PLATFORM: SWITCH | RELEASE DATE: 7TH APRIL
Currently exclusive to the Switch (you’ll see why very shortly), this is a full-on remake of the 1996 arcade game that follows two agents as they investigate an old mansion in which a mad scientist is conducting some macabre experiments. Conceived as an adult-oriented version of the popular-at-the-time Virtua Cop, House of the Dead is an on-rails shooting gallery where players would use a lightgun to blast away at zombies, monsters and other assorted mutants en route to the eventual showdown with the final boss.
While actual replica guns were used to control the original arcade game, modern consoles and home set-ups generally don’t cater for fancy peripherals. The Switch’s gyro controls, however, do an admirable job of tracking your movements and are a perfectly acceptable stand-in for a chunky plastic gun. You don’t even have to wave your arms around like a lunatic if you don’t want to – standard thumbstick aiming is also available (and it’s the only option if you’re playing in handheld mode), and the control schemes can be swapped between at the touch of a button, and you can even use a combination of both if you want to. Whichever method you choose, the analog controls are nicely responsive and the gyro aiming works really well.
House of the Dead‘s “story mode” is fairly short, consisting of just four levels, but it’s a heck of a wild ride. Admittedly it might not be the best looking game you’ve ever seen (landing somewhere around the early PS3 era in the visuals department), but its frantic pace, newly-recorded metal / spooky high energy dance soundtrack and the general mayhem caused by monsters roaring and screaming all over the place make for a hellishly exciting half an hour. While popping zombie heads might be your main concern while playing, there are also civilians to rescue and bonus points to get hold of. You’re constantly kept occupied by shooting everything in sight in the hope of finding a secret or a new weapon or just setting a new high score, all of which also play a big part in encouraging you to go for repeat playthroughs.
This remake packs in a crazy amount of new features that would have either been unnecessary or impossible in the arcade original but are almost expected in modern console titles. Two different score modes, adjustable difficulty settings, competitive and cooperative multiplayer and an ultra-chaotic and unfeasibly difficult “horde” mode that increases the amount of enemies on screen all offer different ways to play as well as varying degrees of challenge. Elsewhere, there’s a statistics tracker (always fun to look at those!), a huge range of options that enable you to customise pretty much every element of the game from how it performs to the sensitivity of the gyro aiming, and a “Creature Library” that gives you information about the various enemies and allows you to get up close and personal with their character models. The library also houses your achievement collection which rewards you with secret codes for meeting various objectives, as well as a mysterious cabinet whose secrets are yours to discover… The photo mode is another welcome addition, complete with postprocessing filters and the capability to capture some really amusing facial expressions, but it’s a shame that it doesn’t seem to be possible to hide the UI before taking a screenshot, leaving your photos cluttered with information about the camera controls. That might be the very smallest of nitpicks, but it shows how far you have to go to find something to grumble about!
The House of the Read Remake has clearly had a lot of love put into it, as well as way more effort than many other remakes. It’s a fantastic revival of an old favourite, and the various ways that the original game has been updated and expanded upon add a lot of value to the overall package. Here’s hoping that later HotD titles might also make their way to the Switch at some point in the future!
