House of the Dead Overkill Impressions

While waiting for Resident Evil 5 I decided to play Sega's House of the Dead Overkill that quietly came out last month. Light gun shooting seems like a perfect way to use the Wii remote and this game was definitely a refreshing take on the House of the Dead formula. The presentation in this game is amazing, it throws away the terrible horror element the game was previously known for and now dons the excessiveness of grindhouse cinema from the 70's and that's what really shines through. The constant jokes will make you laugh as you play the game and if your parents are home you might want to turn down the volume due to the excessive swearing. As a sign of the times this game was awarded the title of most swearing in a video game by Guinness.

The controls are solid and the difficulty is fair untill you decide to buy the assault rifle or auto-shotgun which is just...overkill. Though simple the the game never slows down during its 4-5 hours playthrough which unlocks the harder Director's Cut mode of the game. It's very fun to play with a friend, but with all the toilet humor in the game please prepare them for it as they might be turned away from this parody. Basically the gameplay is still true to House of the Dead.

The downside to this game is sadly the technical issues. Realizing this game is on the Wii I can't blame them for not being able to pull off Metal Gear Solid 4, but there were some obvious problems that weren't unavoidable. The game's framerate drops when there are more than a few enemies on the screen. Also for whatever reason Headstrong Games, the developers, decided to make it so that when you kill a zombie the body is swapped out for broken dead one instead of acumulating the damage done to it. Since Resident Evil 4 Wii doesn't need to resort to this I found it unusually as it actually slows down the game for a second as the game swaps the bodies. I have found some complaints on the web complaining about glitches in the game, but I have yet to experience these.

Besides these small complaints I really enjoy the game and have given it the honor of being the my favorite on-rails light gun shooter ever! I am probabaly getting some Perfect Shots for my remots and play the Director's Cut with a friend later. This game as well as Madworld and The Conduit are all being published by Sega. Many publishers and development studios thinking about the Wii are looking at these games. If these games don't sell well we can look forward to more games like Wii Music and this. So please if you like some maturity or clever gameplay in your games or any type of quality at all then please consider these games. I will love you ever so much.


Note: These words are actually spoken in the game. T_T