As you progress through the game, you can also find a shovel, a revolver, a spraypump that spews gasoline everywhere, sticks of dynamite, a dynamite launcher, Molotov cocktails, a sickle, a sword, and a Gatling gun. Ammo conservation isn't much of an issue. The chainsaw has unlimited gasoline, while shotgun shells are frequently dropped by slain Deadites.
See a Deadite, kill a Deadite, repeat literally ad infinitum.Īsh's goto weapons are, as ever, his double-barreled shotgun and chainsaw, the latter of which he doesn't start with, but which you find early on. The gameplay here is pretty standard stuff, particularly in earlier stages. The city's being overrun with Deadites, and naturally, Ash, chainsaw roaring and shotgun blazing, is going to have to beat them back.
Natural selection, sadly, does not immediately ensue.Īsh, who has conveniently dressed for the day exactly how he looked near the end of Evil Dead 2, right down to the torn shirt and makeshift shotgun holster, and who has misplaced his steel hand from Army of Darkness, heads into Dearborn's streets. (I wonder where Jenny went?) Naturally, the topic at hand is the Necronomicon di Morti, and of course, they play the books-on-tape version on the air. One night, Ash is drinking in his favorite bar and watching a locally-produced television show about paranormal investigation. This is a genre that's yet to really have an A-list title, although it does contain a few of the worst games to come out in the last decade (Fighting Force 2, for example), and while A Fistful of Boomstick isn't going to buck that trend, it's still sort of fun for a while. Three years later, we've got A Fistful of Boomstick, courtesy of VIS Entertainment, who also brought us State of Emergency and Tom and Jerry: War of the Whiskers (uh-oh), and it's essentially a third-person, 3D beat-'em-up. It was still about as much fun as slamming your genitals in a car door. Heavy Iron's Evil Dead: Hail to the King was fairly faithful to the movies, and Bruce Campbell even reprised his role as Ash.
With all that in mind, it's hard to believe that no one thought to pick up the Evil Dead license until late 2000.įurther, it's nearly impossible to believe that they botched the job so badly. You have all the ingredients: a square-jawed, occasionally self-parodying hero entire armies of the undead for him to fight he comes preequipped with a variety of weaponry, from a shovel to an axe to his trusty chainsaw he has a doppelganger, the infamous Evil Ash, for his archnemesis and occasionally, he gets thrown through time and space for very little reason.Įvil Dead 2, and its sequel Army of Darkness, have both had a fairly substantial impact on American game design, what with Duke Nukem and all Ash is essentially the model for every first- or third-person shooter protagonist in existence, with the possible exceptions of the ones that don't talk.
Buy 'EVIL DEAD: A Fistful of Boomstick': PlayStation 2Īt first blush, the Evil Dead series would seem to lend itself extraordinarily well to video games.