The House of the Dead: Overkill

The House of the Dead: Overkill is a prequel to the arcade series that decided not to take itself seriously at all. Agent G teams up here with the foul-mouthed Detective Isaac Washington, and together they make their way through the mud of the American South, where a criminal nicknamed Papa Caesar and his mutants run rampant. The whole game is styled as a 1970s grindhouse film: grainy picture, scratches on the film stock, exaggerated chapter titles, and a narrator introducing the next reel as if it were a double feature at a drive-in.

The gameplay sticks to the classic arcade formula. The camera moves on its own, the player sweeps a cursor across the screen, shoots, reloads with a flick of the controller and tries to keep an unbroken hit chain, since it's the combo that determines the final score. Between chapters, weapons are bought and upgraded, giving a reason to replay the game on a higher difficulty with better gear. The Wii Remote could be fitted with the plastic Wii Zapper add-on, and the game is also excellent played by two people side by side, placing it among the go-to titles for having friends over.

A distinctive hallmark of the game is its language. The dialogue is packed with profanity to such a degree that at launch the title was talked about mainly for that reason, and the humour deliberately pushes past the bounds of good taste. The music mixes funk, blues and rock motifs, and together with the garish neon lighting it creates a sharp, entertainingly over-the-top B-movie atmosphere. Critics received the game better than they themselves expected, since underneath the parody they found an honest, finely tuned shooter with a satisfying feel to the guns. It later got an expanded version on PlayStation 3 and remains to this day one of the best reasons to pick up a light gun for the Wii. The short playtime is offset by how readily people come back to it chasing a better score. Special mention goes to the character of Isaac Washington, whose one-liners became an inseparable part of the title's legend, and to the bonus levels unlocked for good results, which extend the game's lifespan by a few more evenings.