The House of the Dead is hands down my favourite arcade – and one of my favourite in all of gaming – games ever, so to say I was excited for Remake is an understatement. I have a lot of fond memories playing this with my brother when we were kids, and I still have a CRT and Sega Saturn set up at home to play it on every now and again. I think that MegaPixel have done a pretty good job is bringing back for the modern day, albeit with one or two pretty significant drawbacks.
The best part here – aside from having the game at all – are clearly the updated visual elements. Their previous work on Panzer Dragoon looked great, and they’ve taken that same ethos and applied it here. Is it going to challenge to likes of Resident Evil 2 Remake? Absolutely not. But for what we needed here it is still a great looking game. Zombie limbs and heads pop off with satisfying ease, and the fluid frame rate and far denser environments outshine not only the Saturn version (which, for as much as I love it, was a pale imitation of the arcade game in terms of visuals) but even the still great looking Model-2 arcade version. The slightly redesigned zombies keep what made them so distinct, and seeing the Curien Mansion, Labs, and the surrounding areas in such better detail has been a thrill.
Outside of the visuals the game is exactly as we remember it, down to zombie placement, hidden item chests, and the excellent multiple routes to go through. It’s been at least a year or so since I turned on the Saturn version but from the word go I found myself still able to know what to expect next and was never disappointed. The nostalgia is strong here for sure but even if you’ve not played it before there is still a lot of fun to be had in the gameplay. Being an arcade lightgun-based experience HotD is all about the quick thrills, so zombies are thrown at us constantly, with lots of quick turns and sneak attacks to watch out for. A full run through the four stages on offer will only take about 45 minutes, with the incentive of high scores or those alternate routes the driver for replaying the game over and over.
We’re given two modes of play in HotDR; Arcade and Horde. This is where I must start to voice some disappointment. These modes are great fun – both modes follow the original arcade experience but Horde just adds in a shit-ton more enemies to kill – but it’s a shame we didn’t get a version of the excellent Saturn Mode that was in the Saturn’s home release. This gave us extra characters to use each with their own weapons and perks. There are other guns to find and use, but having this Saturn mode, or even a Boss Rush mode, would have just been that little bit more awesome.
My main disappointment though is the obvious: no lightgun support. I’ll not go into how much I want lightgun gaming to return right now, but the short version is that HotD just isn’t the same when playing with a controller. Sure, the game follows the same trajectory and rhythm but having a cursor to drag around the screen and being able to basically fire indefinitely thanks to having the fire and reload triggers at our disposal loses some of the excitement and challenge. The final Magician boss fight used to be a bane of my existence – here, I simply left the cursor in the right spot and hammered the triggers, only occasionally moving it to defend his orb attack.
Don’t get me wrong, I still am having a blast playing through the game again, but there’s constantly that niggle that I could be using the excellent PDP Mars lightgun sitting on my shelf. I’m hoping against hope that we can get some sort of patch later on to support it, but even PDP themselves seem to have already given up on the gun so it’s not looking good. Lightguns aren’t easy to get working on modern displays, so I understand why it has been omitted but if any game was calling out for support, it was House of the Dead.
Conclusion
As much as I’m left wanting for proper lightgun support – and a few extra modes – I can’t deny being utterly thrilled to see The House of the Dead back on my screen. The visual up-spuff is great, and MegaPixel have remained as true as they possibly could to the original game’s gameplay and beats. Even using a controller HotD is great fun, and those who haven’t spent the best part of 25 years playing it will just be treated to a gloriously fun arcade experience.
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This game was reviewed based on Xbox One review code, using an Xbox Series S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
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