Reviews// Splatterhouse

However, as you collect more and more blood, you can spend it on further series of new attacks, throws, dodges and combos. With charging shoulder barges, elaborate grabs and ever more powerful blows, there’s a decent selection of upgrades.

Banks a Billion
Take too much damage in combat and you can use one of your blood banks by sucking health from the surrounding monsters. With fearsomely powerful enemies, even early on, you’ll quickly learn to take advantage of this. Take too many hits and you can see your body disintegrating. Bones are exposed and occasionally your arm will fall off. But this is Splatterhouse, so you simply pick it up and continue to bash monsters over the head with it.

Like the rest of the weapons – from nail-bats to lead pipes, cleavers and knives – your lost limbs are only usable for a limited amount of time before degrading, but they up the damage considerably for their lifespan. Oh, and it’s worth noting that the original’s iconic chainsaw makes a return too. That one is particularly messy.

Perhaps the most interesting moves, however, are the Splatter Kills. Weaken an enemy sufficiently and a sharp red outline will appear around its body, indicating that the move is available. A quick click of the B button (on Xbox 360) and you are whisked into a QuickTime Event (QTE) screen that tasks you with following some directional analogue-stick prompts.

Splatter Kills
These Splatter Kills take the violence to a new level. One sees you ripping open an enemy’s face from the jaw before plunging your arm into its neck and yanking out its spinal column - complete with attached organs. Another sees you ripping its body in half as a hail of viscera squirts out. Yet another sees you jamming your arm up its sphincter. I’m sure you get the point by now.

The Splatter Kills work as a neat metaphor for the rest of the game. They’re queasily chucklesome the first time, but as there are only a few of them they become tired pretty quickly. Just like Splatterhouse itself, the juvenile charm wears off fast.

The level design is of the old-school variety, often locking you in a room until you’ve taken out the desired number of ghoulish monsters, or you've flicked a lever or mechanism by squishing something onto it. It’s solid, yet routinely uninspired stuff. Indeed, the only real change of pace comes in the form of some poorly-implemented 2D platform sequences.

Yet another nod to the game’s lineage, these sections are frustratingly poor. They improve as you progress. But thanks to a combination of tough level design and crappy jumping, they are little more than annoyances.

It’s worth reiterating that this isn’t a terrible game. Far from it. Aside from the 2D sections – and some minor graphical niggles – everything works perfectly well. With a tough campaign of around 10 hours, an enemy wave survival mode and some suitably titillating collectibles scattered around the mansion, it’s a decent package. There are even ports of the original two Splatterhouse games on the disc. But it is a depressingly one-note experience, a gimmicky button-mashing grind.

Conclusion
It’s Splatterhouse’s slavish dedication to the past that ultimately undoes the experience. It’s a perfectly serviceable brawler, with satisfyingly squelchy combat and a decent range of options and modes. But it’s far too retrogressive, with no ideas beyond ramping up the gore-drenched presentation to a fairly ludicrous degree. It’s fan-service to a game that arguably didn’t deserve such reverence in the first place. If you think the grizzly scenes of dismemberment will sustain your interest, then go for it. But there are far better brawlers out there.

SPOnGScore: 69%