House of the Dead: Overkill - Game Review

At a certain point in the rail shooter House of the Dead: Overkill, you will hear a song about a man making out with a zombie. It’s a pretty gross song, yet it is also a perfect example of what is both good and bad about Overkill. It is a game that, like the song, is both clever and dumb, a game that could best be described as stylishly stupid.

The game is presented as a cheesy 1970s horror movie. Overkill has the look of an old, scratched-up print of a Roger Corman movie, broken up into chapters that take place in varied locations including a moving train and a carnival populated by zombie clowns. The soundtrack is an impressive mix of soul and heavy metal songs that beautifully recreate and mock that era.

The game is presented as a cheesy 1970s horror movie. Overkill has the look of an old, scratched-up print of a Roger Corman movie. The soundtrack is an impressive mix of soul and heavy metal songs that beautifully recreate and mock that era.

The game follows the adventures of Agent “G” and Isaac Washington as they pursue madmen who have somehow turned thousands of people into zombies. The also spend time bantering stripper Varla Guns, whose brother they kill early in the game.

The gleefully cheesy story and self-referential dialogue are fun but not always funny. Washington’s profanity-laced speech is never as humorous as the writers think it is and much of the humor falls flat. The game does have its moments though, as when the agents meet a creepy prison warden or have an intellectual conversation about whether the game they’re in contains symbolic misogyny.

In terms of gameplay, Overkill is a standard rail shooter, which means you have no control over where you travel. The game drags you into a room, pauses while you shoot the zombies that swarm you from every direction, and then drags you into another room.

The player simply points the Wii remote at the screen and presses the B button to shoot zombies. This is more fun if you have a light-gun shell, a gun-shaped piece of plastic that holds the remote. (I used the Nerf “Switch Shot EX-3” that came with the middling light-gun Wii game Nerf N-Strike.)

Besides zombies, you can shoot the occasional power up, like a glowing green object that slows time, or another that regenerates health.

I died quite often while playing Overkill, but this was only a minor hindrance. The player gains points for killing zombies, and while these points can be used to buy better weapons (the game became much easier once I got the shotgun), you can also spend points each time you die to continue on with full health. This will doubtless irk hardcore gamers, who enjoy playing the same level over and over to perfect it, but it was a feature I great appreciated. Once you beat the game you can play in the “director’s cut” mode, which contains longer, more difficult versions of each mission. This is the hardcore version of the game, so it caps the number of retries you’re allowed.

While Overkill is generally very nicely done, there are a few defects. Some locations are so poorly lit that you can barely see your attackers. The quickest way to kill a zombie is with a bullet to the head, so it is very frustrating when you can’t tell where the head is.

The game also has some disappointing boss battles. They are not all bad – I particularly enjoyed fighting a guy with a second head sticking out of his stomach – but battles are often repetitive and drawn out, and the final fight is, disappointingly, the easiest of the game.

For the most part, though, Overkill is an entertaining mix of adrenaline pumping excitement and stylish presentation, with excellent graphics and one of the best soundtracks of any game I’ve played. Ultimately, you have to love a game that contains a song about zombie love, even if the song itself makes you a little queasy.