The House of the Dead 2 & 3: The Return Review (WII)

The Dead return Home again…only to be shot with Wii remote!

The Nintendo Wii has been a revelation when it comes to light gun games, The introduction of the Wii Zapper (a sexy bit of white plastic that turns your remote and nunchuck into an good old fashioned light gun.) has seen games such as Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles and Ghost Squad re awaken gamers collective interest in the dying genre. The only time we saw light gun shooters where at the arcades. Now they are back in our living rooms.

HOTD 3 does look a lot better than HOTD 2, and features a shotgun…the only choice for a decerning zombie killer-Groovy!

The House of the Dead franchise gave us the chance to kill Zombies with an unrealistic looking plastic gun, and we loved it. There where four proper sequels (the fourth only available in the arcades as far as I know), and a few weird spin offs such as The Typing of the Dead.(and a crap movie as well!) But the wonderful people at Sega have decided to package the 2nd and 3rd iterations of the series onto a wii disc so we can in fact return to the house of the dead.

Now considering HOTD 2 originally came out on the greatest console ever(The Dreamcast of course-duh!) and if I remember correctly HOTD 3 was out on the original Xbox. It would not be too much to expect Sega to give these games a current gen make-over, to help it compete with the visuals from other games of the genre previously mentioned. I am sorry to inform you that they look exactly the same as they did all them years ago. Now the retro freaks about will be very excited as these games feature the same gameplay, bad voice acting, and now dated visuals that they remember, but as far as I’m concerned this is just laziness on Sega’s part, just a simple port, when a shiny makeover would have justified the new game price tag.

These games should be perfect for casual gamers, but are not due to the fact there is no save option, if you loose all your lives, it’s back to the start again, admittedly you do get an extra life to go again, but after getting so far in the story to be sent all the way back to the beginning is more than slightly annoying in this day and age. I know this is how the games where in the arcades and original console versions, but I would like to think that the games industry has moved since then.

I hate to sound negative about these two games, as I owned and loved them first time round, and was very excited once I heard they were coming out on the Wii. I just feel a bit let down, especially since Sega’s other light gun game -Ghost Squad was absolutely awesome- great graphics and great gameplay-short but sweet with unbelievable replay value and depth. If I hadn’t actually played this game I would have given it 10/10 just because of its pedigree. In case you are still interested, HOTD 3 does look a lot better than HOTD 2, and features a shotgun…the only choice for a decerning zombie killer-Groovy!