Developer: Modern Dream
Publisher: SEGA
Rrp: £14.99 (Steam), £14.99 (Humblebundle)
Released: 29th October 2013
Available on Steam and Humblebundle
Played Using: Keyboard and Mouse
The House of the Dead games, remember them? The bad voice acting, terrible character animations and a plot that would make most B-movie script writers shake their head in shame. Everyone who played these games loved playing them despite of those issues, they were perfect for arcade cabinets because, lets be honest here, no one played them for the story and acting. Then along come The Typing of the Dead series… yep, lets make these awful games educational and remove one of the core things that made them fun, co-op play and spectators.
And now there’s this, The Typing of the Dead: Overkill. So the question is, is it any good? Read on and see.
The House of the Dead: Overkill is a on the rails shooter, meaning you go where the camera takes you, your sole job is to be the gunman. That’s about it, no ducking mechanics, no controlling the camera, just point and shoot. Its something of a dying genre now.
In this case though instead of shooting a gun to kill a zombie you have to type the words and sentences correctly.
Thankfully for every successful word typing the zombies in question gets stunned, there are exceptions, because there always are, to this rule but they are fairly rare. The words that appear are usually customized to fit in with where that scene is set (unless you’re using a DLC language pack) and can lead to a few chuckles because of how out of context they are. I’m not sure if that was intentional on the designers part or not, but if it was then it wasn’t then it was a great stroke of luck.
With most games where if you set the difficulty level to a higher setting it just gives the enemies more health, higher damage and better AI. In this the higher the difficulty the harder the words and sentences are.
At the end of each level you are given a score, which takes into account many things including how quickly you typed, the number of spelling mistakes and any multipliers that were attained along with quite a few other things.
It’s actually kind of impressive how Modern Dream have managed to turn one of the great weaknesses of the House of the Dead series into a strength. The voice actors really ham it up, film scratches have been added to really rub in that cheaply made B-movie feel and there are some very deliberate ‘graphical errors’ that are clearly meant to be taken as the sort of bad cutting and continuity errors that B-movies became known for.
There are several DLC dictonaries for The Typing of the Dead: Overkill, once downloaded and activated the words needed to kill the zombies will fall under whatever theme that map pack would be.
THE TYPING OF THE DEAD: OVERKILL, PART DEUX – THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD: OVERKILL
Did I mention that this game comes with the normal, none typing version of ‘The House of the Dead: Overkill’ too? Well it does, so if you get tired of typing you can just switch over to plain old shooting mode. Personally I found this to be a lot easier than the typing part, especially once you upgrade your weapons enough (something you can’t do in ‘Typing’).
To kill the zombies you shoot click the left mouse button, lob a grenade (once you have that powerup) with the right and [tab] allows you to swap between your primary and secondary weapon.
Shooting also allows you to collect items in the game like health, money or just a collectibles. Getting the collectibles in such a manner may not sound like much of a challenge but sometimes they’ll only be on screen for a moment.
If you enjoy a campy story and just really want to kill some zombies / improve your typing skills then this game may just be for you. To be honest this game is a bit too easy with a mouse, I wish I had some kind of light gun for it, but then I’m a bit old school at heart when it comes to this genre.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
Blue Estate
Bulletstorm
Dead Rising 2
