![]() Still, it's a beat-'em-up, and repetition is kind of the thing with these games. You've seen all the ways to kill one enemy type by the first or second time they appear, so repetition does tend to set in rather quickly. The main problem is that there just aren't enough of them. ![]() These launch you into quicktime events and play out like low-rent versions of Mortal Kombat fatalities. There are some nifty kill moves you can pull on weakened enemies. The combat is largely satisfying, if not overly exciting. Fortunately, that serves the game just fine. More often, though, you can satisfactorily blow through each room full of zombie men, animal-esque mutants, and various other grotesqueries by button mashing to your heart's content. Odds are most players will never get to a point where they memorize all these attacks, since you rarely need the most complex ones outside of the game's hardest difficulty setting-which is a real bastard, by the way. Learning the game's basic combos and attacks is most certainly important, as is earning blood, which is your primary purchasing method for additional combos and special attacks. At some point the specifics of the beat-'em-up gameplay all blend together into one big, gooey, red paste. I haven't harped terribly much on the mechanics of Splatterhouse because, quite frankly, I have a hard time remembering very many of them. You could paint the Great Wall of China a lovely shade of red with all the blood in this game. It's just a shame the rest of the game's voicework is pretty boilerplate, and that the game frequently suffers from audio mixing bugs, where dialogue gets drowned out by metal guitars or otherwise chops up into glitchy nonsense. This kind of dialogue could have been deathly with the wrong combination of writing and voice acting, but here it's generally chuckle-worthy, thanks in no small part to the delivery by veteran voice performer Jim Cummings. All the while, the spirit ensconced within the mask goads and curses at Rick to do better, makes fourth-wall breaking cracks about M-ratings and the nature of what makes a Splatterhouse, and occasionally takes the well-deserved opportunity to call him a pussy. As you run through this game, alternating between the weak and strong attack buttons to form accidental combos and periodically picking up boards, machetes, chainsaws, and even the occasional weaponized severed limb to ramp up the damage, licensed tracks from the likes of Mastodon, Five Finger Death Punch, and Goatwhore will often begin blaring in the background. Splatterhouse is basically the video game equivalent of a gigantic ASCII devil horns, a metal and gore geek's fantasy of grotesque violence by way of screeching guitar solos. Halfway Between Hell and Earth would make a pretty good heavy metal album title, as would much of the stuff found in this game, really. That said, Rick has little choice but to work with this demonic mask, since he would ideally like to save his comely young girlfriend before the doctor turns her into a sacrificial vessel and unleashes some creatures that exist halfway between Hell and Earth. The talking death mask transforms Rick, the aformentioned boy, into said juggernaut for entirely self-serving purposes. The set-up for all this "house splattering" is a pretty typical boy loves girl, boy and girl visit creepy mansion of lunatic doctor, lunatic doctor kidnaps girl and leaves boy for dead, boy finds ancient Aztec ceremonial death mask and uses it to become a hulking, jorts-wearing juggernaut of death kind of deal. ![]() Simultaneously, no matter how much blood, viscera and spinal fluid the developers see fit to dump on you, it's exceedingly difficult to muster up more than a casual shrug at the sight of it all. This is still a fairly standard beat-'em-up, but there are enough wrinkles, tweaks, and amusements here to keep a player functionally engaged through the entirety of its story. The modern day Splatterhouse for the Xbox 360 and PS3 is a game that manages to construct a more interesting gameplay experience around piles upon piles of largely forgettable gore. Arguably the most interesting thing about this remake-apart from its protracted development history, which makes for interesting reading elsewhere-is that the reverse is largely true here. And yet, here we are with a modern-day take on the franchise. Don't let the jorts fool you: Rick is as brutal as they come. Basically, it was all guts, no substance. At its core, the game was a fairly forgettable beat-'em-up with a few interesting monsters to bludgeon and eviscerate, but the sheer amount of blood and gore on offer (again, relative to other games of this era) made it an enticement, even in its heavily edited TurboGrafx form. The original 1988 arcade game, and subsequent TurboGrafx-16 release, mostly served of interest due to its highly graphic (for its time) violence. Splatterhouse is probably not a game that was in dire need of rebooting.
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