A guilty pleasure.
I never played the original Splatterhouse and its sequels. From what I've read about these games, what made them stand out is the shock value of blood and gore everywhere. Fast forward twenty years and the gaming community is over this (not the general media of course). Namco decides to have a "reimagining' of the franchise with the 2010 release of Splatterhouse. Blood, gore, and nudity are abundant in this version. Not too shocking to most gamers I would say in this day and age. So what makes this stand out?
The basic premise of this is that as Rick you have to save your girlfriend Jennifer from Dr. West. You travel across time, dimensions, and explore Dr. West's mansion to find Jennifer. Along the way, you fight various abominations. Eventually, Rick gets to Jenn and the game leaves with a cliffhanger hinting at a sequel.
Gameplay wise, this is all over the place. For the most part, the game controls well. The only parts where it feels clunky are when you are doing any of the sidescrolling segments of the game. You will be required to do precise jumps and rolls and the controls are not up to snuff. You will suffer cheap deaths because of the poor controls.
Combat is solid in Splatterhouse. There is lots of blood to be spilled and gore to be laid around. Nothing is quite as satisfying as ripping an enemy's arm off and then using that to kill other enemies. Through the course of the game, you will upgrade and unlock moves. To upgrade moves, you use the blood you collect from fallen enemies to upgrade. So the more blood you spill, the faster you will upgrade. To help get more blood you can perform splatter kills. These are kills when the enemy is in a weak state and you grab hold of them and perform a brutal finishing move on them. While splatter kills are also fun to do, they get old after a while because the animations get repetitive and they require the use of quick-time button presses. You can also go into a berserk mode where you do massive damage against enemies.
It may appear to be a simple button masher at first, but the game isn't that. You can button mash on the main enemies, but the tougher enemies will stop you from button mashing. You will have to learn enemy patterns and find their weaknesses.
Game length, you are looking anywhere from 5-10 hours to complete and room for replayability with higher difficulties and the ability to carry over the moves you learned in previous playthroughs. There's also the survival arena where your goal is to get through 20 waves of enemies and kill them in any way possible. There's a good amount of unlockable content. You will unlock the original 3 Splatterhouses, journal entries by Dr. West that flesh out the back story, and pictures of Jennifer (I'll leave this to the reader's judgement if they are tasteless or not).
I advise to install this game on your harddrive to help with loading.
This is a far from perfect game. Controls need to be sharpened and load times need to be improved. The story needs to be fleshed out better. It's a nice bonus to read the back story from Dr. West's journal entries, but you will have to beat the game on it's highest difficulty and master the survival arenas. I really hope for a sequel, but I am doubtful. Less than a month out, I got this for $25. If you want some mindless entertainment and something to keep you busy on a weekend, give it a shot. You will have fun, I know I did.
This is my first review, so be soft GB community.
