The The House of The Dead: Remake (Switch)
By: Forever
IN LATE-80s Northern Ireland, while adults were waving firearms about outside, their kids were doing likewise in front of the telly, albeit with bright orange guns aimed at cartoon ducks.
Gun gallery games are probably the oldest form of "arcade", having entertained halfwits at carnivals as far back as the late 19th century. With light gun tech, the genre reached its electronic peak in the mid-80s thanks to Nintendo's Duck Hunt and Operation Wolf, which I fondly recall pumping coins into in Omeath as a kid.
Through the 90s, it was Sega who kept the home fires burning with their 1997 hit The House of The Dead making the biggest splash. Spawning countless sequels and spin-offs (infamously Typing of The Dead, which replaced the gun with a keyboard to encourage QWERTY skills), The House of The Dead arguably did even more than Resident Evil in resurrecting the zombie as a pop culture icon and introduced the 'fast running' variant five years before Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later.
Following government agents Thomas Rogan and G, our finely-tailored Feds investigate the mansion of dead-raising geneticist Dr Curien. With a gossamer thin premise, The House of The Dead essentially involves shooting the gaff up, helping any researchers en route to each of its four levels' bosses.
As the quintessential zombie buster, this Switch re-make once again offers an hour or so of mutant slaughter, endlessly yanking your trigger finger through a gore explosion as an army of corpses, monsters and horrible dialogue attack you.
Rather than spray and pray, every bullet from your pistol counts, with headshots earning bonus points and saving scientists upping your health. Two player action and a Horde mode help pad out what's a fairly slight prospect – most play-throughs will last around 45 minutes.
With three different endings and multiple paths to be taken, THOTD offers the same twitchy, on-your-toes gameplay that coaxed coin-rich oiks to late-90s arcades. It's The House of The Dead as you remember it, but with some of the last century ugliness shaved off.
Built from the ground up, it all looks swish enough while retaining the chunky models and animatronic animations of the original. The only drawback is, predictably, in its controls. Designed as a light gun game, the Switch controllers' gyros attempt to replicate the freedom of wielding a make-believe pistol, but the targeting constantly wanders and requires recalibration.
Of course, you can also simply move a target around the screen with the analogue stick, but what's the point in that? A gun game without the gun is just a game, but The House of The Dead is still one of the Switch's guiltiest pleasures, best recommended to fans of the original prepared to forgive its sins. Though I do miss brandishing a chunky plastic weapon...
