Evil Diary Review | TheXboxHub

Apocalypses don’t get much grimmer than Evil Diary. This is the happy-go-lucky tale of Eve, who is hoping to survive what seems to be a dual alien and zombie invasion. What kind of luck is that? 

Being the only human in a world of monsters means there’s a lot of demand and not a whole lot of supply. You’re going to have to defend yourself against hundreds of enemies by the time you reach the final level, or you’re going to become sausages to go with a side of monster mash. 

That takes the form of some very simple run-and-gunning. Eve is placed in a long, corridor-like arena that runs on for a few screens. You get a bit of downtime before the beasties start arriving, and they do so from your left or right. We found ourselves drawn to the d-pad rather than the analogue stick, so that we could swiftly pivot between the two directions. 

The enemies come in a variety of flavours. There are slow ones, fast ones, some that explode on death, and some that can’t be killed at all: they just hover around the fringes of the screen, leathering you with lasers and toxic bubbles. What’s common between them all is that they seem to have rollerskates attached. You can ignore them completely, and they will pass you by. It’s when you’re in their way that you get relieved of one of your precious health points. 

Which is odd. We dallied with the idea of ignoring most of the enemies, and only picking off the easy ones or the ones that threatened to kill us. But while it might be effective, it’s no fun. So we returned to playing Evil Diary as the designers probably intended it: by killing the things. 

Your objective – mostly – is to reach a total number of dead guys. A level might require forty, and you’re picking the enemies off to reach that total. It doesn’t matter which ones you pick off, so we refer you back to the previous paragraph: you could just stick to the easy ones. As soon as you do reach that total, the level’s over and everything fades to back. Evil Diary has a knack for making this feel like a bad thing: thanks to a dun-dun-DUN audio effect, we thought we’d died, every single time. 

Evil Diary likes to mess around with this ‘kill X creatures’ objective. On occasion, you might come across a lift, and once you press a button, you have a certain amount of time to survive. A freight elevator and motorbike sequence also crops up, taking the action in slightly different directions – only slightly, because you’re still doing the same thing: avoiding death and killing whatever you can.

It’s Evil Diary’s cross to bear: it’s got precious few ideas for how to keep you stuck to the game. Mostly, that’s down to a lack of options for Eve. She has a single gun that she uses throughout Evil Diary, and it’s nowt special. It’s a handgun with a limited clip, and there’s no upgrading or switching out of that weapon. What you start with is what you end with, yet it seems such an easy and obvious element to meddle with.

There are other playable characters to purchase with coins that look a little like mint Polos. But the only real opportunity to buy them is after a playthrough. We felt very little impulse to play again, mainly because the levels were mostly remixes of each other. But it’s a shame, as these two alternative characters change things up. A duck pushes you to adopt a melee build, chopping monsters up with his chainsaw, while the other warrior has a rainbow gun that fires in a helix. We can’t fathom why these couldn’t have been power-ups in the game. 

There are power-ups, but we’d hazard to call them that. Outside of those cash-Polos, there is a Polo that blows up everything in a radius, and a lightning bolt that hands you momentary immunity. But they’re the limit of it, and they don’t turn up often enough to really enjoy anyway. Which makes combat unusually one-note. Eve’s diary must just be entry after entry of ‘shot some zombies’.

Controls-wise, Evil Diary is fine. It’s so simple that you’d be surprised if anything was wonky. We weren’t fans of the reload system, though, as you can’t actually reload: you have to finish the clip and then wait for a second to automatically reload. Not being able to time a reload when things are quiet is a pain: we ended up firing at nothing, just so we had a full magazine for the next wave. We’re not sure that John Wick ever did that.

What we will give credit to is the soundtrack. It goes in hard. When it’s not tossing in Resident Evil 1 sound effects, it’s playing thrash-metal as loud as it possibly can. It’s great and completely blindsided us. We didn’t expect it to kick our ass as much as it did. 

Evil Diary will stop well short of kicking your ass, though. We sailed through it in less than an hour, losing no lives in the process. This isn’t a game for speedrunners or shooter-heads: it’s more of a run-and-gunner for people who want to zone out, switching from left to right and emptying their clips into enemies that pop like balloons. If that was the developers’ objective, then it’s something of a success. Not a thought entered our head as we blitzed through the game. 

The lack of shooting challenge is an odd bedfellow for the cracking metal soundtrack and grimmest of grim tones. Still, we didn’t dislike our time with Evil Diary: while it’s some throwaway monster-killing, it’s also frustration free. If this holiday period is a little too jolly and colourful for you, then say ‘bah humbug’ with Evil Diary.

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