Developed/Published by: Wow Entertainment / Sega
Released: February 7th, 2012
Completed: 18th November 2015
Completion: Finished it.
Trophies / Achievements: 45%

Yes it’s The House Of The Dead month here at exp., which probably to the eyes of the trained seems like a bit of a cop-out because the games basically take about half an hour to finish each, but look, I really only just realised that I own all of them, and being able to polish off an entire franchise seems like a cool thing to do, ok?

So! The House Of The Dead III then. I don’t know what lies in store with The House Of The Dead 4 (I’m excited) but this is, so far, totally the weakest of the series. It’s more The House Of The Dead as you’d probably expect, except with a few serious changes: first, you’ve got a repeating shotgun thing (doesn’t make too much of a difference really, though it’s on screen the whole time in the ports for some reason) and secondly one of the things I really liked about the first two—the ability to change where you go by shooting things in the level—is totally gone. It’s been replaced with a level selection thingy, which (outside of the first level?) basically just allows you to change the order you do things in. Pretty disappointing!

If you’ve been following along however, this is the first one to not feature a super tedious boss rush to drag the game out a bit. However, it does instead all happen at a research facility, which means that the world design is literally never interesting. It giveth, and it taketh away.

I do though really appreciate the game’s slavish dedication to continuity. Despite being a game that’s really only intended for people to put a few 20p pieces in, fire wildly for a while and then go and do something else, it goes to the bother to re-introduce the hero from the first game (James Rogan) keep series stalwart G, and age them appropriately! (they’re proper old!) Unfortunately, it also introduces Rogan’s daughter, Lisa, who… well, frankly, she’s just got a weird face (it’s her eyes, or something?) and someone at Sega decided what The House Of The Dead series was missing was cool one-liners after a boss is killed, so she drops clunkers like “I never was any good at gardening” after shooting a big plant to death.

(Ok, this only happens like four times, but it’s really annoying.)

Oh! The plant level has some cool tentacle zombies in it, though, I liked them. But, as I’ve said, outside of that, the game is not particularly inspired. I like that the game ends with Rogan and G sharing an old bro moment, talking about how young people are the future—it’s almost like the designers think you’ve spent a lot of time with these characters and have grown to love them, like it’s bloody Lethal Weapon III, not Arcade Shooter III—but overall the story doesn’t make any sense, the level design is a bit boring and they’ve actually taken out some of the stuff that makes The House Of The Dead cool in the first place. Skip it.

Will I ever play it again? I can’t see why I would. And remember: I could play The House Of The Dead 2 again like right now and not complain.

Final Thought: This is, and I’m not joking, the only game I’ve played so far with my Move controller. I picked up a Move really cheaply a while back thinking I would use it for something, and here we are. I’m not very impressed honestly—I’m pretty sure something is off, possibly with the calibration of this game specifically, because it’s way, way less precise than a Wii Remote. But I don’t really like either in comparison to a light gun anyway. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll use it for more stuff outside of The House Of The Dead franchise. Or I’ll buy a second-hand Kinect one day literally just for Diabolical Pitch and then at least the Move won’t be the most useless piece of plastic I own.

(“Dude, you’ve already admitted to owning both a Virtua Gun and a Dreamcast Gun.”)

Oh yeah.