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The House of The Dead 3 PC

Konami not being in possession of full rights to the names of football clubs and players. The Dreamcast turning out to be a resounding failure. The fact that most of us have to work in order to receive money. All tremendous injustices I?m sure you?ll agree, but not nearly as unfair as the fact that this title currently retails for the same price as the likes of City of Heroes and Star Wars: Republic Commando. It?s not that there?s any fundamental flaw to the game?s mechanics (it?s an on-rails shooter, what can go wrong?), indeed, the first hour?s play is an absolute blast. It?s just that there?s, well, nothing left after that.

Set sixteen years after the events of House of the Dead 2, you assume the role of Lisa Rogan, daughter of Thomas Rogan, ex-member of the secret government organisation the AMS and star of the previous two titles. After the authorities lose contact with her father whilst investigating the mysterious EFI research facility, Lisa teams up with her father?s ex-partner, agent G, to launch a rescue bid. Together, Rogan and G enter the playground of the evil scientist, Dr Curien.

The problem is that the game has been torn, kicking and screaming, from its natural habitat. Gone is the trademark light gun interface, otherwise known as the point of playing the game, to be replaced by a mouse-controlled crosshair. This, of course, reduces the difficulty level considerably, with your zombified enemies often occupying over half of the available screen space, as they charge towards you.

As a result, your first attempt at the game will be an absolute tour de force, the sort of thing that you might sit your grandkids in front of decades down the line to show them just why SEGA were so revered ?in the olden days?. Showing off their total mastery of the arcade genre, the developers never allow you a moment to catch your breath between blasting hoards of the undead (quite literally) to pieces. The boss battles are epic; indeed the skull-club wielding, twenty-foot giant who introduces himself partway through level one takes the length of a subsequent level to finally see off, and only following an impressive chase along corridors whose walls our new-found friend casts aside as if they were paper. All great fun. In addition, the game?s tongue-in-cheek, possibly unintentional humour occasionally has the utter craziness to make you convulse with delight. Where else would the spoken reaction to the aforementioned behemoth crashing through the foyer window of a scientific institute be ?Whoa, calm down there!

Twenty-five minutes in though, almost to the second, all that fun is over. You?ll have worked your way through the total of six stages. You?ll have discovered that, although the game seems to offer you a dynamic choice of pathways, this only means you get to choose in which order you play levels three, four and five. You?ll have discovered that yes, Time Attack mode only sees you playing the same levels once more, adding two seconds to a ever-descending time limit for every monster downed. In short, that?s all folks!. The inclusion of The House of the Dead 2 as an unlockable bonus is also perhaps a tacit admission that the main course on offer is lacking substance.

There are a number of other issues, too. At certain points during the main game, you will be called upon to complete short set-piece challenges in which you must save your gun-toting accomplice, G, from the claws of some ungodly mutation. Trouble is, as G is central to all of the game?s story-building cut-scenes, it is impossible to misfire and hit him instead. Seeing as the previous instalments solved this problem by challenging the player to save a number of dispensable fleeing scientists, this illogical change assumes greater prominence than would otherwise be the case, Similarly, there are a number of set sequences where, for example, the programmers obviously intended the player to see a number of birds of prey feasting on some rotting carcass, only for them to shoot into the air. Consequently, the birds seem to be rendered invincible until such time as they have taken off, even though it is still possible to fire. Using a light gun, it would be easy to put such misses down to poor aim but the constant presence of your crosshair on the screen highlights the error as not yours.

These are just nit-picking issues however. The insurmountable obstacle this game faces is the fact that it is already available, at a lesser price, on hardware for which it is easy to obtain a light gun. Regardless of the quick fix this game provides, a sensible reviewer can offer no better advice than this: get the game on the Xbox, or wait until its price tag falls by at least three-quarters.