Universal Review
House Of The (Wish It Was) Dead
by Nathan Grayson (November 16th, 2010 at 8:03 am)
Remember those House Of The Dead arcade machines from back in the day? You know, the ones with the big plastic guns that indirectly ate your first car in change? Weren’t they great? Well, Zombie Crisis 3D‘s a lot like that – only replace “great” with the most negative adjective you can think of. Horrendabysmal. Terribawfulstrosity. Dane Cook. Something along those lines.
How so? Oh, let me count the ways. First off, the basics: You’re a person. You have a gun. You shoot zombies. And that is – quite literally – all. Your movement is, of course, on-rails, so your eyes, legs, and head – everything aside from your itchy trigger finger – are the game’s to control. No big deal, though, right? Highly scripted, gore-spattered thrill rides are what this genre’s all about, after all. Problem is, Zombie Crisis doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo.
Instead, the game chooses to funnel you down so many dark gray corridors that future generations of your family will be born without eyes in much the same way as cave-dwelling fish creatures. If the real zombie apocalypse is this dull and repetitive, I’ll probably leap headlong into the nearest crowd of flesh-hungry abominations, as it’ll be a lot easier to enjoy the whole thing without a brain.
Even then, none of that would be a problem if the undead-blasting was fun. Unfortunately, I can’t remember if it was or not, since I was asleep for most of it. You’ve got a whopping total of three guns to work with, and the default pistol will suffice in most normal encounters. The minigun and shotgun are only must-haves when big ol’ bosses come fee-fi-fo-fumming along, and even then, it’s only because bosses won’t stop rearranging your face until you blast them slightly harder than normal zombies. Worse still, despite looking suitably nasty and intimidating, each boss requires the exact same strategy: hit them before they hit you. Then they walk/fly/whatever-squid-monsters-do away for a moment – probably to have a good cry – and return to have another go at it. Rinse, repeat, done.
Beyond that, you shoot two things: zombies and flies. I can count the number of zombie types on one hand, and I couldn’t count the number of annoying face-swarming flies I slaughtered if I had every hand in the entire world. Either way, you end up spending most of the game indiscriminately blasting the same four or five zombie models over and over as they rush headlong in your direction. At one point, they entered through a doorway above me instead of one right in front of me. I thought I was going to faint.
Shooting, at least, feels nice enough, with enemies exploding into a gooey mess of blood and chunky bits with each fire hose-like spray of your shotgun. Dragging your finger across the touch screen can’t even begin to match the feeling of hammering the trigger on an arcade light gun, however, so that part of the appeal loses a lot in the transition to iThings. Worse still, if you – like the official standard issue Podgamer Reviewing Hand – have fingers thicker than Popsicle sticks, they’ll occasionally obscure your view, leading to all sorts of painful unpleasantness.
Not that it really matters all that much. Only on Nightmare difficulty do enemies put up much of a fight, but that does nothing to cure the game’s nasty case of repetition – nor does it do an effective job of quarantining the resulting epidemic of boredom-based narcolepsy from spreading to you. At least the game is gracious enough to bow out early at only an hour-and-15-minutes or so in length.
If that’s not enough, the storyline is some awful nonsense about genetic splicing, and it’s all in horribly broken English to boot. House Of The Dead always thrived on a certain level of camp, but Zombie Crisis is self-serious until the quick but most-certainly-not-painless end.
If I haven’t already made it abundantly clear, avoid this game. The concept behind House Of The Dead, I think, lends itself pretty decently to an iThing game, but Zombie Crisis is definitely not the game to prove it.
so is there a good house of the death like game on the ithing? didn’t really like Time Crisis too?
and did i hear something about typing of the death coming?
Hm. I can’t find any ref to Typing of the Dead coming out. You might be thinking of Texting of the Bread.
Ooo, there’s also something called Tap of the Dead. I’ll bagsy the review. (Also the extraordinarily arm-chancing Tapping of the Dead, which should go in the Thieves Operate in This Area feature.) GOOD WORK TANGENTIALLY, CITIZEN.
House of the Dead + Ouendan = The Swiping of the Dead.