Like any medium, gaming relies heavily on word of mouth. Positive word of mouth can catapult a title to great sales, while negative word of mouth can completely kill a title in its tracks. Even though we take the warning seriously and avoid those titles from the bottom of the barrel, there is an innate curiosity begging to see if these titles are really as bad as we’ve been led to believe. This feature explores those titles to see if they really are that bad by having one of our staff sit down and play the title, or at least as much as they can to give the game a fair shake. Up this week: Splatterhouse.
Namco’s Spaltterhouse was the first game I remember my parents not wanting me to play and because of that the reason I wanted a TurboGrafx-16. It’s on the box advisory label, “The horrifying theme of this game may be inappropriate for young children… and cowards,” made it instantly the coolest thing in town and I had to get my hands on it somehow, someway. I did get a TurboGrafx-16 and eventually, through devilish trickery, was able to play this controversial game. My memories of the title are fuzzy at best but they are fond ones, mostly because of the subterfuge that went into getting the game card into my console.
Namco pulled at these nostalgia strings when it brought the series back to this current generation of consoles in a God of War-like beat-em up, but unlike before, I didn’t have to sneak around to get myself a copy of the game. Instead, what kept me from playing it was the vocal opinion that it wasn’t a very good title. While it’s Metacritic score is an OK 62, big sites like IGN and Gamespot skewered the title in their official reviews and worse, fans of the original found it to be a sloppy mess that wasn’t fun to play.
But is it really as bad as they say?
Keeping in mind that Splatterhouse is now three years old, I sat down with the intention of giving the game as fair a shake as possible. The intro screen instantly captured my attention by pulling the right nostalgia strings with its throwback splash screen. The opening cutscene sets the stage, and just like the original, Rick Taylor finds himself mortally wounded while his girlfriend, Jennifer, has been kidnapped by the mad doctor, Dr. West. An ancient Mayan artifact, the Hell Mask, grants Rick the opportunity to save Jen as well as a second chance at life if he will do its bidding. His bidding mostly involves killing anything and everything in the West mansion to gather blood for the mask. Between the splash screen and the remade opening, I went from feeling somewhat skeptical about playing the title to actually looking forward to splattering some blood everywhere. And then the game started and all that anticipation evaporated into disappointment and disgust.
Calling Splatterhouse a God of War-like game is an insult to actual games like God of War. I say this because it plays as if the developers hadn’t ever actually seen the original God of War game to learn from their mistakes, never mind God of War II and God of War III. There are fast attacks and heavy attacks, neither of which work particularly well. Fast attacks do hardly any damage while heavy attacks take so long to perform that they become worthless in a crowd of enemies. And fighting crowds of enemies is what this game is all about. You’ll fight crowds of identical looking demon dogs, and zombies and brutes. Occasionally the game will throw a new enemy type at you that appear just as drab as everyone else.
Repetitive enemy design though isn’t bad in and of itself, after all a lot of good games do it as well, even if they aren’t quite as egregious as Splatterhouse is about it. No, what makes the combat bad is that the frame rate fluctuates all over the place during combat, which results in imprecise control and some unfair instances where you’ll get caught in a horde of enemies with no way to escape. If you play Splatterhouse, you’ll encounter these instances on the regular as you move from kill-box to kill-box.
Nothing frustrated me more than the one true boss fight I endured. Set against a behemoth with a clocktower for an arm, I was forced to avoid repetitive attacks while whittling away its health in minute increments. Honestly, this is how a lot of boss battles in these types of games go, so while tiresome, it wasn’t aggravating. That changed when I whittled away the boss’s health to nothing and launched into the requisite Quick Time Event. Failing at the QTE results in an instant death and having to redo the entire boss battle again. It was enough to make me want to throw my controller through my 60 inch television so I didn’t have to see it anymore. Instead, after 90 minutes of play, I exited the game, took it out of my console and shut off my 360.
While the gameplay is enough to warrant the game its reputation as a bad title, Splatterhouse does itself no favors with its intangibles. Compared to other 2010 titles, the game looks awful and its drab environments don’t elicit fear but rather boredom. It’s personality is dire, with the game, via the Hell Mask, openly mocking you for poor play. And let’s not even talk about the fact that the collectibles are pieces of explicit “photos” of Rick’s girlfriend that get put together like a puzzle, revealing more of the picture and of Jennifer, the more you collect. I honestly felt a little dirty for getting the achievement for assembling one of them.
And I honestly feel my 360 needs a proper cleaning after having played Splatterhouse. The game is a gross, exploitative piece of garbage that has no redeeming value whatsoever. It really is as bad as advertised.
Do you have a suggestion for a future game to be explored in this feature? If so drop it in the comments below.
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