House of the Dead: Overkill

I bought The House of the Dead: Overkill a couple days ago from Best Buy for $14.99. I've been wanting this game for a long time, and that's a pretty good price. But so far I'm fairly disappointed in certain aspects of the game.

The House of the Dead: Overkill is an on-rails light gun style shooter where you shoot zombies... err, "mutants"-- for some reason the game insists on not calling them zombies, I think it's a running joke from the previous HotD games, but they never actually explain it here. The presentation is another tongue-in-cheek humourous style-- this time wholly inspired by Grindhouse style '60's-'70's movies. The overall idea and especially the music are pretty nicely done. But the humour almost tries too hard to effectively elicit big laughs from me.

My biggest problem with the gameplay is that the images are waaaaay too dark on the screen. You can't see ANYTHING. It's a black background with black stuff that you wave your target reticle over and you know it's a zombie mutant because your reticle turns red. I get that it's supposed to be action-horror, but it's just not enjoyable not being able to see *anything*... even the cutscenes are like this. It's impossible to play this game unless the room is completely dark, and even then you can't see much on the screen. And the only adjustments you can make are to the audio-- no contrast/brightness adjustments at all??? Moronic oversight.

If you look up screenshots of the gameplay, you'll notice that they usually have a greenish tinge... that's because someone tweaked the contrast up... there's no greenish tinge here & thus, it's not possible to see much in the actual game. Drives me nuts.



I'm going to play this a bit more, hope I'll warm up to it.



later
don