PS3/Xbox360; �44.99; cert 18+; Namco
Violence. Everybody loves a bit of it, don't they? Punch, kick, rip, smash, gouge and dismember your way through this reboot of the classic beat-'em-up series, and you should have had enough violence to last you 10 bloody years.
Gratuitous swearing! That's great too, right? Splatterhouse is jam-packed full of it. You can't go more than two minutes in this game without a "shit" this or a "bitch" that.
Do you know what'll go perfectly with all this bad language and excessive violence? Nudity. And why not soundtrack it all with some really loud heavy metal music, made by bands with ridiculously metal names like Goat Whore and Municipal Waste.
A lot of people will be turned off by all this shamelessly adolescent nonsense, but there are a large number of shamelessly adolescent gamers out there. They're going to love this game.
In a plot that sticks reasonably close to the original games, lead character Rick must rescue his girlfriend from the clutches of evil scientist Dr West. He's assisted by a mysterious talking mask, which transforms him from an average college student weakling into a pumped-up Hulk-esque killing machine. In return, Rick must keep the mask happy by harvesting blood from the many Lovecraftian mutants and monsters populating the linear levels.
The combat is carried out with the usual set of kicks, punches, holds and throws you'd expect from a beat-'em-up, a few upgradeable special moves and some brutal weaponry ? planks of wood, knives, severed limbs and so on. Attack moves and combos are simple but satisfying to carry out, and the story takes in a number of impressively realised locations.
The creators have bent over backwards to please old-school Splatterhouse fans: the three original games are included as unlockable bonuses, and at various points the action switches from 3D to 2D, in sections that work both as a love letter to side-scrolling beat-'em-ups of yore, and as thoroughly enjoyable stages in their own right, smoothly shifting the game's pace to complement the relentless brawling that takes place elsewhere.
Throw in some surprisingly nuanced storytelling, some boss battles that can only reasonably be described as mega, and what Namco have produced here is something of a masterpiece of the beat-'em-up genre. Splatterhouse is a vulgar, noisy, shallow, juvenile, gruesome gem of a game that never forgets to be fun, even when going out of its way to be as appalling as possible.
? Game reviewed on PS3
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2010/nov/25/splatterhouse-game-review
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