The House of the Dead: Overkill
You like over-the-top zombie movies like Dawn of the Dead? Quentin Tarantino films like From Dusk till Dawn or Planet Terror by Robert Rodriguez? You hit your head with the Wii-mote when your girlfriend arrives with yet another mini-game compilation with stupid rabbits and wants to put it in your Wii? Then House of the Dead: Overkill is your bloody medicine!
The gameplay of this game exist literally out of this: aim your remote, shot one of more pieces of lead in the head of an undead creature and put a fat smile on your lips when another stupid movie goes completely over the top with all the clichés about zombies. Great fun with limbs, bloodclutters, braindead nurses with oversized cleavage and stinking fatties is yours.
If we weren’t clear yet, everything in this game is more over-the-top than when DoubleD describes showing his butt as “sexy”… The intro movie shows busty strippers, the two main characters are walking stereotypes of the tough black cop and the licked young FBI agent (both shouting the necessary typical tough remarks), explosions and absolute unnecessary violence cursing and gore are present in abundance and meanwhile your sound system pumps out a fantastic soundtrack that reminds of the better work from the grindhouse era.
Alone of with two you play Isaac Washington and Agent G. and need to take down top criminal Papa Caesar. You get some help from sex kitten Varla Guns, a former stripper, and together you’ll reduce tons and tons of hilarious mutants to small pieces. The latter are also quite varied (eventhough some more variation never hurts) and come to life as clowns, doctors, butchers, wanderers and sports heroes. To kill them as good as possible you don’t need to determine your path yourself as this of course happens automatically so that you can concentrate fully on the intense and fast gameplay. Next to shooting you can also collect stuff like gold-colored brains or used grenades and try to activate “bullet time”.
And there’s plenty to do! There are quite a lot of levels that can easily be replayed, you’ll unlock and upgrade new weapons, there are some minigames (for four players) and you can unlock some goodies like concepts and 3D models. Levels can also be added with more mutants (handy for playing co-op with two) and if you’re shooting enough the Director’s Cut version of those levels will become available adding new pieces as so-called “deleted scenes”.
Graphically this isn’t only a pearl of good art direction but also technically everything is good. One of the more beautiful Wii games that we’ve played until now and on top of that you get realistic damage models on the zombies (arms, heads and legs fly around nicely) and also the textures are quite decent. Only the framedrops now and then can bother, especially as these can make you miss a headshot. No whining in that case though as the difficulty degree isn’t bad at all and the continues in the normal mode bring help for the less accurate sharp shooters amongst us.
The House of the Dead Overkill is a brilliant game. Not pretentious, with solid gameplay and plenty of content, beautiful graphics (for the Wii), a truly amazing soundtrack and a grindhouse-zombie atmosphere that’s as cool as it is over the top and unequalled on console. If you’re not afraid of swearing, blood flying around, blown up brains and half a boob then you just have to put this one in your Wii and numb down your intelligence to zero. Enjoy the show!
8.0