The House of the Dead 2 Remake (Switch/2) Review
Summary: A gloriously gory glow up of a stone cold classic that suffers from irksome control issues
3.5
Suffer Like G Did
Forever Entertainment returns with the inevitable, welcome, and slightly baffling The House of the Dead 2 Remake.
It’s great to be able to blast through the lightgun /Dreamcast classic at home again. The House of the Dead 2 is a game I will endure a bowling trip to play. If a bar has it, I will drink there.
So, not having to leave the house again to play through an enhanced version of one of the best light gun games ever made. Sign my antisocial ass up.
However, there is a downside, at least on Switch.
As versatile as the Joycons are, gyro controls on Switch (and even with improved gubbins on the Switch 2) don’t work as well as you would hope.
On paper, it should be the best way to play. It’s like a pointer on the Wii, right? Well, kind of. The problem is that the Switch doesn’t have a sensor bar to track the Joy-Con’s position, so they often drift and need to be recentered regularly.
Though recalibration is as simple as pushing the analogue stick, the problems come when you’re firing either (by pressing either A or ZR) because if you’re using single joycon mode, it throws off your aim slightly. Which is a massive pain in a game where trying to shoot things at a distance is a regular occurrence.
It’s also a pain for boss fights when you need to keep your sights trained on particular weak spots, and makes the opening boss battle against Judgement even more of a credit sink than it used to be.
This is mitigated to a certain extent by adjusting the sensitivity of the gyro controls to something more manageable. I also found that playing with a pair of Joy-Cons and using the left to aim and the right to shoot helped keep my aim a little steadier.
What had me stretching my head, though, was when I went back to play the original House of the Dead Remake, because the Gyro controls seemed to be much more accurate.
Also, the fantastic touch screen controls added to the first game haven’t made the leap to the sequel, which is even more confusing when you consider that you can control the menus via the touch screen but not the game. (Make it make sense)
There is always the option to use the analogue sticks to aim, but they’re pointless since they are far too slow, despite technically being more accurate. Most of the time, I would line up a shot just in time to get eaten.
What I really want, though, is a Switch 2 patch that adds Mouse controls. I played the Steam demo earlier this year and had an absolute blast playing with a mouse. It would be a great addition to the Switch version, if possible.
If you can get the controls to work for you, though, there’s a great light gun game here. It’s still a great campy romp, as you try and track down the mysterious Goldman who has loosed the horrors from the Curion mansion on an unsuspecting European city that definitely isn’t Rome.
Blowing away zombies and saving the panicked townsfolk is still tons of fun and as satisfying as it ever was, especially with a friend in local multiplayer. Or in the new Original mode that lets you modify your run by using various items to boost your guns’ performance or make your life easier. With new ones found by blasting away at the scenery.
Purists will be happy to know there is also an arcade mode that lets you run through the action in a form closer to the original, and a series of fun training missions that see you trying to save civilians without any of them dying, blasting away at barrels, and mowing down zombies with a limited amount of ammo.
It’s still all over in a couple of hours, tops, if you know what you’re doing, but with multiple routes through and multiple endings, there is plenty of replay value. However, trying to get that last ending. With its 80k+ score, which needs a 0 at the end, is still a matter of luck rather than judgment.
The voice acting is still awful, but unfortunately not in a so bad it’s good way. Goldman is now Texan for uh, reasons. You can also tell that everyone is trying their best to make their delivery as wooden and weird as possible. It’s admirable, but it doesn’t land the same as the genuinely awful voice acting in the original.
Once again, Forever Entertainment has done a wonderful job updating the visuals, rebuilding the world of House of The Dead 2 with a degree of care and clear love for the source material and all the creatures from the lowly zombies to the mighty emperor all look superb, and successfully capture the essence of the original models while being given one hell of a glow up.
Final Thoughts
Though it’s clear that Forever Entertainment has a great deal of love for the House of the Dead franchise and has once again done a brilliant job updating the game’s presentation. It seems strange to me that they don’t seem to have learned any lessons from porting over the first game.
It still has similar control issues that the first had at launch, which have since been fixed, and it is missing touchscreen controls, which would make the game shine in handheld mode.
Here’s hoping we’ll get mouse controls for the Switch 2 in the future, and in the meantime, fans of the series will still find plenty to love about the HotD 2 Remake. It is still House of the Dead 2 after all. I just wish I didn’t have to spend my first run tinkering in the options, when the point of a good lightgun game is that you just point and shoot.
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