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If Mario, Princess Peach and the rest of Nintendo’s chirpy, family-friendly characters got a glimpse of the Wii blast-em-up game House of the Dead: Overkill, they’d probably be committed to a Mushroom Kingdom mental institution.
Overkill is one of the rare adult-oriented games for Nintendo’s wee white console; hell, it actually begins with a scantily clad stripper writhing and licking a Wii Remote like a sex toy. From start to finish it’s an unapologetic ride of guns, gore and other grotesquitudes, not to mention an entire Scorsese movie’s worth of f-bombs in just about every possible linguistic permutation.
Pokemon this ain’t. And that’s not such a bad thing.
If you’ve somehow never played a House of the Dead game in an arcade or on a home console, Overkill (technically the fifth game in the 12-year-old series) is what’s sometimes dubbed a “rail shooter,” because your character’s movement is locked onto a preset path through each level, and all you control is the aiming of his gun.
It may sound restricting, but it can actually be quite freeing. Because you have one job and one job only: Shoot everything until it collapses into a pool of twitching crimson.
Overkill owes a none- too-subtle debt to the 2007 flick Grindhouse, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s double feature homage to sleazy, cheesy B-movies of the ’70s. From a scratched-film effect to the overblown movie trailer intros that kick off each new level, it’s milking every drop of sweaty, self- referential fun that it can.
But hey, it works. Playing as Agent G or his trash- talking new partner Isaac Washington, you’re tasked with chasing down a crime lord responsible for mutating ordinary Louisiana folk into murderous zombies. The variety of the environments you travel through (there’s something deeply satisfying about shooting psychotic clowns in an amusement park) and the constant hordes of bloodthirsty foes keep the game engaging from start to finish.
Overkill is far from perfect, though. The biggest problems stem from the Wii itself — the visuals are frequently butt-ugly and the game occasionally hiccups with split-second pauses when the action gets intense, especially in the two-player co-op mode.
But then it’s the Wii’s trademark motion-sensing controls that make point- and-shoot games like Overkill possible in the first place. It definitely cries out to be played with the Wii Zapper lightgun accessory (they sell for about $20 apiece), unless you want to feel like you’re facing off against hordes of mutants with the world’s most deadly TV clicker.
Despite its fairly plentiful flaws, I enjoyed Overkill more than any House of the Dead game before it. Playing the zombie-killing cliche for foul- mouthed laughs instead of the wooden earnestness of the earlier titles is ingenious. Yeah, the constant swearing and unskippable, too- Tarantino-for-their-own- good monologues eventually get grating, and sure, the game is almost criminally short — two players working together will blow through the main story mode in four hours, tops.
Still, it’s one of those rare games that offers a new take on a long-running series by coming at it from a completely fresh, slightly twisted angle. Like the B-movies that inspired it, House of the Dead: Overkill is gooey, fleeting fun.
3 1/2 stars
BottomLine
Although shockingly short and burdened with a host of small flaws, House of the Dead: Overkill has a kind of blood-drenched, foul-mouthed charm that adds new life to this classic game series.