Reviews// House of the Dead: Overkill

As you progress through the game, you can upgrade your arsenal between levels by visiting the gun shop. Buying guns costs dollars, and you get dollars by converting your points, which you earn during the course of the level. Shooting zombies gets you points. Chaining your kills into combos gets you more points, doing it consistently gets you a Goregasm (see what they did there!?) where each kill racks up 1,000 points!

In the gun shop, you can either improve the performance of your current weapon (the cheaper option) or purchase a new one. You can equip two weapons and swap between the two using the '1' or '2' buttons.

If you die, which you do by getting your health meter down to zero, you get the option to buy back in for half your collected credits - which makes dying towards the end of a level more of a penalty than dying earlier.

There are health pick-ups, but you'll have to react fast to get them because the on-rails system whips your point of view past them in double quick time. The same is true of the other pick ups: Golden Brains (score bonus), grenades (self explanatory) and Slow Mo-Fo mode. This last pick up slows down the action, giving you time to aim for head shots. But your own reloading takes longer too, so the benefit is somewhat diminished.

The bosses are quite easy to beat once you work out the correct strategy - which is usually no great struggle. The boss-level intro screen identifies their vulnerable points, and it's simply a case of hitting these while the on-rails movement keeps you relatively safe from danger. The hardest boss, to my mind, was the screamer, and she is encountered fairly early in the game.

The real key to the game is simultaneous two-player mode. It's both more fun and easier to complete the HoTD:O when someone is helping you cut down the zombies. But once you've completed it, there's always the Director's Cut mode, which has more zombies. And once you've completed it in that mode, you can play it in two-handed single-player mode, with a controller in each hand giving you twice the fire power.

SPOnG score: 78%
Conclusion
House of the Dead: Overkill is rollicking good fun. As all House of the Dead games have been. But it's hardly pushing the boundaries graphically. It brings enough new features to the series to keep old hands interested, and it's enough fun to convince ingénues. Despite its quirky humour and compelling packaging, it's too short and too frustratingly imprecise to warrant classic game status. But it's too much fun for any fan of the genre to ignore.