Recently, I had the opportunity to interview the guys at Cranky Pants about their newest title, Evil Dead: Regeneration. Admittedly, I approached the interview with a degree of skepticism considering the limited success of the prior two games. When you combine the facts that it’s based on a movie, has a suggested retail price of twenty bucks and was preceded by two games that scored miserably, you can imagine the low expectations one might have. Apparently for THQ, hiring a new developer was just what the doctor ordered because instead of a game that’s specifically broken, you have one that suffers some blemishes but is rather fun to play.

Now that’s not a cue for everyone to run down to their friendly, neighborhood game shops to pick this title up. It’s not a game of the year candidate by a significant margin, and it may not have broad base appeal for those that aren’t fans of the Evil Dead movies. I happen to love the movies, so I got the humor. If you haven’t seen the movies the humor would likely be lost on you and unfortunately the majority of the game’s appeal would be lost as well.

The game takes place after the movies chronologically. Ash has been locked away in an asylum because no one could possibly believe his story of the Necronomicon and the hordes of unholy Deadites bent on the destruction of everything living. The one exception is the attractive appeals lawyer that gets her hands on the professor’s journal explaining how to use the Necronomicon. Ash’s therapist (they use the term loosely) is already in possession of the book and has been experimenting on inmates at the asylum for some time. Here he creates Ash’s future sidekick and several portals to the world of the dead. The building is thrown into chaos in which Ash escapes his cell, and in the process of escaping the asylum meets Sam, a Deadite midget with the demeanor of Joe Peschi.

Sam (coincidentally sharing the name of the famed director of the Evil Dead and Spiderman movies) is actually quite the good guy despite his being an undead midget. This creates an intriguing interaction between him and Ash, the world’s foremost Deadite ass kicker. This interaction is definitely by design as is demonstrated by the ways you “use” Sam to get the job done. Sam will fight enemies you encounter by jumping on them and popping their heads off. But that’s not the extent of his ability. First of all he can’t be killed making him the perfect cannon fodder. He can be smashed, burned and ripped apart, but he always comes right back for more. Second, because of his small stature he can fit places Ash can’t. In many places, Ash will take over his body and navigate him through small caves or ride gigantic monsters to smash open previously barred egresses.

Third and again due to his size, Sam can be punt kicked into furnaces, fans, onto other Deadites or into the mouths of the disgusting soul eaters that block each of the portals each with devastating effect.

After the post-asylum introductions, Ash discovers his hottie lawyer is kidnapped and he gets down to business closing the portals to save his own ass and if has time while he’s at it, to save hers.

Getting down to business where Ash is concerned invariably involves a shotgun (boom stick for the technologically deprived) and a chainsaw where his right hand should be. In this game however, he adds a few more weapons to his repertoire. In addition to his staple weaponry, Ash can use a handgun or rocket launcher in his left hand (nothing really laudable here). As replacements for his right arm extension, he can use a flamethrower and a very cool grapple gun. The flamethrower can be used to not only set Ash’s enemies ablaze, but to transform Sam from a disgruntled undead midget into a flaming projectile of destruction. The grapple gun can be used to grab enemies and pull them into melee combat or pull switches from a distance. It would have been nice to be able to use it like in Quake or Half-life to be able to pull yourself to areas previously unreachable, but I think it’s unfair to slam a game for something they decided not to implement when it’s not an industry standard. I bring that up because I can’t find anything wrong with the game’s actual mechanics. As a matter of fact, it’s pretty fun.

You basically navigate the level, blasting your way through hordes of skeleton or zombie Deadites. The game has a built in combo system where you can perform up to 5 hit combos where the last move is a slowed-down style move like a chainsaw decapitation or a point blank shotgun blast. These combos combine use of your left and right hands and comprise the majority of your attacks. You can even do air combos with the grapple gun and repeated shots from the shotgun. When enemies are weakened, Ash can perform finisher moves that generally involve gunshots to the head or decapitation; pretty standard stuff actually. In those times when you are desperately outnumbered, Ash can transform into Evil Ash and majorly whoop ass. Every Deadite you kill goes into a Rage meter. Once it reaches the halfway mark you can unleash the fury and go to town until you’ve exhausted your supply of pent up rage. With all these abilities, it’s no surprise that the game is fun to play.

Unfortunately, the game does suffer from repetitiveness in level design. The first level is cool because it flashes back to the cabin in the woods. The second level in the asylum is cool too because of the trickiness of the asylum’s maze-like corridors. The third level is outside the asylum where you have to get past a soul eater, kill a boss and then move on two the next level. You get past the soul eater by finding three different eggs, slicing them open to release the soul and protecting Sam on his way back to the soul eater to be punted into its gaping maw. At first, I really got a kick out of it. By the third or fourth level of the same formula of finding the souls and feeding them to the soul eater wears on you. After closing several portals, you fight the end boss and finish the game; all in about a day.

The only other thing keeping this game from a decent rating is the graphics. While there isn’t anything glaringly wrong with them I just can’t consider them Xbox quality graphics. Polygon counts are low and it shows through in the animation. Though the game is smoothly animated, the low polygon counts cause warping and distortion in the models as they animate. This is most apparent when Ash is sitting on the couch in the asylum and his elbow looks like its lacking very critical bone structure. During the game play it’s not as noticeable because of the lack of close-ups. It’s something that is apparently a flaw of movie-based video games where the only requirement is to create a facsimile of an already established character instead of having to dispense gobs and gobs of realism. If the guy in the game is a reasonable approximation of Ash, then the fans will be sated. It’s just too bad that they lack the ability to set a higher graphical standard for themselves. After all the game is in the twenty-dollar range.

The fact that the game is short, the graphics not up to par and the levels somewhat repetitive will likely keep this game out of the hands of mainstream gamers despite it’s twenty dollar price. This is a game for Evil Dead fans without a doubt. For the price, it’s a marked improvement over the previous games. In this, I think the developers have achieved success. They have created a game that should be received well by Evil Dead fans, and that is ultimately what I think they were shooting for.