House of the Dead will ring a bell if you were apart of quarter inserting addicts that made up of the 90s arcade scene, one of the most famous light gun games was the House of the Dead series along other mainstays like Virtua Cop and Time Crisis. If you haven’t heard of House of the Dead from the arcade then you may have heard of the loosely tied movies of the same name that Hollywood borrowed to make some lackluster efforts to convert a bad video game story into a big screen feature. Either way, House of the Dead has some name recognition either way you look at it as game or movie. Now with the Playstation Move, one of the types of games that seem tailored for the accessory is the light gun game bringing a port of the 2002 arcade game, House of the Dead 3. Will this 10-year-old port work out well on this quite different accessory or will this quarter guzzler fall short of delivering.
If you haven’t played a House of the Dead game before then you might not know that each game has a different gun as a theme. This time around the theme gun ‘de jour’ is the shotgun. So if you’re a fan of shotguns then you’ll be getting plenty of this semi-automatic weapon, if you’re not then maybe this game isn’t for you. The game isn’t especially lasting having 6 levels which if done right will take less than hour with the skill to back it up. The levels are pretty straight forward so once you’ve mastered them you will have very little incentive to go back. You have that one shotgun with unlimited ammo; you go about the levels shooting the zombies standing in your way. The play modes are relatively few, where you can pick between free play or ranked which registers your score online. The only other options available if you want to play through the levels for score or trying to get through them as fast as possible. Keep in mind that all the levels are on rails so the time trial just depends on you not dying and shooting as fast as possible. Now as far as short and rather straightforward games go it’s rather fun, though not exactly varied. You’ll get sudden prompts to save people by shooting nearby enemy and some bosses will break up the basic gunplay but other it’s as simple as shooting the bad guys and enjoying when blood comes out of them. I should note that I had some trouble calibrating the move controller to work with game though I’m not 100% whether the game or the eyesight were at fault so I won’t judge it too harshly.
The graphics are over 10 years out of date and you can definitely see that here since besides the upconverting to 1080p there haven’t been any efforts to upgrade it from an Xbox era game. What was probably was cutting edge at the time, only cuts it because it’s being sold as a cheap downloadable game rather than a full retail release where the graphics would be low tier. The voice acting is painfully bad and I could definitely that they tell the cheapest voice actors were hired to tell what little story the game has and should largely be ignored. The sound effects are quite passible though are what you’d expect from your horror based gunplay, while delivering acceptable though somewhat clichéd sounds to add your environment. Nothing is really standing out in the presentation of this rather old game.
When it all comes down to it House of the Dead 3 is a trip down memory lane for all the bad and good the light gun genre had to offer. While it’s not a masterpiece by any means it’s not that pricey at $6.99 and I can think of worse things than shooting some zombies for a few hours.
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