Evil Dead: Endless Nightmare review
:: BRUCE SCRAMBLEPrice: Free
Version: 1.0
App Reviewed on: iPad Air 2
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It almost always odd when a video game licenses an older movie or property, so when Evil Dead: Endless Nightmare hit the App Store, I felt like I needed to investigate. As it turns out, this first-person endless runner is certainly gruesome enough to get you in the Halloween spirit, but is otherwise generic and a little confusing.
Dead woods
If you've never seen an Evil Dead movie, you should probably go see one for your own good, but that's not necessary to understand what's going on in Endless Nightmare. This game is an endless runner where you leave out from a cabin in the woods, trying to run as far as possible while dodging or killing enemies in your path.
You can control which way your character is facing by moving your finger around the left side of the screen, and you can fend off enemies by tapping the right side of the screen. Along the way, there are drops of blood and weapons to collect, which help you unlock new stuff and survive for longer on each subsequent run.
Objectively nightmarish
Two things that Endless Nightmare actually kind of nails are its creepy factor and mission structure. If you play this game at night in a dark room with headphones, you'll be torn between doing missions and closing the app to do something that isn't so ghoulish.
In between any given run, you'll be given missions like "run for a minute without killing anything" or "kill two deadites with a box cutter," which--upon completion--unlock new power ups and items for you to start with. These missions add tension to what is already pretty harsh audio-visual experience. Sometimes this makes the game feel dramatic, while at others, it just feels completely repulsive.
Where does it stop?
The problems with Endless Nightmare pretty much start and end with the fact that it's a first-person endless runner. While it's a novel idea, there are so many problems with the way the game handles this perspective, that it's hard to understand why certain things happen.
For example, your field of view so limited that you cannot tell if an enemy attacks you from the side until it is too late. Further, you can "dodge" enemies by just facing away from them, but there are always limits to your turning radius, which can prevent you from picking up power ups in the distance for whatever reason. These seem like problems that wouldn't happen in runner with a more conventional perspective.
The bottom line
Despite not really feeling like an Evil Dead game, Endless Nighmare is a sufficiently creepy runner with a good set of hooks to keep driving you forward in it. That said, its perspective makes it pretty hard to play, which is a huge problem for a video game to have.