Quick Note: I played the remake as evidenced by the title, but haven’t played the original. So don’t expect any comparisons between the two versions

Panzer Dragoon Remake is a great little arcade game at a reasonable price. While the original game has remained largely constrained to the ill-fated Sega Saturn (and the PS2… kind of). Those who haven’t played it before can now play it on multiple new platforms. In my case, I chose the PC release from GoG with only a faint idea of what the series was about. As dedicated readers of this blog – who don’t exist – will be aware, I’m a sucker for a bargain. At £1, I can safely say that Panzer Dragoon really was a bargain. Not only is it a solid rail-shooter that manages to slightly embarrass Starfox 64 (my previous favourite) with it’s gameplay. But thanks to this remake it looks and sounds great too. Even if it’s a very short experience, it has a couple of tricks up it’s sleeve that combine to form a compelling gameplay experience.

First things first. The Panzer Dragoon remake may only have one weapon that you can use, but there’s an interesting give-and-take at the centre of the gameplay as this weapon has two firing modes. You can just spam shots, as much as you’d like and in a way that’s par-for-the-course for shoot em ups. Where things get a bit more interesting is that you’re able to hold down the fire button for a lock-on effect. With this lock-on being able to stack shots so long as you keep the enemy in your crosshairs. This makes it useful for enemies who are hard to hit, but there’s a catch. You see while enemy projectiles can be dodged, it’s quite difficult to do so. After all, you are moving on rails as it’s a rail-shooter. Fortunately you can shoot down the majority of these enemy projectiles, but only while shooting “normally”. This forces you to shoot your (locked-on) shot, so that you can now shoot down the incoming projectiles. While this might not sound like much, during frantic parts of the game you really have to constantly think about whether it’s worth sacrificing the ability to easily damage multiple enemies that are darting around, so that you can make it easier to avoid taking damage. The game is therefore able to produce a subtle but constant balancing act. Where you need to maximise the damage you deal while minimising the damage you take. Further compounding this, is the fact that while you can dodge there’s generally a limit as to how much you can dodge. Especially because aiming the targetting cursor at enemies, causes you to move in that direction. So if you are trying to dodge incoming shots which will allow you to keep charging your lock-on shot, then you still need to be mindful of where you’re aiming. As otherwise you’ll end up moving back towards the enemy fire you were trying to dodge! I appreciate that this all might seem a tad verbose. Basically you move with the cursor and you only have a limited amount of room to manoeuvrer.

One other thing that the Panzer Dragoon remake does to keep you on your toes, is manage the health system in a slightly unusual way. You see you can’t get more health during each of the game’s 7 stages. And beating a stage only gives you some health back. Therefore unless you are a real expert, you’ll probably struggle to clear the game with one life. Fortunately enough, you can gain more lives (or credits as they’re called here) by shooting down enough enemies. As a consequence, you’re actively encouraged to be more aggressive. If you shoot down 70% of enemies, you’ll only get 1 extra life. Whereas shooting down 90% of the enemies will give you two extra lives. Of course, as mentioned above the more lock-on shots you use the harder it is to deal with incoming enemy fire. So Panzer Dragoon is a game that incentives aggressive play, while also kind of punishing it.

Another twist that Panzer Dragoon offers that other rail-shooters don’t, is that you can rotate your direction of view while moving. Most rail-shooters would only let you shoot targets in front of you. In Panzer Dragoon on the other hand you’ll be shooting to your left, right and even behind you. This mechanic is used to good effect when fighting larger enemies, who you overtake and who overtake you which makes the fights feel larger than they are. It’s also a way to add further challenge to the game. As while you do have a radar that shows all nearby enemies and where they are. You still need to prioritise targets lest you get repeatedly hit by enemy fire from a direction you’re not watching. These enemies themselves are also quite varied. There are a range of both larger and smaller enemies each of which have their own attack patterns. Some attacks can be negated by shooting them down, while others just have to be dodged. Considering how short the game is, the amount of enemy variety is actually pretty impressive. Plus each level obviously has it’s own unique boss. Some of these bosses even have multiple forms, but none of them felt unfair or overly difficult. Instead Panzer Dragoon is a game that manages to deftly handle it’s difficulty curve. So that the late game is a large step up over the early game, without ever being overwhelming.

And the stages themselves have a nice amount of variation, both in colour palette and theme. There are sandy dunes, Mediterranean-esque ruins, industrial bases and besieged cities to take in over the course of your mission. Each area looks great and manages to look distinct, without being so distracting that it makes spotting the various enemies difficult. As for the soundtrack, it’s pretty good and suitably high-energy for a game which while short is consistently entertaining for it’s full duration. Finally while there is a story (and the credits even mention three lore experts) it is pretty minimal. You get a surprisingly lengthy opening cutscene which could charitably be described as a bit mad. Then are thrust into the action with only very short cutscenes occasionally appearing between stages. The plot is unsurprisingly quite simple. You are given a dragon by a guy and you need to stop the bad dragon from entertaining some sort of doomsday device. Along the way various fauna, critters and soldiers of some sort of empire will try and stop you for some reason. Don’t worry though, because the main point of the review is that Panzer Dragoon looks good, sounds good and runs at a pretty stable frame-rate. At least in this remake edition.

And that’s about all I have to say about the Panzer Dragoon remake, because as mentioned it’s exceedingly short. To be fair, after playing it from start-to-finish in an hour, I did unlock the “secret menu” which allowed me to: browse an art gallery, watch the credits again and even play through any stage with cheats enabled. While these additional features are cool, they can’t mask the fact that this is a very short game and one without any co-op or multiplayer features. As a consequence while I do think it’s a great game, it’s one I can only earnestly recommend in two circumstances. Either you are a big fan of the original and/or rail-shooters more generally. Or if it’s available at a low price during a sale. As mentioned, I paid £1 for my copy from GoG and I imagine a similar price will be available during the next big GoG sale. At that price anyone should buy it.

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Quick Note: This game is slightly glitchy if you start fannying around with co-op settings. If you get stuck you can always force the game to close by opening the Steam overlay and making it quit the game that way.

The House of the Dead: Remake is a game that came out of nowhere and was quickly snatched up and thrown into my Steam library around the time I first saw it was available, as for whatever reason it’s been the only HotD I haven’t played yet. Much like it’s sequels the game has the campy charm of a low quality release while still offering a variety of fun enemy encounters, a short-enough game length that it’s great for co-op while having enough unlockables and collectibles to still offer a decent amount of playtime. Unfortunately the port job hasn’t been conducted without any issue, as the game’s port by a motley band of developers I literally haven’t heard of has resulted in a Unity port that does little to dispel the negative conception of that particularly ill-fated engine. The two main issues I’ve encountered (and fortunately I haven’t encountered the “bug” where the game just flat out refuses to work) are surprisingly long load times and occasional instances of the game failing to load anything visually aside from the enemies. Fortunately these issues are fairly minor, as the game only fails to load the level briefly at a time and the actual loading of each level while slightly tedious only needs to take place when you’re booting up the game for the first time, or loading the game’s gallery mode. As such the game itself is able to operate on a fairly speed basis, with enemies jumping through windows, falling down from ceilings or clambering across walls and water features without any delay which keeps the pace up. The House of the Dead: Remake is therefore a fast paced game and were it not for the fact that it only includes 4 levels you would be in for a roller-coaster ride of an experience, but alas the game is over almost as quickly as it starts once you’ve figured out how the bosses work.

Which is kind of the game’s jam, for want of a better way of describing it. The House of the Dead: Remake is deliberately designed to be a short but intensive thrill ride which has the player basically unable to take a breather at any stage of the experience, as even when there are no enemies on screen there are hidden paths and collectibles scattered around that need to be shot to be unlocked. While this is great for keeping the pace up and ensuring that any co-op partners will find it hard to come up with an excuse to leave mid-session, it does also mean that the game has to be kept short enough that you’ll want to keep on rolling with the punches. Which means you get 4 levels per playthrough, of which 1 is a glorified boss-rush that barely lasts a few minutes because you should know how to deal with the bosses by now. In fact the bosses actually get easier as the game goes on, with the possible exception of the final boss who’s “weak spot” is hidden during the intro-screen. Fortunately the bosses are still fairly intense as they move quickly and you’ll need to keep hammering away at them to stop them for dealing a ton of damage to you, but they’re really more of a show-piece than an immense challenge – at least on normal difficulty.

As for the gameplay itself it’s an on-rails light-gun shooter where your character moves at their own pace through a variety of shooting galleries, with monsters appearing from all sides often with minimal notice. There’s a decent amount of enemy variety considering there are only really 3 stages, but on subsequent playthroughs there isn’t much in the way of variation unless you take the alternative paths. With these paths often being fairly well hidden, or at least requiring some intuition. Your character’s glance might quickly switch to a button for example, which you can shoot within the 2 seconds given to cause an elevator to appear or for a locked door to be shot down. Otherwise your character quickly moves on to the next series of targets. That’s about it for the gameplay, as outside of researchers occasionally getting in the way there isn’t much to it. These researchers are essentially civilians who you can shoot, but you shouldn’t as they give you extra points and sometimes healing items. In addition if you’re able to save all of them then you get a “secret” bonus room during the final stage. The House of the Dead: Remake also comes with an optional horde mode, which I had initially assumed was some sort of last-stand or defensive side activity, but which is instead just the same levels as the base campaign but with considerably more enemies on screen at any point.

With all that being said there isn’t too much to discuss about this House of the Dead remake, as while the graphics are perfectly acceptable they’re not worthy of extensive coverage. There’s a new soundtrack due to licensing issues with the original, which sounds fine to me but which can be replaced with the original’s via modding (on PC) for those who dislike it. The gameplay is enjoyable, faithful and frantic even if it’s fairly straight forward. There isn’t a huge amount of content but there is some replayability via the 3 different endings, different stage routes, achievement hunting (which unlocks additional weapons and even cheat codes) and the optional horde mode which provides a challenge for more hardcore gamers. It’s therefore a serviceable port of the original which features a handful of extra features, but which is sadly let down by the lack of online multiplayer and the lack of alternative game modes. So it’s short and sweet, but not particularly filling unless you are the sort of person who cares about 100% completion. One last thing to mention again is that you can unlock multiple different weapons and cheat codes which are fun to mess around with, but of course you can only play through the 4 included stages so many times before they begin to get a bit tiresome. Horde mode alleviates this slightly by mixing up the enemy spawns, but changing the difficulty doesn’t seem to have much of an impact.

In conclusion then The House of the Dead: Remake is an enjoyable co-op game and a decent enough single player experience, albeit one that most players won’t spend too much time with. While I’m glad that the game has been successful and that a sequel is in development, I am hoping that the House of the Dead 2 remake gets a bit more extra content to help add some meat to the base game’s bones. Unfortunately while The House of the Dead: Remake is a good remake, it does have some weird quirks like the lack of online co-op and some graphical bugs which haven’t been patched by the developers. As for whether I recommend it? Well yeah I do, I think it’s a fun little game and it’s not particularly expensive – plus having a local co-op game that’s not lengthy or overtly complicated is always a good thing. I do just wish it more content however, as playing through the campaign takes under an hour and once you’ve done that you’re just replaying through largely the same handful of stages with the same bosses, even if the alternative routes offer a sliver of much needed variety. The unlockable guns are great, the gallery is cute, the voice acting is still appropriately bad and the visual upgrades are nice, but it’s just oh so short and it’s replayability is near solely dependent on whether you can convince someone to come to your house and give it a go.

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