Review by: Michael C. Luster

I wandered into the local game house with my family and eventually discovered House of the Dead lurking in the back corner. Immediately you see a first person grab a gun and start blasting scenario. However, unlike the usual offering of skeletons and reptiles, here you've got some very nasty animated corpses with an axe to grind, so to speak.

Having always been a fan of brain eating zombie flicks, I saw this as an opportunity to unleash my hidden passion for saving innocent victims. Let me say this: "I was not disappointed, House of the Dead really kicks...". The monsters were styled carefully and were not simple one shot baddies that burst into nothingness. Instead you get zombies the way they you would expect, hungry, vicious, and hard to kill. As you shoot them, parts fly off and blood splatters - pretty good VR here. But it gets even better, zombies are everywhere so the action is hot and heavy and it usually takes a several shots to pick off the pesky ones. Of course a nice point blank blast works well too.

Did I forget to mention the word "gore"? Why yes there is plenty of it as the axe wielding zombies slice their way through the game. Look out if they get too close, your head can split open too! The graphics on the zombies are full of blood and severed limbs, exactly what is required for the real effect. Hey too bad there wasn't a helicopter and some crates that you could push the zombies onto... It would also be cool if you could pick up and axe and give those zombies some payback! One thing I did miss was zombies biting chunks out of people and so forth, perhaps I was too busy shooting.

Anyway as for plot, the courtyard scene was great with zombies running amok. Believe me when I say you need an itchy trigger finger here. Of course once you get into the mansion you have to fight a few stupid critters like toxic frogs and blood sucking bats, these prove to be more of a filler than real action. Personally I'd rather just mix it up with the rotting corpses.

All told I'd recommend this game to anyone who likes 1st person blood and gore shoot'em ups. However, I'm not convinced the coin-op really serves is the best platform for this game. Sure it has great graphics and sound but the story is time sliced to work for quarters and tokens. As a result the sequences are brief and the storyline is compromised. Now if this game were published for the PC CD-ROM, and the storyline was expanded, you could throw away lots of your other shoot'em ups.