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Back in 1998, Sega unleashed one of the strangest horror light gun shooters on the market, The House of the Dead 2, featuring its own brand of late-90s Sega Japan charm. The game featured bright colors contrasting with ultra-violence and monsters, along with some of the most perplexing, campy, and oddly-delivered English voice acting of its era. It became a big hit with its home version for the Dreamcast console just a few months after its arcade release, and went on to be ported to several other consoles in the following years.
Fast forward to 2019, when it was announced that remakes of the first two HOTD games were in development, with the first remake eventually releasing in 2022. We’ve had to wait three more years in addition to see this remake of HOTD2. The remake of the first entry ended up being a great revisit to the Curien mansion scenario, with some really fun gameplay updates that made it a worthy entry to the series, and now it’s time to see how this update of the second game fares.
When first starting up the game, you’re greeted with the new title screen, which, similar to the HOTD Remake, shows a re-created version of the attract sequence from the original arcade game with new graphics, and it plays some of the new music made for the game. While it’s fun to see this updated version of the classic intro, the music leaves a lot to be desired here.
After playing the entire game with the new music turned on, I didn’t remember any of it, and immediately switched it to the classic soundtrack for my future playthroughs, which made the whole game feel a lot better overall. Some pieces of the new music tried to capture or reference some of the original tracks, but does so in ways that only make it more forgettable and less fun.
As far as what the game offers, you’ve got a few modes to choose from, including the Campaign mode, which offers Original and Arcade versions, the Training mode, and a boss rush mode. The training mode offers 10 different missions (all with 5 difficulty levels) to test your skills and have some arcade-y fun with these mini-challenges, but they don’t really add a lot over the original game’s Training mode, even if it’s nice that it was included here. The boss mode is just as you’d imagine, where you fight the bosses one at a time to get the best time or score, which may or may not be your thing.
However, most of what we’ll focus on here is the Campaign mode, which is where the majority of the gameplay takes place. While the Arcade mode option of the Campaign offers a straight-forward run of the game that’s very close to the HOTD2 arcade version, with some new quirky scoring mechanics added on, the Original mode is where most people will spend most of their time with the game. Similar to the Original mode in the home ports of the original HOTD2, this mode lets you acquire items and weapons to use on your future playthroughs of the mode, allowing for some fun mix-ups to the way the game is played and giving a little more replay value to subsequent runs of what is essentially an arcade-accurate light gun shooter.
While this mode does present a lot of fun options to tweak your preferences and play style, it’s also where some of the questionable design decisions start to pop up, which will be a recurring theme throughout this review. In the first HOTD Remake, any weapons you unlocked were unlocked permanently, and it allowed you to freely switch between all of them at any time and in any mode after they were unlocked, but the way this was implemented in HOTD2 Remake is very different.
It makes you choose only one special weapon per playthrough, and all of the weapons that returned from the first remake have been significantly downgraded from how they functioned in that game, making them far less fun to use. I can understand wanting to keep things a little closer to how the Original mode worked in the original HOTD2, but not giving the option to play a mode where all your weapon unlocks were available simultaneously just detracts from the versatility and variety of gameplay.
We also have to talk about quite a few other questionable design decisions, such as not including the very fun Horde mode that was in the first remake, which doubled or tripled the amount of enemies on screen at any given time and made it feel closer to the later HOTD arcade games. Its presence is sorely missed. While it’s also expected in the current game market, it still stinks that there’s no native light gun support on the PC, and it most likely won’t ever get that support.
This has led to fans already making some mods to allow use of PC light guns, but it’s very limited and buggy in its use, even though it instantly makes a huge difference in how fun the game is. It’d be far too optimistic to expect this support to be officially added, but we can still hold a tiny hope that it may come. Using an air mouse with an advanced gyro sensor comes close to approximating the feel of a light gun but it’s not quite the same, even though you can use one natively in the game.
As far as how it looks and plays in a general sense, it’s a very mixed bag overall. The new character models look pretty great across the board, with most of them looking a bit more grotesque and realistic, but the animations sometimes don’t match up in quality. While they went through a lot of trouble to keep most of the awkwardness and campiness from the original intact, whether it was the hammy nonsense dialogue, awkward and wooden animations, or the over-the-top action sequences (all of which were painstakingly preserved for this remake) there’s a handful of nitpicks and other issues that need to be mentioned.
Since the game was updated with a modern game engine and modern lighting, it caused quite a few issues of the lighting being far too dark in most areas (even with the gamma settings all the way up) as well as many of the environments looking dingy and bland overall. While the old-school awkward character and enemy animations can be charming at times, they also sometimes clash with the new high resolution models in a way that feels cheap. Most of the environments and the texture work on them feel very basic and almost unfinished in some areas, and this is even after several patches to fix many missing textures at launch. While it is appreciated that they continue to work on it, it feels like some of these issues are more basic design shortcomings that are more related to the tools and expertise of the developers.
While most of the voice acting is accurately and wonderfully strange, as it was in the original HOTD2, the way that main villain Goldman’s voice was handled feels out-of-place and much too far from the original. He was given a heavy Southern US accent, and it sits in opposition with the other characters, who were all pretty close to their original voice styles and accents.
While the general action and shooting in the game feels good and fairly accurate to the original game, with so many other features lacking or completely missing, it makes this remake feel far less inspired and of less value than the first HOTD Remake. I’ve always been of the opinion that the original HOTD2 is one of the weakest entries in the series as far as actual gameplay goes, so this remake’s choice of sticking so closely to that original gameplay feels like a fault, in this case.
The controls being officially limited to a mouse or controller at this time really limits the experience, and while you also have the option of using an air mouse to make it feel a little closer to a light gun, it’ll never quite be where it needs to be without the light gun support being added in or the use of fan mods.
Even though the patches have fixed many of the issues the game had at launch, it’s still in a state where a lot of things are still very buggy, including animations, several hard crashes, enemy and gore physics issues, and still a few missing or late textures throughout, feeling rather unpolished overall.
While it is interesting to have a new, darker take on House of the Dead 2 that still keeps many of its original features intact, there’s still far too many shortcomings to be able to fully recommend this to anyone who isn’t a die-hard fan of the series. In comparison, the first HOTD Remake felt like it could’ve been a nice re-introduction to light gun games for many people who weren’t necessarily followers of the genre, but HOTD2R falls far short of that kind of recommendation.
It’ll be interesting to see how the other console versions fare when they launch later this year, but for now, the PC version leaves a lot to be desired.
Even though it has a relatively low price tag, the game is still in shoddy shape after several post-launch patches, and while I do have faith that this can be updated to be a much better experience, there are some more fundamental shortcomings that no updates will likely fix.
If you’re a devoted fan of light gun games or the HOTD series, this might be enjoyable for you as long as you temper your expectations and take the time and effort to set up an air mouse or light gun that can improve the overall feel of the game.
(6.5 / 10)
Above Average
(6.5 / 10)A PC review code was provided by the publisher.
