Parents' Guide to The House of the Dead: Remake

This is a faithful re-creation of the classic arcade shooting game that boasts overhauled graphics, but the controls and textures feel outdated. In House of the Dead: Remake, gone are the blocky character models and drab environments of the 1996 version. These visuals have been upgraded with more detailed, realistic models and places with far more objects and effects. The animations of cutscenes and zombies benefit from this modern update with more personality, too. But the improvements aren't consistent, with some blurry textures and long load times. It's a shame the Switch has to compromise between details and frame rate, but this can be manipulated with the Performance mode in the settings menu. While you're there, another thing to adjust is the aiming, which can be frustrating with the touchy Joy-Con analog stick or motion controls. After enabling a mix of both and tweaking their sensitivities, it becomes a smoother experience.

Beyond that, there's not much to playing besides shooting and reloading, since movement is done for you. A single playthrough takes about 40 minutes on average, so this can be replayed to find alternative paths and secret items by shooting breakable objects (like locks and furniture) to improve your score. Developing a particular path to improve your runs can be a fun exercise, which is helped by various kinds and groups of enemies on different routes. There are a couple dozen routes total, with diverse attacks and animations that make aiming an ever changing, frantic challenge, especially when you need to withhold or guide your aim to save scientists who can give you extra lives. A new horde mode has also been added that throws in more enemies, and there are local co-op and competitive modes. But these only bring so much to a game designed for the arcade. House of the Dead: Remake is a decently fine re-creation of the original that's worth playing a few times over, but repetition will also quickly set in.