The House Of The Dead: Remake review – the original zombie shooter

metro.co.uk:

Sega’s classic lightgun game is remade for the Nintendo Switch but how does it cope when there’s no actual gun controller?

At this point it’s obvious there’s no use complaining about Sega not taking advantage of its golden era of arcade and console games. It’s been over 20 years since the Dreamcast and it’s quite clear that Sega has no intention of resurrecting any of its older franchises in any meaningful way. It is willing to licence them out to other people though, as seen most successfully with Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap and Streets Of Rage 4, but that seems to be the best that can be hoped for.

The latter two games were both by French company Dotemu but Sega has worked with others too, such as Polish firm MegaPixel Studio, who did a passable job with the 2020 remake of Panzer Dragoon. And now they’re back with a similarly styled remake of lightgun game The House Of The Dead. Which seems a very odd choice of game given the Switch version doesn’t come with an actual lightgun, thereby removing at least 50% of the appeal before you’ve even started.

We’re really not sure what anyone involved expected to gain from such a venture, as while the original game is entertaining enough to make you pine for the days when Sega still made arcade machines, technical issues and the intractable problem of the controls are never properly addressed.

For those that don’t recognise the name, The House Of The Dead was a 1996 Sega coin-op released just six months after the original Resident Evil. Despite the similarities between the two games, that is, by all accounts, a complete coincidence. A welcome one as it turned out though, as no less than George Romero credits the release of the two games with reigniting public interest in zombie