Could Ash look any worse? |
The character models themselves look like modest improvements over those in the PlayStation version. Creatures and textures are pretty clean, but nothing much has been added to the original models. There's not a lot of character animation in the game, either. When Ash attacks (sounds like a Fox special), he legs remain absolutely frozen in place while his torso flails about. The backgrounds, as I mentioned, added nicely to the atmosphere, but their colors are so muddy that I couldn't even distinguish actual, functioning doors from solid walls in some cases (most notably in the cabin itself, the door that leads into the back yard). The pre-rendered backgrounds, in order to have that neat little motion effect I described earlier, are all in fact pre-rendered movies, and video artifacting smears any subtle color grading on-screen. Even if you are able to make out the features of the background, being able to open a door requires several minutes of pressing up against walls until you wind up in the right position, with no other invisible features blocking your progress. The characters themselves stand out badly against the background, too. This, combined with the poor collision detection, means you're never really fully immersed in the environment, which is always a big distraction to me when I'm playing. On top of this, the camera angles, meant to be creepy and Raimi-esque, come off as clumsy and disorienting. It takes a few seconds to get your bearings on every screen, and you're never exactly certain that you aren't backtracking in the direction from which you just came. This is most apparent in the hideous maze in the forest, but it remains a problem throughout the game. Camera angles disorient you constantly, leaving you wonder which where you stand in relation to where you just were.
Incidentally, I'm not just imagining all these comparisons to Resident Evil. In Evil Dead: Hail To the King, you will often find mushrooms of various colors that can be converted into heal or fuel "with the proper know-how." Not only is this a direct carry-over from the Resident Evil "herb mixing" system, it's also just plain silly--I can accept using mushrooms to restore health, but using them to fuel your chainsaw strains even my distended suspension of disbelief (and no matter what you say, BenT, there is a Santa Claus). More importantly, this mushroom thing doesn't connect to Evil Dead at all; it exists solely as a direct rip-off of once-innovative Resident Evil scheme. Sort of like the save Tapes. See, you use reels of tape to save your games, sort of like the typewriter ribbons in Resident Evil. In RE, you would use the ribbons in a type writer in order to save your game. At least the tapes have some connection to the Evil Dead movies (remember that audio tape containing the spell summoning the Evil from the woods?). Only, you don't use them in a tape recorder.... That would be too logical. You use them on Item Chests -- You might remember these from Resident Evil, too.
Even the basic gameplay quest comes directly from Resident Evil: You have to collect the missing pages of the Necronomicon in order to banish the Evil forever. This is a little reminiscent of collecting reports in RE, but really, it's almost a videogame clich� to have players collecting the missing pieces of ItemX (be it the seven parts of the great sword, the five mystic crystals, whatever) in order to beat the baddy and save the day. I only add this as another piece of evidence in proving that this whole game is a senseless, derivative waste of a brilliant license taken from a movie that is absolutely BEGGING for translation into a good videogame. Really, the only innovation this game possesses is its one-liner "system," and even that fails to impress.
Oops, just answered our question from above. |
In the Evil Dead trilogy, Ash has given us a wide range of brilliant lines that have been sampled in songs ("Who's Laughing Now" by Skinny Puppy) or lifted whole in Duke Nukem. So we have this expectation that Ash, in Hail To the King, may actually deliver some of these one liners. Not an unreasonable expectation, since there is actually a "one liner" button. Press this, and Ash will bust out with some snide comment, one would think. However, a) there's no real reason ever to do this in the game, and b) I only ever heard three lines before I got bored and stopped pressing the button altogether, and one of them was "Yo." After hearing the same samples over and over again, I finally quit messing with the button altogether. I'd have been happier if the one-liners were scripted; that way, I wouldn't have to go crazy hearing the same samples over and over again before finding new ones.
Speaking of redundant samples, I must have heard that damned "I'll swallow your soul!" line about a million times. Every new screen in the haunted forest greeted me with the same sample. When I started running away from the enemies (rather than fight them and run out of ammo, leaving me open to being slaughtered by the bosses), I would cross these screens rather quickly. Once would have been nice just to remind me, but, as with the one liners, this sample was just way overused and rapidly lost its impact.
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