Splatterhouse

For those that don't know, this is a reboot, or a "re-imagining", or "re-we-cannot-be-bothered-coming-up-with-a-new-IP-so-here-is-a-lazy-remake" or any other phrase you want to use. I remember playing the original Splatterhouse back in 1988 and even then, the big attraction was how gory the game was. Despite the crappy late-80s quality arcade graphics, the game was still scary as hell to play. Now here we are, 20 years later, a new Splatterhouse game, that still seems to be promoting it with the same marketing angle of just how gory and bloody this game is.

Let me tell you, they certainly didn't lie. There's so many gallons of blood you could fill a dozen olympic sized swimming pools and still have enough left over to paint your house. Wait. That's kinda gross - why would you paint your house with blood? I can't image that'd get too hygienic. But I'm getting off the point. This game is insanely gory, more than earning it's MA15+ rating. There's torse ripping, limb removals (which then can allow you to use lost limbs as weapons), and some pretty disgusting looking bad guys to smash along the way. Everything is controlled by blood. Leveling up your skills requires blood, the keys to opening different levels requires blood. While I'm all for blood and gore, there's almost too much blood here. It's to the point of ridiculousness and sometimes it's hard to tell what you should and shouldn't be paying attention to.

Behind all the over-the-top blood and guts, there actually is a pretty good storyline - to make a long story short and spoiler-free you play the ultra-geeky Rick Taylor who takes his insanely hot girlfriend Jennifer to see Dr West, for reasons that aren't really explained at the start. It then cuts to you groggily waking up to find you dying in a pool of your own blood with most of your insides on the outside. Rick glances up and for some reason hears an old mystical mask talking to him, convincing to put the mask on, giving you the gift of life with the strength to get your girl back, plus a few little tasks for the mask along the way.

The game plays like your usual God Of War-esq brawler, but it's very much dumbed down here - you run from area to area and button mash to destroy everything in the room. As the game progresses, you unlock more brutal combos to help you destroy everything in your way, the needing to remember how to pull these moves off isn't really vital as the basic attack moves will do, so it's just a matter of leveling up your skills and hitting those buttons as quickly as possible. This is unfortunately about as technical as the game mechanics gets: Run to large room, button mash your way to brutally kill spawning bad guys, run down corridor to next room, rinse, repeat. There's the occasional "kill move" which concentrates on a finishing move. These are impressive at first, but become a little tiring after a while and just straight up annoying a little while later, as these mini-cut-scenes just seem to break the flow of combat.

There's also been a lot of love and attention that's gone into the sound and music. The soundtrack is filled with a variable who's who of the metal world, with Lamb of God, Mastodon, The Calavera Conspiracy, Goatwhore, Five Finger Death Punch and more. The sound effects have been given more than their fair share of attention. However, the mixing doesn't seem to have the same amount of love. So often the sounds seemed buggy as hell. Voice-overs being cut off and drowned out by either the background music, or some arbitrary sound effect. Also, the voice of the Mask is the famous Jim Cummings, who also supplies the voice of Tigger from Winnie The Pooh and Darkwing Duck. Suddenly this game just got a whole lot weirder.

Aside from all the bits that make up the game, Splatterhouse is amazingly banale and boring to play. I get the feeling that 16 Year Old Sarge would've loved this game, but this is 2010, and I'd like to think that I'm after something with a little more sophistication. Going through their horde-mode style game unlocks naked pictures of your girlfriend Jennifer, which leaves me feeling kinda cheap and shallow and the game requires little skill beyond button mashing, with even the boss battles being nothing more than your usual lazy "learn their attack pattern, wait for the right moment, then attack" followed by a quick-time event to finish them off. The graphics and art-style are pretty good, I'll give them that, there's just nothing that stands out about the game. What I also found annoying is that every couple of levels or so, it will switch into old 2D-style platforming for no real particular reason. This is actually pretty poorly executed and are quite confusing when they appear. The save points are also quite far apart in this game (baby), so get ready to save often, because if you die, there's a painfully long loading screen for a level that you just finished playing.

 
  PROS

- Fantastic soundtrack (if you love metal)
- Great sense of humour
- Interesting storyline

CONS

- Terrible soundtrack (if you don't love metal)
- Boring as hell
- Buggy sound
- Repetitive gameplay
- Repetitive gameplay
- Repetitive gameplay

SUMMARY

Look, I'll be totally honest, this is the first game I've reviewed where I haven't finished the single-player campaign. It wasn't because I was rushed for time to get this review out, and it's not because I wasn't good enough to finish it - I just didn't want to play it anymore. I always feel slightly jaded or annoyed when I read a review and find out the reviewer didn't play through the entire game, but trust me when I say that Splatterhouse is boring, repetitive, unoriginal and just not fun in any way at all. It relies too heavily on gimmics to cover up the fact that it's a terrible game. I was hoping for so much more than this, but feel really let down. At the risk of sounding like my mum, I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed.
   [this was originally written for australiangamer.com]