Reviews from the Crypt Part 4: House of the Dead OVERKILL

Well hello Ghouls, it’s time for another Reviews from the Crypt. Today we go back to simpler days, days of excessive gore, guns, and cheesy one liners in HOUSE OF THE DEAD: OVERKILL!

If you’ve never spent a quarter in the arcade playing the classics House of the Dead 1- 4, don’t worry, it’s a completely new story that looks to turn around the entire series, the game is in fact takes place before number 1, when Agent G (the games protagonist) is still a rookie. On a assignment to bring in a deranged criminal Papa Ceaser, he meets Detective Issac Washington (Player two). They start out as rivals but learn to work together to stop the Zomb… er… I mean “Mutant” outbreak.
Pretty standard story that takes strange and almost sick turns.

If you’ve ever played a Rail Shooter, Then you’ve played this game. Simple point at the thing you want to kill and blast it into a thousand pieces. You have no control of where you move, but there are plenty of bad guys to blast on the way. Powerups like health, grenades, a slow down (Slow-Mo Mo-fo) and score improving Golden brains are scattered throughout the level waiting for you to be quick enough to shoot them while taking down large numbers of mutants.
The flow of the level is simple, watch a cut scene to introduce the level, kill mutants, watch a cutscene that introduces the boss, kill the boss, watch another cutscene and repeat. Your score for the entire level gets turned into money where you can purchase/upgrade your weapons, although you will never have enough money to get fully upgraded your weapons on the first play through, you’ll have enough to keep you happy.

Overall though the game is too easy, with 7 levels to go though, the mutants don’t seem to get anymore stronger or difficult besides from ones that carry shields and wear motocycle helmets. If you die you can come back at the cost of half your score. There is a directors cut mode of the game that extends the levels, but you’d have to play the game a lot to notice the difference, also the mutants get stronger and you can only die 3 times.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say that this is one of the best looking Wii games I’ve played. The entire game is done GrindHouse style, to the cheesy 80’s horror music, the film grain and burn, down to the stripper holding a wii remote in the opening sequence. Everything is over the top and the game benefits from it, except for a graphical glitch that can be forgiven, a random animation that only appears if you max out an automatic shotgun and kill 2-3 mutants at the same time. The physic engine for the body part and blood particles slightly glitch so that the remaining mutants skip a few frames in animation.

The music in this game is disgusting, and frankly I love it. An amount of cheesy songs can be unlock by completing side objectives/goals that give you the levels song with lyrics. (Like the Zombie make-out song called One night in Bayou City, but I recommend not for the faint of heart or little kids.)
The voice acting for this game is really good in the terms that it’s not supposed to be, as the game is making fun of GrindHouse style movies you get some brilliant lines, a lot of jokes that occur in every level, and your partner Issac drops the F-bomb almost every 10 seconds (which runs from tasteful to terrible) so much so that the game had (at one point and time) won the Guinness book of world record for most use of F**k in a video game, a impressive feature.

Overkill is really one of the hardcore, 3rd party developed games people have been looking for on the Wii for quite some time, but with low replay value (unless your a score junkie) and the short story mode, as well as the random 4 player party missions. For those thinking of picking up the Extended Edition on PS3, you may want to pop this into your Wii before hand.