A sad revamp to a classic
It’s been three console generations since the last Splatterhouse was released, but was the time this game was sleeping spent wisely to continue in an already known franchise or should it have stayed just a classic.
For those who are familiar with the original Splatterhouse this game is re-imagining of the original story. You play as Rick, you and your girlfriend Jen go and visit Dr. West in his mansion, obviously things do go so well, Jen gets kidnapped and you get impaled by some beast created by the “good” doctor. Taking everything that has just transpired the mask calls out to Rick making a deal to help him get his love back, and while he has given him back his life and the immense power he will need to continue to survive it seems that there is far more conspiring against him then he knows. While this seems obvious that’s all you really get to know for most of the game, the farther you go more of the story is revealed but sadly there isn’t much more to learn what you can probably guess yourself after a couple of minutes. Luckily during the game all of the banter between Rick and the Death Mask helps keep the characters themselves seem a bit more interesting, it’s not much beyond rude remarks but it shows that this shouldn’t be taken seriously.
The game fighting style isn’t much more than you can guess by reading the title. There’s your basic punches and throws, the odd weapon lying around that basically means a kill to enemies outside of the big guys, and when you utilize the masks power to improve your already useful arsenal (a.k.a your arms) by growing spikes and such to rip through all enemies, sadly this takes up a lot of your blood meter which also acts as your recovery ability, by sapping all enemies around you to heal yourself. So it’s your choice to use the meter for power or optional healing when needed, but they made the recovery way to easy in this game, unless you get killed by a cheap death or a trap pit, you’ll usually have more than enough to heal your way past bosses. In many areas they decided to take a 2D approach to help pay tribute to the game before it, good news is that it works and is quite enjoyable, and by completing through the game the other three Splatterhouse games are unlocked so you can get more of this franchise. By fighting enemies you will rank up points which you can spend on upgrading your health speed of attacks, etc, while later on they do cost quite a bit they do feel balanced even though you might just stick to the same few combos.
While it did take a long time for the newest title to get out from this franchise I wish that it had been in development a bit longer, there are many things that could have been improved to make the game better. For instance in a game like Devil May Cry when you get about halfway through the room the exits will be sealed and then you either fight or solve a puzzle to get out, in this game you will find yourself getting to the door and end up running around until the game catches up to what needs to be done, the same is when you finish clearing the room of enemies, you will stand at the gate waiting for it to open, which is annoyed by itself but on the odd time you have a timer it can be a bit frustrating. For taking out enemies if you get there health low enough you can do a “splatterkill” which kills them in a fancy way by using either the analogue or the buttons to pull them off but after the first few it get quite tiresome and the bigger guys can only die by using these so it gets irritating by the games end. Loading times are horrible even to redo an area it takes far too long and during loading screens are the same two 4 second loops over and over so it get increasingly annoying. Another big problem that I encounter quite a few times was that at times certain actions just wouldn’t work, you’d try to get into your powerful form but it wouldn’t let you ending up in a cheap death, then after trying again it would work just fine.
Though this game has many up and downs it doesn’t do much to keep the interest through the whole main story which is only about 6 hours long, they did include the original games and an additional Survival Arena’s but it’s the same stuff form the main story so if this is your kind of game you’ll have enough to play for a while but sadly there could have done so much more to make this game more fluid in and out of combat and made the story more interesting to the player and to the game itself.
I give it a 5/10
