I guess I have time for some old-school zombie shooting action. I genuinely miss lightgun games, they were massively popular in that mid to late 90s period and Sega had some of the best titles in the arcade. The home ports were pretty great too. MegaPixel Studio and Forever Entertainment have teamed up to add a fresh coat of paint to a classic with The House of the Dead 2: Remake.

“In February 2000, a small city was suddenly overrun by hostile creatures. Two AMS agents, James Taylor and Gary Stewart, were sent to investigate. Upon arrival, they noticed that the situation resembled the Curien Mansion incident from 1998. Determined to uncover the source of the infestation, they began shooting their way through hordes of creatures.”

Released earlier this year on PC and Switch, The House of the Dead 2: Remake has now been released for the PlayStation and Xbox, just in time for Halloween too. Just for clarity, I have been playing the Xbox version. Now, the main issue with remaking these awesome lightgun games for modern consoles is the lack of a lightgun. This is why they were great fun in the arcade and on the Dreamcast. Playing this on the Xbox without a lightgun does take a chunk away from the experience. Instead if being able to quickly aim the gun where you need it, you now have to drag a cursor across the screen, and that is just not as satisfying or as quick.

This is the major issue, not just with The House of the Dead 2: Remake, but all ports and remakes of these classics. Lightgun games are all about fast reactions, zipping your aim from one side of the screen to the other, always being on edge due to the fact an enemy can pop up at any second. It just does not work with a controller and a cursor. Add on that the original wasn’t in widescreen, and this remake is, so you now have more screen to cover here. There are several sliders to tinker with to find your own perfect preference. Yet, I couldn’t seem to get it right for me. I’d play for a few seconds realise that cursor movement doesn’t feel right, pause, go to options, tinker, and back to the game. Still didn’t feel right, so repeat the whole process over again, and again, and again, and again… and again. Maybe you will find that sweet spot and nail a set up that works, but I never could.

This remake does massively improve the game’s graphics in glorious HD, as the numerous zombies and other monsters look great over the original. However, I did notice that this remake uses a less colourful palette and everything looks murkier, very brown and dull. The lighting is also pretty bad, I had to ram the gamma slider up to max just to be able to see anything. The stilted awful voice acting is here too, but I’m pretty sure that it is not the original audio. A few lines sounded off, like actors trying to act badly instead of the actors being genuinely bad. I found that the camera movements were too fast over the original too. I decided to go back and play the original The House of the Dead 2 on PC, yep I do still have it installed. I found the original PC port so much better to play (not as good as the Dreamcast). Maybe the mouse control had something to do with it? But it was mainly the camera movement. You get new weapons and powerups by shooting barrels, boxes and such. This was easier (not not easy) on the original. This remake moves the camera around too fast and trying to nab those all-important upgrades is next to impossible.

I always think that a remake should improve on the original. Aside from the new HD graphics, The House of the Dead 2: Remake feels more like several steps back over the original. The controls just don’t work (even with plenty of tinkering), the camera moves around far more erratically, the colours are dull, and it’s just not as good as the original from 1998. With all of the controller slider options, I think there should be an option to slow the game down too. If someone wants to play at 90%, 80%, 70% speed, why not? It’s the only way I can think of to make this more playable. It is simply impossible to play this properly with a controller because you just can’t cover the screen the same was as you can with a lightgun. Just get hold of a copy of the original and skip this remake.