As someone who grew up playing House of the Dead in the arcade near my house,
I was absolutely over the moon when House of the Dead Remake was announced for the Nintendo
Switch--especially since it’s a genre that is more dead than the zombies you’ll encounter.
Sega even lost the original source code, requiring the entire game to be rebuilt from scratch.
Sure, The graphics didn’t look amazing (perhaps fittingly)
and it doesn’t have actual light-gun support, but I still couldn’t wait to get my hands on it,
especially with the new modes exclusive to this version. And now that it’s here, have
MegaPixel done this arcade classic justice on the Nintendo Switch, or is it dead on arrival? That’s
what I’m here to answer in Gamexplain’s review of House of the Dead Remake on The Nintendo Switch.
For the uninitiated, House of the Dead Remake is a short, on-rails, light gun shooter
where you explore a creepy doctor’s mansion and encounter all kinds of disgusting enemies from
Zombies, weird bat dog-looking things, and these chainsaw-wielding monstrosities.
Of course, The Switch version lacks the physical light gun element but otherwise
seems to be a faithful adaptation of the original with the levels accurately recreated
and all the enemies in their original spots. The frequent branching paths are a standout feature
and it's great being able to experiment without worrying about how many quarters I have left in my
pocket. The addictive gameplay loop of blowing off zombie's heads, all the while trying to perfect
your score is here in full force and I found myself coming back for just one more run to try
out that one alternate path I missed or aiming for a higher score than my last successful run.
The short 30 minute or so playthroughs make it easy to hop right back in for another play,
and I was happy with being able to have this classic in the palm of my hands flaws and all.
Gone are the days of throwing euros or quarters into a machine to beat it. House of the Dead
Remake instead gives you 10 credits, or lives, to start with, with each affording you 3 hit points..
Once all 10 of your credits are gone you can trade in 5000 points from your current score to respawn,
making it relatively easy to beat the game, but at the cost of your high score. So all you high
score chasers out there will want to avoid having to cash in your points for more ties,
while also to learning the enemy placements, best paths, and which barrels house the golden frogs.
The game offers two modes, original, and horde. The original model is a faithful recreation of
the classic House of the Dead, with the exact same story, bosses, and enemies. However, you do have 4
difficulty options to choose from, including Easy, Normal, and Hard--all of which allow you to choose
which of the two agents to play as, with both having different damage multipliers. Arcade mode
is the final and hardest difficulty and you can’t choose which agent you start at in this mode. In
addition, you can choose from two scoring modes, Modern and Classic, with Classic being true to the
Arcade original, which only awards points for knocking off limbs and killing blows,
whereas Modern adds in score multipliers for kills while also awarding points for every single shot
you land. And I love the modern scoring system. It gives the game a more frantic feeling as I
emptied multiple shots into every single last inch of a zombie to lickj inas many points as possible.
You have to be less accurate which to some people might be a bonus as the gyro aiming,
while accurate, will never beat the feel of an actual light gun. Horde mode has the
same options as original mode but throws any balance out the window and lumps easily double,
sometimes triple the number of enemies are you at any given time. I didn’t care for this
mode all too much. There was simply way too much going on, so I mostly stuck to the original mode
As you might expect, you can play with a friend too, in either cooperative and competitive modesIn
competitive, you compete for points and in cooperative you share points.
This was my favorite way to experience the game, calling out which enemy to shoot first
and learning the optimal strategies to get a new high score. Of course, you can always
just play the two-player cooperative mode by yourself too, and I found it was quite
fun playing dual-wielding both guns–maybe it should have been an official option?.
Buw we have to address the elephant in the room: the lack of official light gun support.
And this has always been a struggle for home ports of Arcade light gun games to replicate,
with some offering expensive accessory kits to mimic the arcade light gun feel,
with others relying on the built-in hardware, like the Wii Remote’s pointer–which actually
worked quite well, especially when paired with a lightgun shell. For better or worse,
House of the Dead on the Switch doesn’t support any kind of light gun accessory,
and relies entirely on the Switch’s gyro or stick controls to control the pointer,
depending on your preference–Thankfully, the gyro aiming works actually quite well, offering a level
of precision–and fun–that I enjoyed–even if it’s not quite 1 to 1. After a few runs, I
was blowing zombies' heads off with ease. But like any gyro-reliant game, the cursor will drift over
time, requiring you to occasionally recalibrate it with a quick press of the Y Button–it’s
not too distracting, though I did have to do it often. I eventually settled into a rhythm
of recentering while reloading. Fortunately, You can play this with either one or two joy-cons if
you want, with the latter option allowing you to use one joy-con exclusively to aim,
and the other being used for everything else, like shooting and reloading, which is arguably better
as your aim will never be thrown off by spamming the shoot or reload buttons.
As for the option to use the analog stick for aiming. Well, I didn’t like it at all.
This type of game just doesn’t work using an analog stick to drag a cursor around–but hey,
it's there for the people that really hate gyro controls. Thankfully, you actually can use both
at once which strikes a decent balance, though I still preferred using purely gyro aiming. Light
gun games are designed pretty cheekily, they want you to shell out as much money as possible
after all so I needed the speed of the gyro aiming to have any chance of beating the game.
You can play with a Pro Controller too, though I wouldn’t recommend it as using
gyro to aim with a two-handed controller felt awkward and not especially great for my wrists.
Plus at least holding a Joy-Con felts a little light gun light.
The same is true when using gyro in handheld mode tpp as you have to move the entire system to aim.
The game is just begging for touch controls here. Yes,
I was one of the only people who played Touch The Dead on the DS and I would love
to see the developers implement touch screen controls in a future update.
Regrettably, the HD rumble doesn’t add much to the experience. The feedback on reloading and
landing a shot feel almost indistinguishable so I turned it off after testing it out.
As mentioned, everything has been remade from scratch, with new character models and overall
better effects. And the game does technically look better…but it’s still really ugly.
And arguably loses part of the charm that the original’s extremely dated appearance had.
There is pop in galore, the blood looks like jelly, enemy skin the enemies resemble clay,
and don’t get me started on the hair. It has 0 redeeming qualities. Just look at the opening
cutscene….yeah it doesn’t give off a good first impression. Some of the textures are so bad that
I don’t have any game in recent memory to use as a comparison. The enemy models look ok overall
but there’s a strange shine over all of them giving them an extremely fake-looking appearance.
Now surprisingly there are two graphical modes to choose from. I don’t have the
official specs but performance mode seems to run at a higher 6- frames per
second, which is great for the fast-twitch action. I found it impossible to play without -performance
mode turned on as it felt like my cursor was moving through mud and it was significantly harder
to shoot things accurately. In non-performance mode, the game does have some better effects,
including lighting but its extremely bloomy making it a bit annoying to look at when light sources
like torches are on screen. While performance mode certainly runs at a higher framerate, both modes
heavily suffer from frame drops, stutters, and freezing which overall hurt the experience a lot.
Look I can forgive poor graphics if the framerate is solid but when both are sub-par there aren’t
many excuses. A game like this needs a solid framerate and unfortunately, it just isn’t stable.
The voice acting has also been rerecorded but it retains the same
so bad it’s good charm as the original.
it’s slightly less over the top compared to the arcade version but I was still entertained by
how wonderfully bad it is nonetheless–and I mean that in the best possible way.
At the end of the day I’m still mostly happy that I have House of the Dead on the Switch as I still
had plenty of fun playing through it despite its issues. I appreciate Mega Pixel’s effort in
reviving the genre and showing some love for this amazing classic game. though the poor performance
combined with the terrible updated graphics left me disappointed. And of course, while I would have
loved proper light gun support, I also totally get that’s not a reasonable expectation–and the gyro
controls serve as a decent replacement. Ultimately I’m mixed on House of the Dead Remake. My love
and nostalgia for the game allowed me to have a good time playing the remake–especially with two
players–but I was left hoping for something better and closer to the arcade original.
There we have GameXplain’s review for House of the Dead Remake on Nintendo Switch.
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