If John Woo directed a Night of the Living Dead film, it might look a little like Zombie Revenge. This is a spin–off of the House of the Dead lightgun games, and the similarities are blatantly obvious. The House of the Dead series featured a team of heavily armed special agents trying to clear a poor, defenseless city of vicious zombies.

While the two House of the Dead games were first–person lightgun games, Zombie Revenge takes the exact same concept and puts it into a third–person action game. Think Dynamite Cop (or even Double Dragon), and you’re pretty much on the money. The actual game play in Zombie Revenge is just as mindlessly simple as its predecessors.

Your job, as one of the three selectable agents, is to wade through the various zombies, monsters, and beasties infesting the area and blow them all to little tiny smoking pieces. Unlike previous games, though, in this one you’re given more than just an automatic pistol to help you out. You can now use fists and feet to pummel the undead, and there are weapons ranging from machine guns, to shotguns, to giant drills (a la Total Recall) that you can pick up and use. This is very good, since your default automatic pistol can run out of ammo all too easily in the game’s target–rich environments.

There are various other items to be retrieved, such as land mines or health boosts, but your main focus is going to be the weapons. You’re going to need all the help you can get, as swarms of the undead pour in at you from every conceivable direction. All you have to do is kill everything that moves. And, just to keep things from getting TOO boring, you’ll occasionally need to talk to innocent victims, operate devices, and fight your way through boss–type enemies.

As you might imagine, this sort of game is great for releasing your aggressions, but it won’t do much for your mind improvement. The graphics in this game are quite good, although not as polished as many of the other Dreamcast games. The special effects, such as blood and flames, are done really well, and the cut scenes are nice and cinematic. The art design is near brilliant, with grotesque, imaginative monsters and dark, spooky warehouse locales. This entire game screams "eye candy." The character designs, zombie designs, and level–change title cards are all homages to the original House of the Dead games, which is a treat for fans of those games.

Soundwise, the delightful weapon booms and zombie screeches are overshadowed by another feature typical of House of the Dead games: the voice acting. The characters in Zombie Revenge make the actors in junior high school amateur theatrical productions look like Academy Award winning thespians! In an interesting twist, though, one of the characters speaks only in Japanese, with subtitles. At least it’s hard to tell when his acting is stiff, which is one small benefit.

What tips the scales for this game back into the "cool!" side of things is all the odd options contained within the title’s environment. You can select from a variety of gameplay modes, like Bare Knuckle Mode, where your punches and kicks are more effective, but you don’t start out with a weapon. There’s even a couple of bizarre, little VMU minigames, such as a Chaos–like Character Raising Game or Zombie Fishing where you, well, fish for zombies.

Overall, this game is a fun way to pass an afternoon, if your mind needs a break from games like Elemental Gimmick Gear or Soul Reaver. Just be aware of its flaws and prepare to be frustrated. If Dynamite Cop was too short for you, or you always wanted a third–person perspective House of the Dead, then this is your game.

If you want a little more meat to your games, or hate games that purposefully kill you off right when you’re getting to the good part, then maybe you’d better skip this one. Plenty of mindless monster–blasting action, lots of guns, tons of explosions, many targets, and an abundance of adrenaline—it’s mindless—don’t expect an intricate storyline. The game play is also repetitive and a bit weak. There’s also the little problem of no save feature and limited continues.

Oh, the voice acting is hideous, but that’s traditional now for this series. If you just want to blow something up, this game is far superior to its competitors on the Dreamcast. It’s definitely worth renting, but it’s probably not going to be a very worthwhile purchase.

Overall Game Rating: B-

Sega website

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