Game Review: House of the Dead Overkill

Steve Wollaston - Sunday Mercury

Sometimes it's easy to forget that, at its heart, the Nintendo Wii also has to appeal to hard-to-please gamers, the sort of folk prepared to lock the door for hours and get to the bottom of a game.

With Harry Redknapp and family - including the never aging daughter-in-law Louise - seen in the adverts playing Mario Kart, and all this talk about how the Wii Fit is pulling the nation away from obesity, there appeared to be a danger the Wii would become a little too civilized.

Which is why gamers everywhere should rejoice in the arrival of that arcade favorite, House of The Dead, on the little white box. Overkill by just name this game is not.

It's one thing to have jolty, pixel rough zombies lurching towards you in an absorbing shoot-to-the-death in the arcade, but what happens to the game when it's given a new lease of life on a console as powerful as the Wii.
Will it lose anything when the graphics are smoothed out?

Does the adrenalin rush lessen when you know you don't have to part with another dollar to play again?

Will it, in short, be nothing like the teenage memories?

The answers are: no.

It is, however, a massively different game to its arcade predecessor as though you are playing a pivotal role in some sort of zombie movie, rather than simply standing in front of your TV set blasting anything that gets in the past.
With an almost X-rated dialogue at the start, it's obvious it's no-holds-barred guts, gore and horror all the way.

Interestingly, Overkill is billed a prequel to the arcade series - although, as with all good prequels, the characters are familiar.

It's Agent G's first assignment on leaving the academy and he finds himself in Bayou City. You enter the game at the point Agent G is entering Papa Caesar's house, alongside a local detective. Detective Washington is a local cop in Bayou city, a small town Deep South backwater place pretty much entirely run by local plantation owner and criminal mastermind Papa Caesar.

Once the door to the mansion opens, it's blood on the screen all the way.
The monsters seem to give a lot less warning than in the old arcade games, but the familiar "reload" signs appear on the screen at an all-too alarming rate, while the dialogue is at best rather obvious.

But once you've shot one, you can't stop. And that's where the success of this franchise lives.

Sega, in short, has done a superb job in balancing the need to create a game worthy for the Wii against remaining loyal to its enduring genre. This game is destined to be the bad boy of the Wii, hidden away from TV adverts but proof that no matter how much the Wii is changing the face of gaming, there's a corner which will forever be blood, guts and gore.

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