House of the Dead returns in this light gun shooter.
The Nintendo Wii already has some Light Gun shooters under it's belt like Ghost Squad and Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, although the latter is a blended game than a straight forward Light Gun game. House of the Dead II and III return seems like a fairly logical choice.
For some odd reason, the game does not include the 4th game, which is fine, but why they skipped the first game entirely is unknown to me. It would have been simple to add it but they omitted it completely and that is kind of annoying. At the beginning, you can choose to either play House of the Dead II or III and the stats of each game are tracked independently.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, it's the same game that was in the arcades a decade ago and the graphics really haven't aged very well at all. They're blocky and clunky but at least the blood still flies everywhere as you shoot them into ground meat.
One thing that players from the arcade will remember, is the brutal difficulty in House of the Dead II. There's no way to dodge attacks except for blowing out the enemies before they get a chance to attack you. At times, there's so many things on the screen, that it's hard to focus on what on your imminent threats and they just keep piling on. Now the game tries to give you some extra chances by putting around some health icons that you can shoot for life, but they are far too rare to be of real use. You can also rescue civilians but you have to rescue so many just to get a bonus life at the end of the stage that's it better not to take the chance because if you shoot one, you lose a life. That entirely counteracts the reason to even bother.
House of the Dead III came out a little later and so the graphics do hold up a bit bitter but when you get down to it, it's still a fairly ugly game by today's standards. The game does have a fair frame rate and rarely does it slow down and everything looks exactly the same as it did in the arcade. In both games, you're allowed to go different routes to the same ending but certain routes are longer and others are easier. House of the Dead III allows the player to choose what order the areas the player will visit next but in reality, all areas must be visited so it doesn't affect the game at all.
This newer game is far easier than the previous and it shows from how much easier it is to combat the plethora of enemies thrown at you. The only difficulty most players will might have are with the gargantuan bosses who take so many hits, you're more than likely to take your fair share. Getting extra lives is also a lot easier. Rescuing your partners from surrounding hordes of enemies will grant an extra life, while failing will get you nothing. This system is much fairer and allows players to get more lives much easily.
In both versions of the Wii, the player can select an easier mode where you can find special items that can give you unlimited ammo, to more continues or different types of gun fire. Although this mode is a lot funner, it is also a lot easier taking the difficulty out of it but at least the games give you a choice as to how to play.
Soundwise, the game sounds the exact same. This includes the horrible voice acting of the second game and it's legacy of poor quality remains intact in this iteration. You'll be wondering if this script came from a Grade 2 play but few play these types of games to get a real interesting story.
There are also challenges from defeating bosses in a certain time or shooting barrels. Beating these challenges will allow you to access unlimited continues and other goodies but if you're that good, there really wouldn't be a reason to get them.
Where this game fails in my opinion is the aiming system. In the arcades, the technology used for the game is different than the technology used for the Wii. The sensor bar is estimating where you are pointing on the screen but it is never actually where you are pointing. As a result, the game needs the cross hair to be on the screen at all times. Turning it off would be foolish because there is no good way of knowing where the game believes the player is aiming. Many times, you will be aiming at one place, but it's slightly over to the left. This destroyed my game play experience and made it very not enjoyable. Although I was able to slug through it, in the end, I didn't really want to play it because the aiming was always slightly or horrifically off.
House of the Dead II and III were fun games when they came out. Now that they're back on the Wii, they're still fun, but not nearly as much so. Add to the fact that the aim is atrocious, and there's very little replay incentive, you'll realize why these were relegated to the arcades years ago.