by On consoles, The House of the Dead: Overkill took one of the most well-trodden premises imaginable — shooting zombies in first-person, on rails — and used it to create one of the most memorably over-the-top games of all time. Taking tropes from ’70s grindhouse horror movies and cranking them to ridiculous levels, HotD:O was gruesome, hectic, and — as its characters clumsily shoehorned f-bombs into nearly every sentence — so deliberately crass that it was impossible to see it as anything other than a comedy.
The iOS version, subtitled The Lost Reels, scales all that back considerably. Once again following the exploits of Agent G, his absurdly foul-mouthed partner Detective Washington, and two hyperviolent strippers out for revenge, it does its best to approximate the original as players blast their way through two creepy environments (a dilapidated mansion on the bayou and a filthy-looking hospital) filled with flesh-hungry zombies. Power-ups and secret paths occasionally pop up to offer players something new to gun for, and while there are only three zombie types per level (or four, in the $1.99 “Naked Terror” add-on level), they mix up their attacks just enough to keep you on your toes, and to keep the action from getting too stale.
Compared to the console versions of Overkill, The Lost Reels feels like a pale imitation. Its characters still swear copiously between levels, and zombie heads still explode on a near-constant basis, but the gameplay’s slower, the zombies far less diverse, and the levels — which cut some of the original areas and recycle the remaining ones — are more drab and repetitive than crazy and threatening. And while it packs in two of the boss fights from the full-sized version (or three, with Naked Terror), they’ve been simplified to the point that any personality or challenge has been sapped away.
Taken on its own, however, it’s a fun (if somewhat expensive) rail shooter that packs in an awful lot of blood for an iOS game. Aiming with its virtual-thumbstick controls works surprisingly well, and being able to swap between a pistol and shotgun to keep from being mauled while reloading adds a light element of strategy. Also, as stingy as the game is with its levels, it’s generous enough with its in-game currency that you’ll be able to rapidly upgrade your guns and abilities to near-unbeatable heights. And while you’ll revisit the same areas frequently, the fact that the game charts different paths through them each time definitely helps.
