Description Evil Dead - A Fistful of Boomstick mixes the comedy and fun of the campy horror movie series with intense combat missions and a number of puzzle-solving sequences for the most complete Evil Dead game yet! Take on the role of Ash, the chainsaw-armed hero from the Evil Dead trilogy, and fend off hordes of Zombies and Deadites with multiple weapons including the axe, rifle, shotgun and infamous chainsaw.
Summary: A dream come true for an Evil DEad fan. You get to be Ash! This game has all the apeal of the Evil dead movies. It's 20 years after Army of Darkness, Ash is sitting in a bar watching a Tv talk show. The guest is some old professor talking about the Book of the Dead. One thing leads to another, and they end up unleashing hordes of deadites upon humanity. Poor ash starts out by blasting his favorite bartender with his trusty boomstick. Once again, the fate of the world rests on ash's shoulder.
Summary: This is an excellent game! Fun to play, well thought out, and lots of great extras! It is a 20 dollar game though, so don't look for much variety in the gameplay or wildy different settings (that stuff would ramp up the cost of designing it, thus raising the price). The levels all sort of look the same, and the battling you do is all pretty much the same. Still, this is easily the best Evil Dead game, and even though it uses the State Of Emergency engine, it is MUCH better than that as well. I gave this game a 5 based on the fact that it's 20 dollars new. If I had to pay 50, I'd rate this a 4 or so.
Summary: Since the reviewer below did such an excellent job with the details and history of Evil Dead, I'll leave all that out. First of all, game developers, you should really try to hire Bruce Campbell to voice your games. From Pitfall on PSone, the funny tutorial on Spider-man the movie game and these Evil Dead games, Bruce is the king of video game voices. And this is a pretty good game, though it has some problems. The good stuff is really good. A great story with a lot of humor and funny one liners throughout. And the gore is exaggerated and plentiful, as it should be in the Evil Dead universe. And the framerate is steady. Only once or twice, and not too badly, did it drop when there were dozens attacking Ash at once. And Ash looks good. The bad is the fact that you never get past knowing you are playing State Of Emergency starring Ash. Sure, there are a couple puzzles (easy ones) thrown in, but for the most part this is hack and slash. And this is very obviously a PS2 port. The textures are nonexistant and details up close are a blur. And unless you are a hardcore Evil Dead fan (and I am) you will grow bored of the repetitive gameplay after about a half hour (just like State Of Emergency). But this game isn't really about the gameplay (uh, yeah, I really just said that) it's about the story and continuing adventures of Ash. So that's the Yin and the Yang of it. Great acting and story, average to weak gameplay and poor if doable graphics by Xbox standards. Actually, this game is just like the Evil Dead movies. Some people watch them and think they are silly and annoying. Others see them as masterpieces in imagination (if not in budget). Evil Dead fans, at fifty dollars I'd only recommend a rental, but it released at twenty. And at twenty bucks it's groovy, baby.
Summary: "Who the hell are you?" "The name's Ash... Housewares."
If there's a man that stands for cheesy horror cliché and laugh-out-loud one-liners, that man would be named Bruce Cambell. A god among the B movie crowd, Bruce has rarely put himself in the spotlight of serious roles. He starred in Brisco County Jr. as a cowboy, in Xena Warrior Princess as a rogue, and even in the recent Spiderman movie as a wrestling announcer. Before all of this, though, Bruce played the part of a man's man by the name of Ash. Before Sam Raimi was directing our friendly neighborhood webslinger on the silver screen, he and his high school bud (Cambell) put together a low-budget film by the name of 'Evil Dead'. Even by yesterday's standards, Evil Dead's special effects were laughable at best, but it all added to the hilarity of the movie.
Ash, the star of the Evil dead movie (and it's two sequels: Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness) was what I would call an epiphany of characterization. Ash was so cliché and stereotyped that he was side-splittingly funny. I don't recall ever laughing so hard as I did when I witnessed Ash cut off his own hand and affix a heavily modified chainsaw to his stump, and then quietly comment: "Groovy." Or better yet, as a demon-possessed woman screams, "I'll swallow your soul!" he calmly replies with "Let's go."
So who is Ash? Well, to start out, Ash was a happily employed clerk at S-Mart. "Shop Smart, shop S-Mart!" That is, until he and some of his college friends went up to an abandoned cabin in the woods where they were assaulted by demons from another dimension. "It got into my hand, so I had to cut it off at the wrist, but then it came back for me. Big time," Ash would later recount at the beginning of Army of Darkness. In the meantime, Ash brandishes a chainsaw and sawed-off double barrel shotgun to ward off the 'Deadites' (demon possessed humans, zombies, and skeletons). All this while spouting off smart-assed comments like "Who wants some? Who wants to have a little?”
It doesn't take a lot of investigation to realize that the actual 'Duke Nukem' character from Duke Nukem 3D was pretty much a direct plagiarism of Ash's character. Just about every one liner that Duke blurted out was directly lifted from one of the Evil dead movies, but even worse than that, the Duke Nukem voice actor made the lines sound awful in comparison to Cambell.
The reason I go so far in depth with all this Evil Dead mumbo jumbo (the Ash-technical term for it) is because you really have to understand the Evil Dead universe that Sam Raimi created for us to fully appreciate Evil Dead: Fist Full of Boomstick (FFoB). This over-the-top, commonplace stage of survival horror would be nothing with out Ash. And it's a good thing they got Bruce Cambell for FFoB or else there might not have been enough meat to this title to really recommend more than a rental.
I honestly wish I could give this game a 3.5 out of 5 because I feel that would what FFOB deserves. However, since there is no .5 incriment in the scoring, I'm going to let my Evil Dead bias get the best of me and round the 3.5 up to 4 instead of down to 3. Truly, for a $20 game, FFoB gives you your moneys worth; especially if you're a Cambell fan.
Summary: AWSOME! This is a wonderful game. And for the price!!! WOW! Followers of the series will find this game an appropriate aftermath for the movie trilogy; and non followers will find this game amusing too. So if you twenty bucks that you want to spend on somthing useful this games for you.
( Bonus "Making of" Video featuring Bruce Campbell )
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