Evil Dead: Hail to the King was developed by Heavy Iron Studios and published by THQ in 2000. It is a survival horror game based on Sam Raimi‘s classic cabin-in-the-woods horror film, and – to be honest – it’s pretty bad. Which is a pity because I’m a big horror film fan (have been since I was a teenager), and this game should be right down my street.

Hail to the King is a Resident Evil-style game based mainly on Evil Dead 2 (although I did read that it was “set eight years after the events of Army of Darkness.“). It does in fact try to recreate Evil Dead 2‘s introduction and dialogue using CGI, and the resulting cut scenes are awful. The CGI is so laughably bad that it’s really only going to appeal to numpties. And this was the case back when the game was initially released; this is not simply a case of time being unkind to it – Heavy Iron Studios and THQ did a really poor job with the pre-rendered movies. Heck, even Bruce Campbell – who was brought in to do the voice of Ash – sounds like he’s phoning-in his performance.

The game itself is a little bit better. Ash – who you control – is presented as a 3D polygonal model, moving over still backgrounds (just like in the Resident Evil games), which change when you walk around. The layout of the cabin is not particularly authentic to the films (especially the location of the trap door to the cellar), and it doesn’t have any of the detail seen in the Evil Dead movies. Where are the trophy animal heads, or the wall spaces? The locations in this game are bare bones and inadequate. Yes, the painted backgrounds are well-drawn, but the lack of contrast completely ruins them.

You control Ash using ‘tank controls’ (push up to walk forward; left and right make you rotate – very much Resident Evil style controls), and you must explore, find and collect useful items (and juggle them in your limited inventory), and fight Kandarian demons whenever you encounter them. Which is often…

During the first part of the game, walking into a specific area will trigger a demon to rise from the ground and attack you. You have to use either your chainsaw (which has a limited amount of fuel), or other means, to inflict enough damage on them, so that they stop attacking. These initial enemies are ghost-like and have little to no connection to the monsters seen in the films. They can also be really annoying; popping up constantly to harass you. Fighting them is not much fun either. You can swing your chainsaw at them, and if you’re lucky, you can inflict a killer blow by sticking the chainsaw into them and letting the blood fly. You can also attack with a secondary weapon (an axe or a gun) too. Defeated monsters might disappear for a few seconds, but you can be damn sure they’ll be back in short order.

The game’s designer’s decided that chainsaw fuel was going to be a deciding factor in the game, so you have to find fuel canisters (or process mushrooms into fuel), to keep the thing running. Which I’m not convinced was a good idea. This is mostly because you have to turn the chainsaw on to use it, and turn it off to save fuel, which gets in the way of combat. Do you ever see Ash fuel-up the chainsaw in any of the films? No. Because it’s unnecessary. And it’s unnecessary in this game too, but because someone thought it had to be included in this game, another bad idea made its way into it…

Evil Dead: Hail to the King is a travesty of a video game, and is also an insult to both the films, and the fans. The background graphics are murky and indistinct; the action is repetitive and derivative; the cut scenes are pathetic; the enemies are terrible (and bear little relation to the demons in the films), and the gameplay is annoying and flawed (like, for example, the fact that it’s all too easy to turn off the chainsaw by accident in mid-battle, or to just run out of gas). Constant enemy re-spawns give you little time to think, open doors, experiment with interactive parts of the scenery, or even pick stuff up, and the game just appears really badly thought-out.

With a bit more thought and care put into it, Hail to the King could have been an okay game. THQ, though – at this period in time – were not known for their “thought and care”. And Heavy Iron Studios I don’t think were talented enough to recreate Evil Dead 2 properly (which is surprising considering the sheer number of people who worked on this). Evil Dead: Hail to the King is an unfortunate mess, and is a good example of how NOT to make a video game.

More: Evil Dead: Hail to the King on Wikipedia