There are a lot of reasons to like House of the Dead: Overkill: the Quentin Tarantino aesthetic, the new combo system, the unlockable weapons cache. These features expand upon the classic haunted house setup, in which players follow a fixed path as they blow away the undead with a light gun.

Hey, clown, the top of your head is missing -- Ow. Don't bite me!

But there's one reason that I respect Overkill, which is that under all the changes and new gloss, this is still House of the Dead. Sega and Headstrong Games have gone out of their way to attract new players, but they haven't made fundamental changes to the series' gameplay, and they're not pretending this is "War and Peace."

Overkill, then, is a rail shooter just like all the other House of the Dead games. You're allowed to nudge the camera peripherally a little bit -- a wrinkle which is put to good use, as the camera will often quickly sweep your vision past power-ups that are placed just off the screen. You'll have to nudge the camera left or right to nab them, which takes your attention away from the ever-encroaching zombies -- cough! Mutants! Never say the Z-word! -- which ratchets up the tension. All good things.

Each game stage is presented like a mini-exploitation movie. Yeah, we like Left 4 Dead too.

The pickups tend to be useful, too, particularly the glowing green things that slow time and make a long series of precisely targeted headshots possible. In the past, House of the Dead would reward good marksmanship with a series of ratings, but now there is a combo system that adds a score bonus as long as you keep hitting targets.


Combos work like so: Six kills in a row (with no misses or personal injury) starts the combo chain, and for every additional six kills you'll notch a higher violence rating. Eventually you'll reach Goregasm, at which every kill nets 1,000 points. Points lead to cash, which leads to weapon upgrades and a better chance of surviving through the game's seven chapters.

Overkill's faux Tarantino characters (who would be more consistently funny if the writers didn't mistake constant F-bombs for the height of hi-larity) and funhouse setting are just window dressing. House of the Dead is a carnival game at heart, and the new combo system constantly encourages and rewards good performance. Overkill was the first time I was really inspired to take my time and try to balance my rate of fire and target selection. I've always just blasted through these games to see what would come next. This combo system got me invested in my own performance. It made me play differently, and more intently.


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The bullseyes in the HUD are the combo meter; these players are doing it wrong.

Through combos, I was more engaged in the entirety of the game. I got caught up in the arms race, trying to balance my weapons load so that I could have something for every occasion (pistol and shotgun to build combos, something fully automatic for bosses). I loved the harder difficulty level that opens up after beating the seven levels. (In the main game, you can "buy" continues with half your current point total; in the Director's Cut mode you have very limited continues, and more enemies.)

The scratchy film grain, bickering characters and overall "Grindhouse" feel turn out to be, as expected, more marketing angle than anything else. But in this case, the marketing is actually selling something worth playing. Overkill isn't ambitious, and isn't likely to be an enduring inspiration, but it is a fun few hours that rescues light-gun games from the dusty far recesses of the bargain bin, and that's good enough.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.