House of the Dead: OVERKILL
Now, as we all know the Wii is indeed in some need for third party games that aren’t a bunch of over-priced mini games. It also needs some games that are exclusive to get people more willing to buy into and play the console. This is exactly what House of the Dead: OVERKILL offers. Personally, I’ve been satisfied with my Wii, but those are some common complaints. Not only is that exactly what House of the Dead: OVERKILL is but it’s more. I grew up in the era of American arcade gaming. That means I played tons of pinball machines, fighters, racers, DDR, adventure, NeoGeo games, and rail shooters. I mostly played rail shooters. House of the Dead has always been my favorite series, but my second favorite rail shooter (My favorite being CarnEvil, but it never went past 1.). With OVERKILL House of the Dead has now become my favorite rail shooter series. It’s obvious OVERKILL creators are rail shooter fans themselves and looked at tons of rail shooters to inspire OVERKILL. Examples: It has the multiple item/ item power/fire rate system from Ghost Squad. Time Crisis, and Umbrella Chronicles. It obvious they took the good from a lot of rail shooters and made it better, they even took some bad ideas and made them better. They made some things up of their own, which pushes the competition even further. There were a tons of rail shooter firsts with this game. This is the first rail shooter that I’ve seen with bullet physics, recoil, and spray for all weapons and they were appropriate to the weapon. Like, a SMG has more recoil and spray then a handgun. The shotgun have more spray than the SMG and handgun together. Each weapon also has their own reload speed and firing rate that vary based on the weapon. They put a lot into the engine in this game. The recoil system also affects when you move. When the character is moving the recoil and spray greatly increase. The zombies are live actors, they aren’t on rails. I didn’t realize that until one time the game skipped past a zombie and I entered the next room. As I was shooting the zombies in the next room the one zombie I skipped came around and appeared into view and started to come towards me. Also the zombies never walk the same path all of the time. The zombies also adapt to which limb you shoot off. For instance, if you shoot them in the leg and/or knee and it doesn’t fall off then they start to limp on the leg that’s damaged. If you shoot a leg at the right spot it becomes unusable and they fall to the ground and crawl towards you. If you shoot off their arm they adapt and cover the arm that was shot off. This is also the first rail shooter I’ve seen where if you shoot someone in the head, no matter where at, is an instant kill. With the limbs that fly off they don’t vanish. They stay in the game and sometimes they fly off into the background and you’ll run over them later, or they’ll hit the wall and bounce off with mild force in the resisting direction. You can also shoot the limbs as they lie on the floor to get rid of them. They also took the bad self-moving camera choice from RE:UC and made it work better. It’s also trigger able so you can turn it off, on, or toggle it in game with the D-Pad. The reason it’s not bad in this one is it’s not so sensitive that when you try to reload you move the screen, or incredibly slow. It also knows how to stay put. If I turn the screen to the left then I move back to the center of the screen it still stays left, not quickly going back to the normal screen view. Also, there are movies and “Hold your fire” moments, like in every rail shooter, but they managed to fix these too! Every time one of them happens the game will reload your weapons. Yes, it’ll reload both for you. That’s such an amazing thing because I’ve had countless times people die on me because I had to reload. You can also fire off screen. Say you’re trying to shoot an item but it’s barely off screen, well now you can shoot off screen and the game counts where your cursor is really at in the world, which is another nice feature. The grenade system is nice as well. They took the House of the Dead 4 grenade system then upgraded it. They’ve a more realistic explosion, and they explode on impact now. So you no longer have to wait 3 seconds after throwing it with the zombies moving out of blast range to get a nice player-sandwich. There’s also tons of unlockables in the game. They call them “achievements” which is nice there’s some form of achievement in this game. It really causes you to play more because you want to unlock everything. The money system is pretty rough. It gets hard to get money in the game after a while, so save up and buy everything important first. There’s also an amazing bullet time feature in the game in which everything slows down. Voices, bullets, Wiimote sounds, yes everything slows down. Now lets get onto some negatives. It’s easy to tell they decided to add and change features later on in the game. This is easy to see because when going through the start of the game you’ll notice everything has a good amount of detail and fine touches, but later on quality drops. It really bugs me that as the game progresses it loses visual quality. There are some bad load times, especially if you got a defunct disk like mine, and the game freezes up at random. The developers have announced this problem and said it was because they packed so much onto the disk, but they didn’t get a dual-layer WiiDiskette. Sometimes the subtitles in the game flash by too quickly, like literally, there was a time where a full sentence shows up for 2 seconds then is gone. Then there’s dual wield mode. It’s literally a single player version of co-op. You need two Wiimotes and your P1 Wiimote will shoot your left hand weapon and P2 Wiimote will shoot your right hand. It’s literally a pointless mode to play, other then for the achievements. If you have two Wiimotes you’re better off playing co-op and getting 4 weapons as opposed to two. Dual Wield mode would be amazing if it supported two players. Then you and your friend could be firing 4 weapons at once. Yes, the game supports four Wiimotes (figured I’d let you know this) but when you select Dual Wield mode it blocks out the second player join button. Even with that bad stuff there’s still more to make up for it. There’s the amazing “70’s” sound-track. The Grind House horror style, which is done oh so well. The voice acting is synced up really nicely, and throughout the game there’s the movie flicker lines. You know for old movies the black lines that flicker across the screen. Well, this game has them and they’re not pre-generated. I’ve never run through a stage and realized the same sequence of lines on screen. The characters I also strongly believable and realistic. Some more annoying then others (Varla Gunns) some really badass (G). Also, this is one of the real mature games for the Wii. A lot of games get a “mature” rating but are really a teen game, but they get the mature rating because the Wii simulates the motions. There’s also a small amount of waggle. When certain zombies grab you, you have to waggle to break free and upon doing so you smash the zombie with what ever weapon you have and kill it. There’s tons of swearing, dirty jokes, and toilet humor through the game. I mean there’s TONS of swearing. The game opens up on the line “Wassup motherfucker!”. A few incest and necrophilia stuff as well. Also It has some cool minigames. I really only like one of them, and it makes up for the other two, it‘s called “Stay Alive“. You and up to three friends compete against each other wave after wave of zombies to see who can get the highest score. You all share health and the timer. As a heads up, to make this game easier, upgrade the AMS pistol. The other two are okay, one is a target practice range at a carnival, and the last one is you shoot zombies following civilians to save the civilians. Once the civilians get to the safe point they’re okay, but you’re each assigned a color to guard. As you see this game has some negatives, but way more positive things about it. I say House of the Dead: OVERKILL is a must buy for any Wii owner over the age of at least 15, or a really mature 13 year old. Everyone I know is shocked at the content of this game, especially with the ending and the final boss. I’m surprised they didn’t card me when I bought this as well, as it even says “Recommended for adults only” on the box. If I had to rate this game I’d give it a 100/100.
Even if you’re on the tip of buying the game is published by Sega, so you know there will be a price drop in at least 6 months, but this game is really worth the $50.
Am I this game’s target audience?: Yes
What is this game rated?: Mature (recommended 17+,18+ in other countries)
What the game really should’ve been rated?: Mature (I recommend 15+, and that’s even pushing it.)
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