Confession time. Despite being a massive fan of horror books, games and movies I have not seen ANYTHING Evil Dead related. Not a single thing, not the original 1981 movie, not the new Evil Dead Rise from last year and absolutely nothing in between. I have drunkenly watched some scenes from the various movies on YouTube with friends but never sat down and watched something from this franchise from start to finish. Not that I have anything against it, it's certainly on my to-do list, but my watchlist is almost as big as my gaming backlog so its really just a case of being lost in the crowd.
So as someone who knows fuck all about franchise, A Fistful of Boomstick was certainly an interesting experience. Series main character Ash Williams (portrayed in game by the actual Bruce Campbell, very cool) gets embroiled in what I assume is yet another encounter with demonic monsters called Deadites and it's up to him and his trusty boomstick to make them go away. This translates into a pretty generic (for the time) yet quite entertaining PS2 action game where you lay waste to demons while solving puzzles to progress a predictable yet decently entertaining enough plot. The story certainly feels like a bit of an afterthought, a phoned in excuse to facilitate demon murder but judging from the fact that the franchise is about a man with a chainsaw for an arm I think moaning about the predictable twists and sub-par storytelling would be akin to moaning about the lack of story substance in something like Doom. It's not what we're here for.
So gameplay is king in this one and it's decent enough. One button for gun, one button for chainsaw arm, kill most things that move until a cutscene happens and then do it again until credits. Sounds like something that might get repetetive and boring but the game isn't long enough for that to really happen. I played through the whole thing in one sitting that took around 6 or 7 hours and right as I was maybe starting to get fed up it had the good sense to finish. Just the right length. Aside from the boomsticking and the chainsawing Ash also gets access to a spell book which comes with a few offensive options but is mainly used for solving puzzles. The problem with the spellbook is that it's such a crap offensive option that it's easy to forget that you even have it and then that forgetfullness causes the game to stall horribly as you flounder around with a puzzle that's easily solved with a quick incantation. For example there was one part where I got a Possess Deadite spell, a spell that you are supposed to use in order to grab a couple of items stashed behind an unkillable horde of the bastards. A simple puzzle meant to show you how to use the spell but I died there multiple times trying to run in and brute force it (despite the game telling me not to) because I just flat out forgot that I had even picked up the spell. I was so comfortable in filling everything full of buckshot that the function of my R1 button had completely left my brain.
Despite my own stupidity in that one instance, the other puzzles in this game aren't much better. There was one puzzle that required the possession of a dog, a spell I DID remember but it then fails to show you that there is a live dog enemy behind an automatically closing door which led me to run around a mostly empty map for about 20 minutes looking for a different dog enemy to possess. Like trying to solve a jigsaw where someone has just hidden a couple of the pieces around the house and not told you about it. Aside from that there was a couple of annoying "put the McGuffin in the right sequence in the thing" which would have been fine if the menuing wasn't so slow and one puzzle that involved finding gems with an alarm thing which gave me Sonic Adventure 2 Knuckles flashbacks and I'd rather not thing about those sections of that game.
The bosses are also an incredibly weak aspect of the game pretty much consisting of low-tier Zelda dungeon bosses. One where you tennis a projectile back, one where you make him run into a wall and the final boss is LITERALLY just stationary King Dodongo. I would have liked a bit more out of its bigger fights and it's a shame we got this lame, generic, My First Video Game Boss tier shit.
All in all though, these problems aren't enough to ruin what is a pretty decent movie tie in game. I'd argue that it's worth it just for some of the Bruce Campbell one liners. It's not going to blow your mind or change your life but Fistful of Boomstick will give you a decently fun action game experience and a sensible chuckle
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