Much like Sam Raimi's third Evil Dead film, Army of Darkness, like the Evil Dead games. Seen as a shorter, far worse thing than it should have been. Army of Darkness was seen as the worst in the series of films by the majority see but it tried new things, a different style, more slapstick comedy, and a strange idea of an Evil Ash...

So now that another Evil Dead game has made it's way onto the Xbox and PC, what has come from it? It's pretty good, still very flawed, but much better than those earlier attempts (Evil Dead A Fistful of Boomstick ffor example).

Regeneration opens up with Ash, in the Sunny Meadows Asylum, when of course those pesky Deadites manage to become unleashed by a crazy doctor...tsk tsk. So with his boomstick and half deadite friend Sam (yes, half deadite) Ash must make his way through the game causing general mayhem and killing a lot of varied monsters before stopping the insane Doctor Reinhard from unleashing Hell on Earth.

How will he do this though? For the first time in an Evil Dead game Ash is rescuing a busty damsel, Sally Bowline, who possesses another Doctor's diary, which is needed to unlock the secret required to open the destruction Dr. Reinhard wants.

So its story isn't up to much, but this game was designed for killing zombies and ghouls, with catchphrases and a new combo system in toll.

Firstly, for a third person game the camera design is really well done at far ranges, allowing you to see every thing coming at you, and switching around as you change targets, it does falter slightly when you are using Sam to kick at enemies, but it is excellent when it oculd have been the damning factor of the game.

When you get to close encounters it does begin to freak out, changing Ash's view and forcing you to manually turn it around many times in what should be a relatively simple battle. If this happens when you need to use Sam...it begins to become a little frustrating. The controls used in order to hurt enemies is annoying, as targeting is random, and not neccesarily going to the enemy in front of you, meaning that when you have to power up to kick the little guy he may attack the wrong person.

It isn't a massive thing until you face bosses though, but for now I think you get the picture.

As far as weapons go though Ash begins with his favourite combo, the chainsaw and shotgun, which the die hards will be using throughout the game to kill Deadite scum. These two weapons and his little buddy Sam are used to create numerous combos, and for the first few times you see each of these performed they are equally painful looking and comedic, sadly the later weapons don't provide the same kick...

The weapons are far too powerful and render the combo system that has been placed pointless due to their power, especially on the Bomb Lance, you'll just end up locking onto enemies and prodding them until they are dead later on...sad really...I ended up switching to the old weapons many time just to keep the playing time open...

The game itself is very short, five or six hours for experienced console players, and this may have been put into effect due to the repetitive nature of the gameplay. What we could have done with was less repetitive puzzles. Straddling a huge Deadite may sound like fun, but for the dozen or so levels there are in game, you'll be performing this act in almost all of them.

They all end with an imaginative and mobidly funny death for the thing though, so riding it through for the short time just to see all the creature murders is worth it.

The levels themselves though...they are a varied bunch, for good and bad moments. The usual Graveyard area is dull and boring, but the Temple level is really well thought out graphically and structure wise. Half of the levels are high quality and a few are boring, two are God awful. Though for a button mashing slice and dice 'em up, this is really good.

The cartoon style of the game is a great improvement over the ropey animation in the last game, and while it hardly pushes boundarys for the PC or Xbox, it still fills the comedic feel well. The FMVs are frequent in this game too, and are of a fair quality, with the official voice of the legendary Bruce Campbell (Ash in the Evil Dead trilogy), and so die hards will be hard pushed not to check this out.

The sound effects are the selling point for me, as Sam and Bruce have comments for every area, and if you simply leave them they end up comign out with some flippant arguments that always seem to end with a Campbell putdown or threat. Nice.

If you do manage to push through the game's short girth, you should manage to collect at least half of the extras, which include game art (as usual) and short clips where Bruce Campbell and Ted Raimi (Sam Raimi "The Director's" brother) talking about different aspects of the game, and these extras are really entertaining and a good laugh for fans of the movies.

For those fans out there I would reccomend renting this game for three or four days to paly it through and watch the extras as to me, this is all it's worth. It's an extreme improvement over the previous Evil Dead endeavours, but still only worth a short blast.

64% A good quick blast, with extras for the hardcores.