The House of the Dead 2 & 3 Return

Release

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Critic score

80/100

Platform families

Editorial overview

Inside The House of the Dead 2 & 3 Return

What it is

This compilation bundles the following games:

The House of the Dead 2 (Dreamcast) The House of the Dead III (Xbox)

Both games were ported to the Wii with support for the Wii Zapper peripheral. A new Extreme mode is unlockable for The House of the Dead III, with faster enemy attacks and smaller bullet blast radii for the player's guns (similar to the handgun in the second game). At the same time, the shotgun can be reloaded much faster and a new melee attack is introduced: Guard Attack. It is a powerful move that also blocks incoming attacks, but requires a "reload" time.

The premise

HotD2: The game follows the fictional events of February 26, 2000, fourteen months after the 1998 Curien Mansion incident in The House of the Dead.

AMS agent G has gone missing and his last known location is Venice, Italy. The city of Venice becomes chaotic when a strange zombie breakout takes place. American AMS agents James Taylor and Gary Stewart are dispatched, along with Amy Crystal and Harry Harris, to investigate and evacuate the populace. They suddenly encounter the impish Zeal, who had recently dealt with G. Upon finding G alive but wounded, James and Gary converse with him and G gives them a field journal showing the bosses and weak points. The pair are then met with a massive undead horde, similar to the kind from the Curien Mansion incident. They continue on, trying to save the town's civilians from the zombies.

HotD3: The zombie infestation has spread all over the world, reducing the world into desolation with the civilization collapsing.

In 2019 (16 years after the events of The House of the Dead 4), a paramilitary force led by retired AMS agent Thomas Rogan infiltrates the EFI Research Facility, a research center formerly owned by Dr. Roy Curien located in an unnamed place in Europe or North America, to investigate what led to the world's collapse. During the mission, his entire team is killed, until he and his second-in-command, Captain Dan Taylor are left. When they manage to find their answer in a giant laboratory, Death, a gigantic mutant who serves as the facility's security guard, kills Taylor and injures Rogan. While fighting to stay alive, Rogan is approached by an unidentified figure in a semi-corporate attire who offers help. Contact with him is lost.

Two weeks later, on October 31, Rogan's daughter, Lisa, accompanied by his former partner, semi-retired agent "G", arrives at the facility to rescue him. While navigating through the facility, they fend off against hordes of undead creatures, before they encounter Death, whom they fight twice. Later, they fight a deformed sloth, The Fool, and a mutated tendrilous plant named The Sun. Along the way, Lisa muses to "G" how she has to live in the shadows of her well-known father and that she is often the subject of his comparison.