House of the Dead is no stranger to Planet Virtua. We don't love all of them, but the first two games from the arcade, Sega Saturn and Sega Dreamcast were some of our most celebrated titles! Overkill has found brand new life, since its introduction on the Wii, and it is some of the greatest the brand has to offer, bar none.
Oh, yes, this is some of the corniest, cheesiest horror movie parody you could possibly ask for. Since the old days of the grindhouse movies in the dollar theaters, horror fans have had a fascination with slasher/zombie movies with a shoe-string budget, stupid one-liners and questionable effects in both makeup and pyros. As crappy as these movies were in production, they had their own beautiful charm to them.
House of the Dead: Overkill captured this perfectly, and if you don't have a gun to shoot the screen with, now there's Typing of the Dead. That's right, you can now shoot zombies using the English language and that is yet another point of celebration! Now, you are going through strip clubs, old mansions and dark places, taking down zombies with your typing skills. This is especially endearing because now you can play it with a normal gun, mouse or the keys on your keyboard plugging holes in zombies.
The real problem with this game is that it is unbearably short. By the time you're ready for another bout of the main characters' hilarious one-liners, it's basically over. Some of the action can get a little disgusting and grotesque, especially with the final bossfight.
It's very easy, aside from the typing. The typing gives it a wonderful exercise for your fingers and while I type 100 words a minute, I do make typos and the game penalizes you if you have too many at once. Of course, it's a railshooter, and it's going to have the sudden enemies that appear at the bottom of the screen and some of the more unfair things therein. With the typing, this is toned down a great deal because you kind of need to do that when someone has to literally read and word and very quickly type it. This is a little more difficult than it sounds.
With the Typing version, this game has been given new life and it is wondrous! This is definitely an addition to the House of the Dead series that belongs on your gameslist and do not pass it up. It is better than the House of the Dead remake, for certain.
