With Evil Dead Rise now out and the fifth Evil Dead movie overall, it got me thinking about the Evil Dead video games. Movie games are never expected to be the best gaming experiences. Nor are they usually seen to be all that great representations of the movies they are based on. Over the years there have been a few games based on the Evil Dead movies, and they’ve never really set the world on fire.
A few years ago all that changed with the release of the mobile phone and Army of Darkness Defence. Now if you haven’t heard of this game it pains me to tell you that it has long since been removed from the AppStore. The thing that pains more more about this is that even if you bought the game back when it was originally available they don’t let you re-download it today. This is a big sign of the huge issues with digital app stores for games and software.
Fortunately there are still ways to get and play the game and if you have the blue stacks Android emulator on your computer there is at least one way to continue playing the game that hopefully shouldn’t go away.
Of course, playing this game on PC isn’t how it was intended to play and on PC it may seem a repetitive or shallow experience, but as the game was originally intended, as a mobile phone game that you’d play for short bursts on a train or flight this game was awesome and very addictive.
Based on the third Evil Dead movie ‘Army of Darkness’ the game sees you play as Ash as he has to stop the evil deadites from capturing the book of the dead, the Necronomicon.
The game only has one setting which is a castle area. Whilst you would expect the lack of variety to be an issue, it really isn’t that big a deal. A change to the visual look to the game may have been nice, but the point of the game is you’re defending the castle and the book from ever increasingly challenging waves of evil beings.
The gameplay is simple, but has a surprising amount of strategy as I will get into. When the game starts you control Ash who can walk left and right and you do this by holding the left or right side of the screen.
As Ash gets within range of the deadites he will automatically fire his shotgun at them. After earning enough coins you can buy an upgrade to give Ash a metal fist. Then if you get very close you will punch them with the metal fist (keep in mind that Ash’s hand turned against him and he had to cut it off to stop it from attacking him in the second movie). Later on you’ll be able to buy another upgrade to replace the metal gauntlet with a chainsaw which is more powerful and gives you some distance from the enemies.
You have a life bar which will slowly refill so if you’re taking damage you can back away from the monsters to get some energy back. The problem with this is much like the monster from the movie It Follows, the deadites will keep walking towards their goal unless they’re stopped. So here comes part of the strategy – how much do you fight the monsters from a short distance away and how much do you go in for the attack to slow their progress towards the book?
Fortunately after a few stages of the game you are able to call upon the troops to help you. Building your team is probably the biggest aspect of the strategy in playing the game if you want to be successful.
As the enemies get stronger and more plentiful you’ll quickly find they are too much for Ash even if you use the upgrades to max out Ash, and his shotgun and chainsaw. The troops include various villagers, knights and archers who have different attacks to help fight the deadites. Other than calling for their arrival these troops are completely computer controlled. They will walk up to the deadites and battle until either they are killed or kill the enemies. Essentially they work exactly like your enemies but are on your side.
The further through the game you progress the more troops and upgrades you can access and buy with the coins you earn from playing levels. You also have a blacksmith on your side and in the game he acts as a metre for how often and how many troops you can call upon. I guess the logic is that he provides the weaponry the troops use to fight. So the more his metre fills up the more troops you can call upon.
You do have the option to let the blacksmith’s metre fill up all the way and then you can upgrade the blacksmith himself and once done you’ll be able to call upon troops at a faster rate. Some of the strategy here is do you call upon fighting troops earlier or wait and let the blacksmith be upgraded fully so they you can call upon more troops faster. Each of the types of troops you can call upon use progressively more of the meter to call upon so being able to fill the metre faster means you can get more powerful help quicker.
Everyone will have their own strategy but for me I found the best combination is to focus on upgrading the weaker troops and overwhelm the enemies with quantities of pawns rather than just a couple of knights and bishops.
Eventually you’ll have access to powerful weapons like the death coaster car but this just rams the enemies and you don’t get to drive it. The most useful upgrades are perhaps for the castle itself to add archers to the castle and a pit to trap some enemies in.
The game has a lot of stages where by the end you will face enemy kings and queens which are super hard to beat, but if you’ve built up your troops and worked on the upgrades well enough should be defeatable
It’s a shame that the game isn’t available on the AppStore anymore, but there are some other games which are in the same format. Believe it or not the closest games I’ve found to it are based on Garfield and are called Garfield Defence, and whilst they will scratch the itch, they are not as good.
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