Very few arcade titles have a place in my heart like House of the Dead 2. While I’ve done my fair share of cabinets, only House of the Dead 2 got me to dump literally twenty dollars worth of quarters into it so I could play, from start to finish, with a friend one faithful summer. It was such dumb fun, and I cherish that memory as only an arcade kid could. That kind of glowing memory is what compelled me to pick up House of the Dead 2: Remake. In spite of a less-than-stellar review of the first game’s remake, I had high hopes that this second one, riding off my own wave of nostalgia, would deliver an excellent experience. Several hours later, I can say that, while not precisely what I dreamt of, it’s both competent and enjoyable, which is more than most games deliver.

I won’t bore or bother you with the plot of House of the Dead 2, as it seriously does not matter. This was an arcade cabinet with gun controllers designed to reward you for headshotting the shambling dead and didn’t expect you to be there for more than twenty minutes at a time, so the plot, however complex it may be, can be easily passed over. Having said that, the moments where you bear witness to the vignettes and cutscenes between fire fights are glorious in their almost absurd presentation. The voice acting is full of scenery chewing delivery energy, causing everything to be more dramatic than the original Resident Evil. Some might argue that it sounds terrible, and they’d be right: which fits this game perfectly. Why are you expecting Hamlet when you’re watching Joe Dirt? Set expectations accordingly.

First, the good news for everyone: Forever Entertainment stepped up their game with both the UI and overall handling of this second House of the Game title. The menus are much cleaner and more visible, with better toggles for controls and handling. Being able to assign aiming to two joysticks instead of one allows for a more intuitive approach to moving and aiming without gyroscopic controls. You can easily pop in and out of the menus in order to load up the original game version, the arcade version or, after fighting them once, a boss rush/practice mode where you can get your jollies practicing on all manner of hellish undead great and small. Just being able to load up this game in either docked or handheld mode without it being a massive headache is such a blessing.

Additionally, multiplayer support! If ever there was an arcade shooting gallery game that needed to have extra crosshairs on the screen, it’s House of the Dead 2. Besides the fact that you can’t always remember exactly where each baddie will pop up (and I do mean pop up), there are moments where you’ve got upwards of eight mobs on the screen at all once, rushing you and determined to take away some of your sweet, sweet life. Allowing a second player to join in on the carnage not only improves longevity, it also just makes the game significantly more fun. It’s a scientific fact that your enjoyment of executing everything in your sight is improved when doing it with a friend, loved one or whomever you can convince to pick up the other controller.

For the most part, House of the Dead 2 is just as much fun as I remembered. The shifting difficulties increase or decrease the number of successful shots to take down a target. The arcade version is very straightforward and relentless, while the “original” game version bakes in more powerups that you can shoot to make the experience more deadly for your foes. The level progressions – starting from the infamous car crash, heading down the waterways, delving underground and culminating in a truly bizarre boss battle – feel fresh and smooth, like the game was designed recently instead of being dredged up from over two decades ago. It’s definitely more difficult than I remember, and that difficulty is only exacerbating the further along you go in the main game line.

The mobs have an incredible variety, and the challenge of knowing the how and why of each creature’s kill point and weak spot turns you into a walking encyclopedia of monster knowledge. Unlike many other games, even the first boss is a massive challenge to undertake, demanding you understand patterns and guessing where to aim from the word go. That’s the great part of a title that was brought over from the cabinets: it wants your quarters, not your adoration. There’s no apology for the difficulty and the needle eye precision demanded for moving forward. You simply just need to get good and try to keep all the information in mind, because my Switch dock sure as hell doesn’t have a place to feed in coins to keep the game going once I run out of continues.

As much as I want to love the game front to back, the motion controls are an abhorrent nightmare for the Switch. If you’re playing with Joycons, you need to relearn how to move and it’ll take a WHILE before you get the X and Y axis sensitivity just right for your own play version. The Pro Controller was able to get situated a little faster, but it still was never great. As a joke, I tried to go gyroscope in handheld mode, and I might as well have put my Switch light in the washing machine for all the good it did with my aiming. This was an element of the game that makes it ideal, and there isn’t a good transition of it onto the Switch at all.

Look, I don’t mind the artwork redux, honestly. I have fondness for the OG version, but I also have a Dreamcast and a light gun if I desperately want to relive memory lane. I think the ragdoll physics are fine and add to the aforementioned absurdity of it all. I loved this game for being an over-the-top experience, not because I thought it was full of gritty zombie lore that I took as gospel. House of the Dead: Overkill perfectly encapsulated what this series should be, and House of the Dead 2 was basically a prototype for how the direction of the series should be headed. By making the overall game more campy and silly than it originally was, the port takes a genuine swing at making something that’s not only fun, but substantially better than the attempt at the first port.

But rail shooters simply aren’t as fun without the movement, and that kills things a bit for me. I had my fun with titles like Rage back in the day, but House of the Dead 2 was about being up on your feet, sweeping and swinging and firing off shots like a goddamn maverick agent. Headshots felt great to rack up, not just a lucky break when you were flailing about with the joysticks. It’s not the Switch’s fault there isn’t a decent light gun controller, just 3D printed cases for Joycons that do nothing to fix the inherent flaw in the system’s primary controller. But there was plenty of time and not a crushing demand for House of the Dead 2, so the aiming and shooting should have been a pleasure, not either a boring revisitation of Switch FPS limitations or a nausea-inducing whirlwind of misses.

Personally, I think the new House of the Dead 2: Remake is heads and shoulders and legs and bleeding torsos above the first game’s port. This one is playable, enjoyable and does a decent job of capturing the feel of the game’s core tenants. I don’t have an obvious solution for how to fix the gyroscopic problem, but players who have time and dedication will land on the right settings to make the game feel as fluid as possible. In the meantime, it’s still fun, it’s still gory, and it’s still a trip to enjoy in today’s modern gaming era. Now, I’ve got my Switch keyboard ready: where’s my Typing of the Dead port?

Graphics: 7.5 The new graphics add a light sheen of grease to an otherwise gritty title, bringing the illusion of polish wihtout actually improving anything. Some darks are quite dark, even on modern displays.	Gameplay: 7.5 Point and shoot without being able to point. The joystick controls are fine and servicable, but I really wanted to do motion controls. Simply not happening without a large investment of trial and error experimentations.
Sound: 9.0 Honestly, loved it. Over the top, campy and borderline trash, the gutteral zombie cries combined with marginally better acting than the House of the Dead movie made for a fun aural experience, haters be damned.	Fun Factor: 8.0 When the game was on, it was so on. I loved the blood, the guts, the split second saving of civilians and the targeting of bonus inducing background props. But once things got out of sync – bad aiming leading to miss after miss – my enjoyment deflated rapidly. It was more good than bad, but the bad took me right out.
Final Verdict: 8.0

The House of the Dead 2: Remake is available now on Steam, GOG, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5 and XBox Series One X/S.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of The House of the Dead 2: Remake was provided by the publisher.