Game Review: The House of the Dead Remake

If you ever ventured into your local arcade or entertainment venue in the in the late 90’s or early 2000’s, then you will have likely seen or played the iconic arcade light-gun game; The House of the Dead.  Where Resident Evil was driving the zombie craze on home consoles at the time, The House of the Dead helped generate it in the arcades with its gory visuals and fast-paced gunplay. The original entry in the series was an instant hit both in Japan and across western territories, becoming the highest grossing arcade unit the year following its release in Japan.  The success of the first entry warranted SEGA to get to work on producing a plethora of sequels and home-console ports for the franchise which are still being released to this very day.  One of the more recent releases is the topic of this particular review; The House of the Dead Remake.

Developed by Polish developer MegaPixel Studio and published by Forever Entertainment under license by SEGA, The House of the Dead Remake released in April 2022 across Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 Xbox One, PC and Stadia (Remember that misfire?). Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 ports soon followed in September 2022 and January 2023 respectively. Upon release, the game was not well received by critics, amassing an underwhelming 61 aggregate score on OpenCritic. I couldn’t find anything from MegaPixel or SEGA regarding the total sales of the title but I can only assume it did meet expectations considering they were able to develop a remake to the 2nd entry soon after.

The narrative of The House of the Dead Remake follows Agent Thomas Rogan and his partner “G” who work for the United States agency titled AMS. Rogan receives a distress call from his fiancée Sophie Richards who is in Europe investigating a renowned biochemist by the name of Dr Curien.  Curien’s desire to explore the boundaries of life and death drove him mad as he began to genetically engineer creatures in his underground lab at his grand mansion.  Heading to the mansion, the duo of agents discovers Curien’s experiments have broken loose from the lab and have begun to wreak havoc on the scientists who work there.  Witnessing Sophie get kidnapped right in front of them by one of Curien’s creatures, Rogan and “G” gear up to shoot their way through this estate to save her and put a stop to the mad doctor’s schemes before its too late. 

As with most arcade games, there isn’t really much effort to define the narrative outside of the intro cutscene.  I appreciate the format of these kind of games doesn’t really offer much in the way of narrative opportunities so I can’t hold too much against it for that. The setup is fairly generic for the most part though, a scientist goes mad and goes too far with his experiments which eventually break out and cause havoc; it’s all fairly well-trodden stuff which doesn’t offer much originality to avoid comparisons to that other big zombie game at the time. What I find to be the saving grace of the game though, whether intentional or not was its ridiculous tone.  The way the course of the game progresses from shooting zombies to shooting mechanically engineered monstrosities is silly in quite an endearing way.  It helps that the voice acting for the game is so awful that you can’t help but find it funny in an ironic way.  From what I understand these were all aspects found in the original version too, so I appreciate MegaPixel’s devotion to keep the core impression of the game the same; even if it is really silly.

The game allows you to play through its four-chapter structure either solo or with a friend as you work your way through each level, dispatching varying enemies and facing a noteworthy boss at the end of each one. I have to remind myself the games structure is a reflection of the original game’s arcade design but for a game that is listed at $33.49 CAD full price, MegaPixel really should have made more of an effort to add more substantial content to the game. You have the option to play through the game in either regular story mode with all the same encounters from the original arcade game or you can play it in Horde mode which ramps up the number of zombies on screen at one time and makes them considerably harder to take down. Combine this with the difficulty settings and additional weapons/cheats you can utilize, there’s at least some small level of replayability to be found here, though ultimately the level of content still comes off as shallow and not worth the full price as a result. 

Unlike the original House of the Dead game though, you sadly won’t be playing this game via a light gun arcade cabinet and I do think this adds to the overall jank the game’s controls suffer from as a result.  Don’t get me wrong, MegaPixel clearly made an effort to offer the player as many options to play the game in a way that felt comfortable to them.  You can play it standard by moving the cursor with the analogue sticks and firing or you can enable gyro controls which will allow you to aim by moving the controller with motion to control the cursor.  If you have the game on PlayStation 4, the game even offers PlayStation Move support to try give you an even more immersive way to play. I won’t fault MegaPixel for trying to accommodate all types of play, though I still feel the controls put up notable resistance that makes it feel more like you’re fighting them than the actual monsters.

I also have to note the visual side of the game as well, which I feel comes off as quite cheap, like it was made utilizing a free open-source game engine rather than a dedicated or licensed one. Don’t get me wrong, I know this series has never had much to offer graphically, especially when we’re talking about the original game; but there’s just something oddly ugly about the presentation of the game’s graphics.  I appreciate SEGA lost the original source code for the game so a lot of the visuals and animations had to be crafted from the ground up and maybe I should be a little more forgiving of MegaPixel as a result of that limitation. Due to licensing issues, MegaPixel weren’t able to utilize the original score by Tetsuya Kawauchi so Sébastien Poncelet stepped in to recreate the soundtrack in a way that was legally distinct but still familiar enough to emulate the same core sound.  The score is impressive on that that feat alone, but I appreciate how energetic and fun it is as well.

If you’re a devoted fan of the original House of the Dead game then I feel the remake will definitely satisfy you. For good or worse, MegaPixel recreated the game’s structure authentically with all of its silly charm and structure.  I do think the game being stuck on home-consoles doesn’t do it any favors sadly as the game worked all those years ago primarily because of the light-gun setup offered through the arcade units. I think MegaPixel do deserve credit for trying their hardest to realize this remake with the limited resources and budget to hand; even if the game isn’t all that impressive on its own, I can at least acknowledge it is faithfully recreated by a studio that clearly loved the original game.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐