Here is a game that I did not expect to get the remake treatment; at least not in this singular form. For those that don’t know, The House of the Dead is a classic arcade light-gun shooter that took arcades by storm in the 90s and later kept us laughing on the Sega Dreamcast. It was never a great game but one that got by from the experience, whether that was in a crowded arcade with strangers or at home with friends and some clunky Dreamcast pistols, or standard controllers if you weren’t rich.

The House of the Dead: Remake brings the original arcade game to the home with new updated visuals that bring it in line with modern arcade shooters that grace the dozen or so arcades still active in this country. It’s not a stunning upgrade as it feels like something well-suited for the later Xbox 360 era, but it gets the job done. Enemies explode into all manner of gruesome parts and each different enemy type has weak-spots that you can target for massive damage. Target an arm to make an enemy drop their weapon, shoot of a leg to slow them down, go for a headshot and more.

What makes The House of the Dead: Remake fun is the replay value afforded to the player. There are multiple paths that you can take, but unlike most games of this type you don’t actually get to choose the path. Instead, you must complete a specific series of events in order for you to move into another path. Maybe you have to rescue an innocent or maybe you have to shoot the lock off a hatch to unlock a new path. This means you’ll be shooting like crazy and racking up not only points, but finding fun secrets as well. Secret paths also feature different enemies which you can unlock in the menu to read more about them once you kill them.

Playing on the PC feels about as close as you can get to having a light-gun in your hands. In fact, it feels a little bit easier as mouse technology has evolved quite a bit since the days of my sitting on an old XP machine with a mouse that had a rubber ball in it trying to make my way through Virtua Cop. Still, The House of the Dead: Remake isn’t a long game as it should take an average player just under an hour to complete. Thankfully there are lots of extras and an included horde mode to play with, not to mention the multiplayer that can make for a great time.

Still, there are issues with The House of the Dead: Remake that I’m not sure are because of the update or if they were in the original game back in the day. Physics seem a bit wonky at times and enemies often glitch into the backgrounds when killed. I’m pretty sure the old games didn’t have a physics engine so this must be the case. It’s more humorous than anything and I haven’t seen it impact the actual shooting mechanics, so it’s all good in my book. Many players have also commented about optimization issues, but my time with the game on a midrange PC at home (Ryzen 5, GTX 1650 Super, 8GB RAM) didn’t have any trouble running things.

But I think I may have buried the lead here as the main reason people remember The House of The Dead series is for ridiculous story and the AMAZING voice work that the studio used for the English translation. It’s about as bad as you can imagine and really helped to give the series a unique charm. It really does feel like the script was written by a bunch of twelve-year-old’s stuck in detention. I dare say it’s almost worth the price of admission if you have never experienced any House of the Dead game up to this point, which might be a lot of people considering the last mainline entry released on the Nintendo Wii.

The House of the Dead: Remake feels like it has its heart in the right place and is a lot of fun but the package just feels a bit empty, especially at this price point. I’m so used to The House of the Dead games being released in a double or triple pack with the second or third titles. Asking $25 for a single arcade title that barely lasts an hour with and core gameplay experience that is decades old is a hard pill to swallow, especially when money is tight for most people right now.

If this were a remake of the first two titles I could recommend it easy, but as it stands this one if for serious fans of light-gun games who want to relive some of that 90s fun with a mouse. For everyone else I recommend waiting for this one to go on sale or pick it up when it gets packed in with the eventual sequel remake.

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J. Luis

J. Luis is the current Editor-In-Chief here at GAMbIT. With a background in investigative journalism his work encompasses the pop-culture spectrum here, but he also works in the political spectrum for other organizations.

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