"Remember when Capcom once tried to experiment on placing Res. Evil in a different style of genre? Needless to say this should've been it."

Genre mixings can be such a fascinating feat can they? Fighting & Tetris in games such as Super Puzzle Fighter. Survival Horror and RPG in the Japan-only Capcom Classic that is namely “Sweet Home” for the Nintendo Famicom. City Simulation and side-scrolling action in the SNES classic Actraiser, and all sorts of genres in the recent game “Haven: Call of the King”. Clever innovations like that are what can keep Video Games from becoming too dull. Oh sure new does not inherently mean good but still Video History have had a nice long history of these fascinating mixtures of Genres. And this, my fellow readers is FAR from an exception. Ever wondered what would happen if Sega tried to mix House of the Dead with Streets of Rage/Dynamite Cop? Well fortunately they came with this as the very answer to that very question, and oh good god what a great answer this is.

I'll admit to you right now that while the gameplay is very nicely innovative the rest of the game on the other hand isn't all that much when it comes to that. You play as either one of three characters a kind of bland but an overall nice guy of a mild-mannered pretty boy, a scar-faced gruff-mannered man whom only speaks in Japanese, a lovely young blonde bombshell whom can pretty much put Lara Croft to shame in various ways. (Granted some might be put off by her rather cutesy voice but it certainly didn't bother me.) The storyline is that you're fighting a huge army of zombies led by a mutated madman which was the aftermath of a government experiment gone awry. Not the most original overall storyline concept but hey it works pretty well anyways. (Though the presence of a rather odd cutesy young girl in the storyline would seem a bit more confusing but that's not too big a problem.)

This overlooked Arcade game from the late 90's has aged pretty well over the years. While there is some blockiness here & there the graphics are overall good, the control & challenge factor are solid enough. The music is decent but the quality of the voice acting is kind of a mixed bag. You fight your undead enemies with either your fists & feet or of course your own firearm artillery. (You start off with a handgun of limited but not too limited ammo. But you can be able to wield other guns like a Shot Gun or a Machine Gun. And you can occasionally wield other weaponry like a power drill.) Not too mention on how when you beat all the foes in a certain area they make you move to the next are otherwise something big & nasty would happen and you lose a life. That could've really botched this up but fortunately they really made this nice & easy enough to get into and made getting to the next zone pretty much a snap. The overall length of the game namely the amount of stages is also nicely balanced as in how it doesn't feel too long or too short. Now that is definitely something you don't see everyday in video gaming nowadays.

Overall this is just simply another great example of placing two renowned genres into one great package. It's a really sad shame that Sega didn't try to do more with this game since all they did was give it a port to their infamous Dreamcast that's only slightly less obscure than this buried treasure of an Arcade game. Unfortunately this is a considerably hard to find game in Arcades. Over Video Game History there has been a pretty darn good amount of titles that should've had good sequels/remakes to their very name and this my friends is by all means one of them.

+ A great & nicely innovative blend of two known genres
+ Highly above average graphics, control & challenge
+ The very length of this game is also nicely balanced as well.
+ Its really nice & easy to get into it and know how to do it well
+ Another example of a great game that could've made a great series
- The cutesy young girl you'll meet early in the game has an awfully underdeveloped part of the storyline.
- Voice acting is a mixed bag
- The main good guy of the story while not utterly terrible is pretty bland compared to his partners
- This is yet another hard to find good Arcade game. (While its Dreamcast counterpart is not that much easier.)
- Chalk this one up on the surprisingly long list of underused Video Game ideas.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/27/05