If you like to kill cheerleaders with shovels, you will love this game.

User Rating: 7 | Evil Dead: A Fistful of Boomstick XBOX
I got to play an early build of Boomstick at THQ's booth back when they used to rent out all of Petrie Hall for E3. They basically just had one "level" set up, where you could run around town hitting zombies with shovels and shooting them with your trusty boomstick. No real goal, nothing that you were really supposed to be doing, and it ended if you went inside the church. I thought it was a blast and declared that this was the PS2 "killer app" I had been waiting for. This was the game that would force me to finally buy a PS2.

Fortunately it ended up coming out for the Xbox as well, because Fistfull of Boomstick in no way, shape or form warrants buying a new video game system to play.

I never had a chance to play the earlier titles which shared the same license, though by all counts this stands head and shoulders over them. Unfortunately that's not enough to actually make it a good game. The things I'd had fun with playing the tech demo at E3 were still there, unfortunately that's really all that was there. The combat, while fun at first, lacks any real sort of variety. Sure smacking zombies around with a shovel is good times, but it lacks the variety you can find in other similarly set up games. Even the Buffy games, themselves not shining examples of design brilliance, far overshadow this as far as gameplay is concerned.

The single most obnoxious thing to me is that you need to pick up a certain item to save your game and that item is then expended after use. Every time I played the game I ended up playing for far longer than I really felt like because I didn't want to "waste" a save, and I only ever played it really late at night when I was sure not to be interrupted. Which, while it helped the ambiance, didn't cut down on the annoyance factor.

For fans of Evil Dead and Bruce Campbell, it's worth a look. For anyone else, probably just take a pass. If you do pick it up though, lay off the cheerleaders. The THQ staff would really appreciate it, especially if they're trying to show the game off to some guy in a suit. Kill the zombies, not the pretty ladies.