Ash was the unfortunate antihero of 3 Evil dead movies, that saw him unwisely mess around with a ancient and powerful book called the Necronomicon, which opened the gates of hell and allowed the forces of evil to sweep the land - raising the dead and turning them into 'Deadites' (and Deadites like to eat live people). Ash battled evil, lost his girlfriend to it, escaped it, lost a hand to it, tamed it, travelled through time, fought the evil army, fell in love and still always ended up back in the sleepy little town of Dearborn, Michigan in time for tea. Slapstick comedy was never far from the fore, and the movies, though violent and gory always had their tongues stuffed firmly in their cheeks.

   

Fistful of Boomstick sees you wandering around the small town of Dearborn (in several different periods of time) killing all the Deadite zombies you come across because some idiot has been fiddling with the Necronomicon again. It plays like a sort of gory Tomb Raider, only without the climbing, or pulling blocks, or Lara's boobs or anything much apart from shooting/hacking/blasting/incinerating anything you don't like the look of. Ash can use separate weapons in each hand, and chainsaw/shotgun combination kills look cool. The problem is that these moves are tricky to pull off with the accuracy required, so you end up just blasting/hacking or running past Deadites in order to just get to you next destination as soon as possible. And if that sounded like you know where you're going in Fistful of Boomstick then I misled you - with no map and only your sense of direction and a few signposts to help you, you'll be running all over Dearborn looking for anything of use. You soon realise that there isn't going to be anything to brilliant in terms of innovative gameplay to look forward to; all you do is run, kill and hunt for something (anything) to help you open up a new section or progress to the next level.

All we've wanted for years is a game that allows you to dispatch nasty dead things via chainsaw or shotgun with the accompaniment of a smartass saying like Ash does in the Evil Dead movies - and at last we can. They dug up Bruce Campbell to voice in-game Ash and star in the 'making of' video, and he supplied plenty of wise cracks and sarcasm for the virtual Ash to spout…which is cool until they start to repeat after 4 or 5 different ones, and repeat, and repeat, and repeat…

   

Talking of repetition, the gameplay soon becomes so repetitive due to the regenerating Deadites that any novelty supplied by the extreme but comical gore soon wears thin. The saving graces are that it gives you plenty of save tokens so you don't have to replay to much should Ash die, and it comes packaged with the Evil Dead 2 movie DVD. The game itself is just another example of multi-format pap, without a single original idea of its own. This wouldn't be so bad, but the ones it does copy are all so poorly implemented and the no-brainer gameplay so lacking in any sort of addictiveness or fun that you'll soon wish you bought something else instead. It's hard for us to believe that an Evil Dead game that has so much killing in it, and Bruce Campbell involved could turn out so mind-numbingly poor. The Evil Dead movies have been given the videogame 'treatment' twice now to my knowledge, and we're still yet to see a game that does them justice.