The House of the Dead: Overkill First Look Preview

Rebooting a franchise has become a popular way to breathe new life into much loved, but perhaps ageing properties. Resident Evil 4 transformed the classic survival horror formula and was rewarded with strong sales and unanimous critical acclaim. You only have to look at Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies – Dark Knight is already one of the most successful movies of all time – to see the the appeal.

This is exactly what Headstrong Games is hoping to achieve with SEGA’s light-gun franchise, The House of the Dead. It’s 9:05 on the first day of the Leipzig Games Convention and we’re told this is one of the first times The House of the Dead: Overkill on Wii has been shown to press. It’s obvious from the moment the game loads that we’re about to see something very different to the classic HotD titles; fans of low-budget, gore-filled, b-movie horrors are in for a real treat.

Agent G, fresh out of the academy, has teamed up with hard-boiled bad-ass Agent Washington to investigate stories of mysterious disappearances in small-town Louisiana. The demo begins on level three – Carnival of Fun – a classic American funfair which has become overrun with the living dead. Almost immediately the agents are under attack with the Wii Remote’s motion controls being tested to their fullest in order to stay alive. Controls are handled entirely with the Wii Remote: B fires, shake/A reloads and 1 changes weapon. It’s simple stuff and that’s exactly what you want when brain-hungry zombies are waiting around every corner. The game will also enable players to look around 30 degrees in all directions by moving the Wii remote to the edge of the screen – similarly to what was seen in Capcom’s Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles.

With the choice of a Magnum (six shots of high accuracy and power) or a Sub Machine gun (bullets sprayed with low accuracy) the agents continue to make mince meat of the zombie hordes, dismembered limbs and blood filling the screen. When things get a little too hairy an adrenaline boost can be initiated to slow down time, making deadly shots easier to pull off. Let a zombie get too close and it’ll grapple you, with a strong shake of the Remote required to break free from its clutches. We’re told the game features over 20 blended death animations, ensuring a magnum to the head of a zombie looks just like you’d imagine. Zombies won’t give up without a fight though – remove a leg and it’ll drag its body along the ground forcing the player to dispense another round into its head.

Headstrong also says the game’s story will be important to the experience, with Call of Duty-like set pieces helping to move things along in cinematic fashion; During the Carnival of Fun level a ride explodes, sending one of its carriages hurtling towards the camera and narrowly missing the player. Other such scripted events will be regularly triggered ensuring moments without gun-fire maintain an edge-of-your seat excitement.

While the gameplay appears very much classic The House of the Dead stuff, it’s the presentation that sets it apart from its predecessors. Headstrong has taken the b-movie theme and run with it. Think Quentin Tarantino & Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse and you’re on your way to understanding Overkill. Everything is overexposed, giving rise to overdone bloom. An aged look has been achieved through film damage, green-tinted blacks and a heavy grain. Everything also looks more real than we’ve seen in previous HotD titles, with good use of motion blur, blood and gore mapping, plus dynamic lighting on gun fire helping to ensure it’s one of the more visually impressive Wii titles we’ve seen.

After successfully making it through the carnival our agents enter a large tent in which we glimpse a boss character. It’s a large mutant zombie with a second zombie growing from its midriff. Sadly the demo ends before the fight can begin, but we can expect plenty of these boss battles scattered throughout the story.

There was then time for a quick blast of two-player cooperative play, which ups the difficulty to compensate for the extra helping hand. This mode will feature a versus score system with the two players working together to take down the zombies, but also against each other to achieve a higher score. Here the game’s combo system – don’t miss and it’ll increase – will help separate the noobs from light-gun veterans.

There’s still plenty more that Headstrong and SEGA hasn’t revealed, too. We’re told that a currently unannounced game mode will require the use of two Wii Remotes and then there are the potential online elements such as leaderboards to think about.

It was a brief demo and there was no hands-on time, but The House of the Dead: Overkill was a great way to kick off Games Convention 2008. We’re loving the retro b-movie presentation and from what we could tell the Wii Remote shooting looks every bit as good as it felt with an arcade light gun. We were left a little disappointed by SEGA’s House of the Dead 2 & 3 Wii compilation, but have high hopes that Headstrong is onto a winner with Overkill.

The House of the Dead: Overkill is scheduled for release early in 2009 for Wii.