Reviews// House of the Dead: Overkill

So, HotD doesn't have much competition, which may be why the developers don't feel an overwhelming compulsion to raise their game. Which is a shame. Because while HotD:O is undeniably great fun, it's not technically nor artistically a major tour de force. But what it does do is live with the graphical limitations of the Wii, and provide the whole package with a combination of sharp dialogue, interesting storyline and creative art direction to position it as a Grindhouse-style b-movie.

The Tarantino influences are laughably transparent, but Headstrong games has done a good job with them. The dialogue is at once hackneyed and formulaic while also being sharp and humorous. HotD:O reaches deep into the barrel of horror b-movie cliché and scrapes its hand long and hard along the bottom of the barrel, then dredges up whatever it finds there. But it treats the resulting melange in a way that is at once self referential and post-ironic.

It throws the whole lot plus the kitchen sink into the mix. The game starts with a grinding metal tune while a lasciviously and scantily leather-clad woman grinds on a metal pole. The game is clad in the trappings of a movie, and the cut scenes have just the right amount of narrative to maintain the pretence. The soundtrack and some purposefully and humorously botched editing - a la Tarantino's Grindhouse - merely add to the artifice.

The heroes of the game, who you get to control in one, and co-operative two-player, modes are the permanently be-sun-spectacled special agent called simply "G" (who I like to think would be played by Keanu Reeves in the movie of of the pseudo-movie game) and a muscular black dood who goes by the somewhat stereotypical name of Isaac Washington.

Washington does everything else stereotypically too, including using the word 'motherfucker' at least once in every sentence, and twice on Sundays. But it's all for a good cause, and despite the spoiler warning at the top of this review, we're going to keep that one a secret.

Agent G is the protagonist of the other House of the Dead games and this one, which is supposedly set in 1991, acts as a prequel to the previous games in the series.

Other major NPCs include Varla Guns, a stripper with pneumatic breasts and interesting tattoos; and Papa Caesar the ostensible villain of the piece (played by Burt Reynolds in our imaginary film-game film tie-in). You'll meet more characters towards the end, but I'll leave them for a surprise.

The weapon aiming, the key feature of any gun game, is disappointingly vague. No matter how many times I re-calibrated my controller, there was still a dead spot at the bottom right of the screen where I simply could not get my cursor to reliably track. This turned out not to be too important since most of the action is in and around the middle of the screen.

Indeed, the action is on rails - quite literally at one or two points in the game - and keeping your cursor firmly aimed at the screen centre is the appropriate course of action to be prepared for the next wave of zombies. But the cursor movement felt slightly laggy and imprecise; kind of like early PlayStation gun games, before Namco brought out the definitive GunCon accessory. Since the Wii is a spatial controller-based console, this woolliness is barely forgiveable.