The House of the Dead: Overkill Extended Cut Review

The lightgun shooter genre has, let’s be honest, stagnated a little. The glory days of Virtua Cop and Time Crisis seemed gone for good, leaving us with half-decent Wii/PlayStation Move games. What we didn’t see coming in 2009 was Headstrong and SEGA’s superb B-movie take on the long-running House of the Dead series. Now ported over to the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Move, this bloody, gory, crude, profanity-filled lightgun shooter will hopefully find a bigger audience. House of the Dead games have always been badly acted and somewhat ridiculous, but Overkill makes the most of this quite brilliantly.

There’s nothing overly complex about the game. Agent G, a slick rookie agent, and Isaac Washington, a completely stereotypical f-bomb dropping, macho American, turn up at a mansion and from then on you’re blasting zombies through nine insane levels – presented as short-run movies in the style of the Grindhouse double feature from Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. Take one moment of Overkill seriously and you’d be completely missing the point. The plot and events that take place in Overkill beggar belief, with a final moment that had a few of us in the office looking agog at the screen, equally in shock and horror. Having played through the game a second time now on PS3, the experience remains joyfully disgusting.

Washington steals the show from the moment he opens his mouth for the first time, just seconds into the game. This guy is very emotional and says exactly what’s on his mind, which is usually a torrent of often hilariously foul language. Combine this with some brilliant evil characters, Varla Guns, the female eye-candy, and Papa Caesar, a somewhat demented crime lord, and you’ve got a game that only the biggest prude would fail to enjoy.

B-movie cool can only carry the game so far though, so thankfully the classic lightgun gameplay has been given a new lease of life here. You’re still only pointing and shooting (with a small amount of free-look if you move the cursor to the edge of the screen), but the levels have been made with all the aplomb of SEGA or Namco back in the golden age. The nine levels will only take about four hours to blast your way through, but it’s a thrilling experience.

Weapons (of which the PS3 version features new ones not seen in the Wii game) and upgrades can be bought using money earned through your performances, and this adds a small amount of tactics to proceedings. Your default pistol can be upgraded to become a more than handy death dealer, but there’s no question that a nicely upgraded shotgun, or better yet an automatic shotgun, does the job a lot better. What you need to consider is that score equals cash at the end of each level, and you get a better score by increasing your combo – the number of kills in a row without missing.

A machine gun might wipe out a room of zombies very easily, but it’s also going to miss a lot and prevent you from scoring as many points as you could. On the other hand, while you can continue as many times as you like, each continue costs you half your score on that level up to that point, so maybe a saved life at the cost of a lost combo is worth it. In a great move by Headstrong the completed main campaign isn’t the end of things, with an unlocked Director’s Cut mode changing the rules slightly. No longer are you able to spam continues (not that most experienced gamers will die too often on their first run through), with a limit of three per level introduced.

With this extended, harder game mode, two-player co-op play throughout both campaigns and a handful of mini-games that support up to four players, there really is more here than most lightgun shooter fans could have hoped for. My favourite mini-game is the brutal Victim Support, in which you must try to help civilians reach exits by shooting the ultra violent zombies trying to clobber them. There’s also a survival mode, in which you need to shoot as many zombies as possible until you’re dead or the time runs out, and a fairground style target shooting game.

On the Wii Overkill was a great looking game, and this has carried over well to the PlayStation 3. What we’ve got clearly isn’t a game designed from the ground up for the PS3, but it’s a step up over the original thanks to a raft of improvements across the board – with the lighting in particular standing out for praise. 3D is also supported, either through a new 3D TV or the old-fashioned coloured glasses. The 3D TV option is far superior, as you might expect, and actually adds a considerable amount to the overall experience, with objects and characters often coming right out of the screen.

The soundtrack and voice acting deserve a special mention too, as the two have been handled perfectly. The tunes fit the tone of the game to a tee and regularly raise a smile, while the script and delivery ranges from mildly amusing to the kind of stuff I struggled to believe was actually happening.

New to the PS3 game is Candy Striper, girlfriend of Varla’s wheelchair-bound brother. She, along with Varla, receives two exclusive levels that blend well into the overall story. There’s also much-needed online leaderboard support, giving the PS3 version that competitive angle that the Wii game lacked. Collectible item hunters will also be pleased to hear that there are loads of new ones to find here – although I often struggled to spot them. The game can also be played using the DualShock controller, but unless you’ve got PlayStation Move I’d advise staying clear.

As long as you’re not offended by strong language and an extreme amount of blood (trust me, this is one of the most obscene games I’ve ever played) Overkill should be added to your collection as soon as possible. For a lightgun shooter you’ll get a great deal of time from the main campaigns, and there are plenty of unlockables and multiplayer modes to keep you coming back. Should you buy House of the Dead: Overkill? Of course you mother fu***ng should!