Evil Dead: Hail to the King

A bitter pill to swallow. Still, you could waste an afternoon or two on this and still find yourself fairly amazed with some of the puzzle elements, the hunt for horror exploration aspect, and all the chainsaw-ripping, zombie-blasting gore.

Hit-or-miss, mushy controls mean you're dead more often than not even though combat with Deadites is a simple button-smashing slugfest.

While the game perfectly captures the mood of the Evil Dead movies both graphically and aurally, poor control in combination with tedious combat makes playing this game a real chore.

It's hard to believe that the survival-horror genre can only be done right by Capcom (and perhaps Konami), but Hail to the King will do little to convince you otherwise.

Rent it like I did, beat in a couple of nights (it's about 4-5 hours long if you rush through it conserving your ammo/gas and avoiding the respawning Deadites) and mourn the butchering of yet another promising movie franchise in a videogame that fails to do justice to its cool characters and interesting plot.

While there are a few interesting spots and plot points, Evil Dead the game has managed to turn one of the most original and entertaining of all B-horror-film franchises into nothing more than a boring, uninspired, and pedestrian attempt to cash in on a license.

All in all, the nasty, pixellated graphics, lax controls, repetitive enemies, slim variation and frustrating, leaden gameplay make for an effort that reeks like a maggot-infested corpse.