Evil Dead: Hail to the King

List Price: $29.99 Discount Price: $18.75

Accessories:
PC Gamer (1-year)	Games for Windows: The Official Magazine

Customer Reviews:

Deserved Praise [Posted on 2001-08-24]
This game has recieved mostly favorable reviews, but a couple have been unfavorable and a little unfair. The main critisisms seem to be in response to the inexuastible amount of re-spawning enemies, and the fact that if you try and face those enemies; 1 after another, you will never win. Gues what, there is a reason for this. You see your not suposed to keep hacking and blasting until you die , you have to run once and a while. Learnning to dodge enemies is the fundemental aspect of the game. Attacking only when faced with 1, or 2 enemies and imediately getting out of there; either backwards, or forwards, while keeping in mind either ammo, fuel, health, and anny combination of them. As far as the graphics, I thought they were done preety well, all the stuff going on, like the blood dripping off of Ash's chain-saw up to about 5 minuites after youve beaten an enemy, the dust rising off of As's feet as you walk, the fog, the nice lighting effects, and the snow, or whattever that starts to fall in the woods every so often. One of the best features is the music, very well orcistrated. Also, though it is not a very long game (thq did that on purpose) the more you play, the funnier Ash's lines get as you finnish an enemy." Chew on this! Say hello to disco for me!" I don't think it is the gratest game, but thq and the respective creative talents did a fine job and deserve there praise. I hope that they creat the sequel that they were planning for one, or more of the next generation systems; now that they have this as their starting point. It will be much better, I'm sure.

I've seen better, but I've also seen worse [Posted on 2001-09-27]
To start off with, I will mention something that I have not seen in any of the reviews. This game is a combination of a third person view, but from a single camera angle.

Most people are aware that third person is a view from behind the player. This game is similar, except that in most rooms you only have one angle for the ENTIRE room. You see Ash at a distance, but most of the time the camera never moves, unless the room is so big it can't fit all onto one screen.

I have never seen a game set up this way before. I rarely play third person, I really only like first person. Anyway, this single view was hard to get used to for me.

The opening animations are pretty good. Bruce Campbell does the voice overs, except the animation doesn't look much like him.

The default keys are very strange. Usually the keys somehow relate to the weapon. Not in this game. R starts the chainsaw, E turns it off, F uses it. Now who would just think of that?? You can redefine them, but that still is pretty lame.

Overall, not a bad game. Good graphics overall, good sound, and fairly good layout.

The bad parts is Ash has very strange weapon controls, since the camera angle in each room does not change, it takes time to get used to moving him around. Almost every step you take a deadite pops up. I've never seen a game with enemies coming up so often. The deadites take forever to kill. I hit one of them over 10 times with the axe and finally killed it. I guess you could say the game is a combination of contstantly being attacked along with enemies that are hard to kill.

You do need some horsepower to play this. I have a Pentium III 800 with 256 MB of RAM and a 3dfx video card with 16 MB, and even on my machine it runs alright, but it could do better. The loading times take longer than most other games I have played. I don't have much loaded in the background either. My setup is beyond their requirements.

So essentially, the game is just alright. The price now is all I feel it is worth. This is coming from a HUGE Evil Dead fan. Unfortunately, the game was a little disappointing to me. Like I said though, I've seen worse. If you have ever played Alien Trilogy for the IBM world, you know what I mean.

Finally, I don't know how often you are supposed to be able to save games. During the entire cabin scene I couldn't save, and once I walked outside, I still couldn't. Go figure.

Overall, for HUGE fans of the movies, its not too bad. Takes getting used to. For those who love and worship this game, I guess they had less expectations than I did. If I had the chance to buy it again, I probably would, but I wouldn't pay anything more than what I did. It's not *that* good.

it's ok [Posted on 2001-10-02]
i have to respond to some of the negative reviews for this game. the graphics are not very good (quality wise but concept is great) and the gameplay isn't very exciting. it's a clone of resident evil and it wasn't done nearly as well.

that said, it offers some positives if you enjoyed RE and are also a fan of evil dead. i think much of the evil dead reference is lost on the younger demographic which makes me question the reason they bought the license in the first place.

however, had this game nothing to do with evil dead i would of rated it 2 stars instead of 3.

Diehard fans only [Posted on 2001-11-03]
Wow! If it wasn't for the Evil Dead licence, this would be the worst videogame ever created. It is basically Resident Evil lite, with all of RE's faults and none of its strengths. In place of slow moving zombies which need to be dispatched before they can reach the player's throat, Hail to the King provides endlessly spawning floating zombie demon things that get really annoying after playing for longer than five minutes. In the end, the game boils down to mindlessly slashing enemies over and over and over again. Even the concept of health and ammo conservation is eliminated due to the fact that enemies conveniently drop items exactly when you need them. The only challenge left in the game is figuring out how to move ash around while fighting multiple deadites on either side. While Evil Dead: Hail to the King is not the absolute worst game ever conceived and produced by the human race, I strongly advise you not to buy or rent this game unless you really love Evil Dead. You might even want to avoid it if you do love the movies, as the story is clumsy and Bruce Campbell's voice work is sub-par. Just stay far far away.

So much potential [Posted on 2001-12-11]
Basically a pathetic rip-off of Resident Evil with a model that looks nothing like Bruce Campbell. It's just no-good. Got it cause Evil Dead movies rule, but this game just sucks, no two ways about it.

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