The House of the Dead: Overkill

The House of the Dead is a long-running light gun series that started life in arcades. You pop in a coin, pick up the plastic gun attached to the cabinet and then blast away as hordes of zombies come streaming toward you. The player has little or no control over the direction you move in, you just have to focus on blasting the slavering hordes to into bloody chunks.

Quite obviously the light-gun concept is an easy one to translate to the Wii as the motion sensitive controls are perfect for this kind of thing. Overkill is not the first light-gun game to hit Nintendo’s little white console, but it is by far the most successful.

Realising what a ridiculous concept they had, the developers of Overkill have gone way over in the top in the violence department. Limbs and chunks of flesh come flying off the monsters as you shoot them, and you rack up combos that increase the amount of gore on-screen.

Overkill is deliriously violent but with a knowingly trashy tongue-in-cheek attitude. Taking a cue from ‘grindhouse’ gore films the graphics have a washed-out sepia tone and scratches on the screen emulate cheap film stock. Yes, it’s violent and definitely not suitable for kids, but there’s nothing nasty about its jokey splatter-movie style.

Typically, light gun games are short, relying on a high difficulty to extend the life of the game. Overkill can be completed in about three hours the first time you play, which is actually a bit longer than most light-gun titles. What really ups the value though is all the extra content. There’s also a director’s cut option with new routes and enemies, and the score you rack up as you play is used to purchase increasingly powerful weapons.

Verdict: 8/10

There’s loads of over-the-top shooting violence to be had here. It’s a brilliant arcade blaster with plenty of extra content to bolster the main story mode.