s formula of punishing saves, backtracking, and stiff controls can be hard to work with in its own right, there’s still enough done right in those games to make them worthwhile. That isn’t the case with Evil Dead, mainly because it brings a whole bunch of new problems to the mix.
Let’s start with combat, because it had the potential to be really cool. For starters, Ash has a chainsaw on one arm, and you can equip all sorts of weapons in the other hand, including an axe and Ash’s beloved boomstick, the shotgun. Unfortunately, I found using the chainsaw to be a chore. I had to keep it full of gasoline, and while that might not sound like a big problem, keep in mind that it doesn’t just use gas during fights. Every moment the chainsaw is idling, it’s burning gas. Sure, I had the option to switch it off, but that just meant that I needed to take the time to fire it up every time I get surprised by an enemy. And fighting with it just a sloppy mess, thanks to the terrible collision, forced camera perspective, and sluggish controls. What could be worse? How about enemies that constantly re-spawned, not only when I revisited areas because of all the backtracking, but also if I lingered in the same area for too long. I found that if I didn’t choose to cut and run at some point, I could have spent eternity fighting the same enemies over and over again. Besides being just tedious, it really taxed my gasoline and ammo supplies, not to mention my life. Granted, nearly every felled enemy would drop a recovery item or some ammo, but was never enough.
The game’s puzzles are mostly comprised of the typical step-and-fetch-it type. I found myself roaming the game’s pre-rendered screens on a scavenger hunt, collecting items to take to locations and use them so I can acquire another item, open a barred path, or advance the story a bit. That’s great, and as uninspired as the “use this item here” style puzzles were, at least it helps to break up the tedium of the horrible combat.
The graphics and sound are also a bit of a mixed bag. The Dreamcast version looks sharper and crisper than the PlayStation rev, but don’t expect any beefier polygon models or other extras for SEGA’s little white box. The pre-rendered screens look good, and they even feature some looping FMV in the background to make them look more alive than the static screens of the early Resident Evil games. Ash himself also looks pretty decent in the actual game, but his likeness in the CG cinematics is rather rough. The Deadites, on the other hand, look terrible and their designs don’t feel like they were inspired by the films at all. Ash cracks off some decent one-liners, but ironically I found this to be one of Campbell’s weaker efforts of his voice acting career. Some of his most classic lines sound like they were delivered while reading the morning paper.
Man, what a letdown. I came into this game with eager anticipation. I was pumped to play this one. I didn’t expect a masterpiece, but I did expect a fun game based on a great line of fun horror flicks. But Hail to the King is just an unplayable mess that feels tedious and broken. About the only really nice thing I can say is that at least the story tries to pay respects to the lore laid down in the films, and I suppose does a pretty good job of it. But what difference does it make if the playing the game feels like torture?
Gampelay: The animated backdrops are pretty cool, but everything else looks rather sub par. Technically it looks better than the PSX version, but not by much.
Audio: Bruce Campbell is on board, but he also sounds bored. He scores a few comedic hits, but his performance sounds like it was phoned in.
Control: All the frustrations of your typical survival horror game multiplied by ten thousand. Dispatching Deadites is a chore.
Overall Value: This game is crap and you should be playing something better. I wanted to bail on this game in the first hour, and things didn’t get any better.
GameFan Zero 