The reason to pick up Evil Dead: The Game is its multiplayer modes, without a doubt, but some of the best survivors are initially locked. To access them, you have to clear five single-player missions. Each is a survival gauntlet that will test your reflexes, resource management, and firepower.
Here are some tips and tricks for clearing the Missions in Evil Dead: The Game.
How to Survive Evil Dead: The Game’s Missions
Many of the skills you may have picked up from Evil Dead‘s PVP or PVE modes won’t apply in Missions. You’re alone on the map against a horde of Deadites with a set amount of gear and ammunition, and many of the mechanics have been altered or disabled.
While you can work on a couple of the game’s achievements in Missions, there aren’t any specifically associated with clearing them. That being said, the Four Horsemen, Medieval Mode, and Jacksonville, here we come! trophy/achievements all require you to have unlocked specific characters from Missions.
While your character in a solo mission effectively has maxed stats, and their Fear climbs relatively slowly, they also don’t have access to their active skills, auras, or advanced abilities. They also have a maximum of one bar of Shield. It’s just them and their weapons against whatever nasty shocks the level has in store.
The good news is that most of those shocks aren’t random, which means you can plan for them. There is some amount of randomness at work in each Mission, such as what weapons can show up where, but major events like enemy placement and big upgrades are in fixed positions.
It’s common for your first attempt at any given Mission to be an unmitigated disaster, but once you have some idea of what’s in store, you can bank resources in preparation for them.
Even so, there aren’t any checkpoints or saves in Missions. You either win or you’re sent right back to the start to try again.
With practice, effort, and a little luck, you can get through all the Missions, but it can be frustrating. Here are some of the tips we’ve come up with to make the learning process a little easier.
Stay on the Path
With the notable exception of Mission 5, there generally isn’t anything to be found in any building that you don’t specifically have to visit. While it wouldn’t surprise me to find that there are well-hidden secrets in the most obscure corners of every Mission’s map, I’ve yet to find one.
The Missions are generally good about putting caches of resources at or near your objectives, or along the most obvious route that you’d take to reach them. Any other building on the map always seems to be empty.
Use Your Environment
When you don’t have other players to fall back on, you have to make some of your own luck. Deadites are just as fond as coming at you from your blind spot in Missions as they are in any other mode, and even if they only inflict a little damage, that’s more than you want to take.
When you’re ambushed by Deadites, which reliably happens whenever you get near a major objective, they’re going to try and flank you. At this point, it’s useful to duck inside houses, jump fences, or put obstacles between yourself and them.
You can mow down a lot of Deadites in a hurry with little risk if you’re able to force them into a bottleneck. That can be as easy as ducking through a shed. Even a lit campfire can be a useful obstacle under the right circumstances.
Of course, the same applies to you. Elite Deadites are particularly good at forcing you to switch positions. Always have an eye on your exit route.
Use the Roads
It’s useful to stick to the roads whenever you can afford to do so. They’re nice and flat, which makes it difficult for Deadites to ambush you from unexpected directions. There also generally aren’t any traps, such as possessed trees or sudden Deadite spawns.
Vehicular Homicide Is Not Your Friend
In Missions 3 and 4, there’s only one car on the map and it’s given to you right at the start. If you wreck it, you won’t find a replacement.
As such, it’s not worth it to weaponize the car, particularly given how weird vehicular health is in Evil Dead. You can go from a seemingly intact car to an immobile wreck in seconds. While you can generally handle a little damage here and there, try to play it safe, or you’ll be left without wheels at the worst possible moment.
This is particularly important in Mission 3, since it’s timed. While it makes a lot of sense under the circumstances to bring a car into one of the combat arenas and do donuts all over the Deadites, it will almost certainly total the car and you’ll never make it to the final arena in time if you’re stuck on foot. Leave your ride in a safe area before you start.
The exception is the end of Mission 4. Your escape vehicle seems to be more durable than most of the other cars you’re generally given–I’ve actively tried to wreck it and was unsuccessful–so you can go ahead and plow over a few Deadites on your run to safety.
Don’t Take Hits You Can Avoid
In general, ammunition and weapons are a lot more plentiful in Missions than cola and Amulets. You can afford to waste bullets, but not health.
It’s always worthwhile to expend ammo to end a fight as quickly as possible. You’re almost guaranteed to find more. Only let a Deadite close to melee if you can’t blow them away from a distance.
Once a Deadite is up in your personal space, you’re generally better off dodging than trying to preempt their attack. Elite Deadites and bosses are difficult or impossible to unbalance, but many of them take a long time to recover from a missed attack. Being patient, baiting a swing, and doing damage afterward is safer than wading into them. If there’s one skill from Missions that’s worth taking with you into multiplayer mode, it’s mastering the dodge mechanic.
Balance > Damage
As you’ve likely noticed if you’ve jumped into multiplayer at all, your character is invincible during finishers. Other enemies either won’t attack at all or will harmlessly whiff while you’re taking off their buddy’s head.
In Missions, when you’re getting steamrolled by multiple Deadites at once, it can be really helpful to land as many finishers as possible. Not only can it occasionally let you dodge an incoming attack, but it generally buys you a couple of seconds as all the local enemies reset their attack patterns.
This makes weapons that inflict a lot of Balance damage, like bats, hammers, and shovels, much more useful. You’re arguably better off with a shovel than Ash’s chainsaw, which I’ll admit sounds blasphemous. An off-balance Deadite not only isn’t attacking, but gives you an opportunity to land a finisher.
Don’t Kill Anything You Don’t Have To
The rate at which slain Deadites drop items is dramatically lowered in Missions. It seems to go up a bit if you’re low or out of bullets, but otherwise, only specific enemies drop specific items.
That means there’s no reason to get into a fight if you don’t have to. If you can sneak by or outrun a Deadite, it’s always worth doing.
While Deadites are generally faster than you are in a straight line, they do give up surprisingly easily and their pathfinding’s not all it could be. (What do you want, they’re dead. They’re all messed up.) If you can get a few obstacles like fences or buildings between you and a Deadite, you can generally get far enough away from it that it’ll abandon the search.
This is particularly useful in Mission 4, where Pablo gets an amulet that occasionally makes him the next best thing to invisible. While it only works in specifically labeled areas, it does let you skip a couple of particularly obnoxious fights, such as the Berserker who’s standing out front of the convenience store.
Save Shemp’s, Burn Amulets
You only have one bar of Shield in Missions, but it’s still enough to absorb at least one hit. While Amulets are relatively uncommon, you should still try to keep that Shield bar full whenever possible.
Don’t burn a whole Amulet to replenish a partially-full bar, but don’t feel like you’ve got to save them, either. If you’re the sort of player who hoards everything for emergencies, break that habit with the Amulets, as they’re entirely meant to be preemptive.
