games: House of the Dead: Overkill

The Wii version of House of the Dead is the same basic game that you all know and probably love. You’re shooting zombies with a plastic gun. Our hero Agent G has a new friend – Agent Washington. He’s a rude man, who turns the air bluer than “necrotizing flesh”.

You won’t laugh at this game, like you did with the others. You’ll laugh with it. It’s a tongue-in-cheek homage to Blaxploitation and B-Movies. The graphics are perfect - covering up the Wii’s shortcomings with a grainy old film effect. And the gun holster works a treat.

The poor Wii Remote has been a bit of a let-down, in general. I’m sick of waving around just because there aren’t enough buttons. But for Overkill, it works perfectly.

You get a reticule in the basic mode, and that feels natural, and sweet. But if you tell the game where the corners of your screen are, you can play like you would in the arcade. Just make sure you don’t move around the room too much, as that’ll knock the calibration off.

Chaining together kills will eventually trigger a Goregasm. It’s not as messy or sexy as it sounds - but it does give you an American flag, and a points multiplier. And at the end of a level, points get turned into money. You can spend that on new guns and upgrades.

There’s also bullet-time bonuses, to let you chain a few headshots, and collectibles that give you access to the game’s excellent soundtrack. The feel of that low-rent funk is consistently brilliant, and it’s the most adult game on the Wii yet.

The story is pretty ridiculous. There’s incest, a whiff of necrophilia, and girls with their boobs nearly out. And their brains completely out. But unlike other House of the Dead games, the script is genuinely funny, and it’s acted out perfectly. Even if you hate gun games it’s almost worth playing House of the Dead just to annoy your mum, who’s probably waiting to play the Wii tennis.

To be honest there’s not that much new stuff to keep going back for. But that’s not the point - it’s just a lot of fun to play, especially with a friend. And surely that’s the best reason to replay a game. Not because you win an imaginary hat. Because you enjoy it. 4 stars!

Kotaku:
Developer Headstrong re-imagines the House of the Dead franchise in Overkill, a prequel to the series that takes us back to a simpler time, when men were men, women were half-naked, and black policemen use the word motherf***er as often as humanly possible. The game tells the story of a young Agent G, teaming up with Detective Isaac Washington to take down Papa Caesar, a deranged, Chinese-food loving crime lord who seems to have turned the inhabitants of Bayou City into a horde of bloodthirsty monsters. You know, the usual.

EuroGamer:
You can either berate SEGA for blatantly cashing in on its tired old light-gun back catalogue, or continue to celebrate the fact that the Wii is the new spiritual home for all these old classics, with a control system that lends itself perfectly to the genre. It’s little wonder we’re currently experiencing a flood of old and new point-and-shoot blasters. Recently, SEGA got the ball rolling by belatedly treating us to a port of 2004 arcade title Ghost Squad, so it’s only logical to service this peculiar niche by re-issuing something more renowned and familiar - in this case House of the Dead 2 and 3 in the same package. If you care enough about the genre, the chances are you’ll already own one or the other (probably both), and will simply relish the chance to play them again using the Wii controllers - either the Wii Zapper or the similarly adept Wii Remote.

Gamespot:
The House of the Dead games are gleefully fun on-rails shooters that drop you knee-deep in the undead with a loaded weapon and encourage you to aim for the head. The series places a great deal of emphasis on throwing unconventional monsters at you–such as zombie mermen, zombie frogs, zombie bats, zombie plants, and zombie ninjas–while dazzling your intellect with so-bad-it’s-good voice acting and a ridiculous story pretentiously in love with the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck. Although Sega has finally managed to perfect IR shooting on the Wii with this bundle of two of the series’ games, House of the Dead 2 & 3 Return is ultimately a short, simple port of aging games that suffers from an inconsistent frame rate and isn’t quite worth the asking price.