Handjob dungeon: now that sounds like a great place to visit, doesn’t it? Sadly, it isn’t. It turns out that Handjob Dungeon isn’t a sex den where full-blooded males’ dreams come true, but it’s actually just a play on words and an indication of the type of playground wit and tongue-in-cheek humour that you’ll encounter throughout Splatterhouse, a re-imagining of the 1988 blood-soaked, button-mashing arcade hit.
Handjob Dungeon is actually a dingy, blood-splattered location in the heart of West Mansion, where sharp-clawed monsters with a penchant for blood amble freely down dimly-lit corridors awaiting to unleash their wrath. Thankfully, you have superhuman strength all of your own and think nothing of picking up your own dismembered arm off the floor and beating the living daylights out of any hellish freak that stands in your way. In Splatterhouse, you’re the one who dishes out the handjobs.
At its core, Splatterhouse is an old-school brawler where you move from room to room killing monsters, racking up combos and attempting to upgrade your character into an awesome killing machine. The game’s protagonist is Rick, a huge hunk of a guy whose bulging biceps make the Incredible Hulk look rather puny, and who is so hard and immune to pain that he’ll quite nonchalantly batter his way, with limbs or without, through hundreds of ghoulish creatures who try and hamper the search for his kidnapped girlfriend.
Splatterhouse isn’t the type of game that needs a storyline, but the theme of passion and revenge runs through its veins and at least provides some reason for the blood shed. And despite the storyline’s lack of depth, it stays true to the original and beefs things up with some impressive cut-scenes and bags of crude humour to tickle your funny bone and soften the blow of some of the gut-wrenching moves. Splatterhouse succeeds mostly with its humor and there are a few laugh-out-loud moments that come from the mask that Rick wears. The voice of the mask constantly tries to demotivate you by saying such delightful phrases as “For a dick, you’re such as pussy,” and they get cruder and more ridiculous as you progress. You may find yourself shaking your head and even feeling slightly embarrassed at some of the one-liners, but generally it’s all tongue-in-cheek.
The storyline follows Rick and his girlfriend Jennifer as they take shelter in a mansion from a storm. It turns out that parapsychologist Dr. West has been conducting bizarre experiments at the mansion and while you’re shacked up a couple of monsters turn up, take Jennifer away and leave Rick nearly dead. Rick gets hold of a "Terror Mask,” that speaks to him through his thoughts. Rick places the mask on his face and then morphs into a killing machine with superhuman strength. On the search for Jennifer, you roam the corridors and rooms of the mansion using anything that you can pick up to lay waste to the vile creatures that stand in your way.
Content-wise, there’s a decent amount to get through, even away from the eight-hour campaign mode. With inspiration gained from the original arcade hit, Splatterhouse not only features a main campaign and a survival arena (where you have to fend off waves of monsters) but when you complete it you also unlock ports of the three original arcade games. Needless to say, the gameplay in these retro outings feels quite dated compared to modern day brawlers, but it’s a good chance to relive some of those memories, or discover why Splatterhouse became one of the first console games to come with a parent advisory warning. In a throwback to those days, Namco has also included some 2D side scrolling, platform sections in the main campaign that break up the constant brawling and tough boss battles rather nicely.
While it’s clear that there’s a lot more Namco could and should have done during these platform sections to make them more current and exciting, jumping over spiked pits, rolling past swinging axes, or jumping over huge chasms, still has a place on modern day consoles. The platform sections in Splatterhouse are rather shallow, but do they require a degree of skill and timing to complete and provide some decent entertainment, albeit not much of a challenge.
The main bulk of gamplay involves fighting hordes of monsters with a range of weapons and moves that you unlock as you progress. As you slay monsters and spill blood, you fill up your blood bank and can spend points on upgrading across a number of attributes and skills such as fast attacks, heavy attacks and grabs. You can level up to five times in each of these attributes, so overall there are 40 different combos that you can unlock from ‘Splatter Slash’ (slicing enemies apart,) to the ‘Meat Shot,’ where you can use enemies as a deadly projectile. And it’s quite a rewarding system too; not just because you get access to bigger and powerful moves, but it’s very handy to be able to access the upgrade screen at any point in the game. This means that if you get stuck at any point, or if you die, you can then spend your points in an area that you think might facilitate your efforts, such as upgrading your dodge manoeuvre so you evade attacks more effectively.
As you progress, the combos that you access get more insane and brutal, but also become harder to pull off as you combine face buttons and triggers together. The upgrade system is fairly basic, but you will need to use a range of moves to get past some tough enemies and there’s more than enough moves to allow you some creative freedom. And that’s really the highlight of Splatterhouse, and what it’s really all about. It’s not going to win any awards for its repetitive gameplay, linear levels and bland environments, but there is satisfaction to be had out of mastering the art of combos and enjoying the grotesque, visual delights that come as part of knowing how to charge attacks, pull off ground pounds or slice enemies apart with the likes of the ‘Splatter Jump Slash.’
The fun to be had out of the combat system comes from the grotesque visuals rather than the technically adept move set or incredibly responsive A.I. In this respect, Splatterhouse suffers from lack of balance and refinement. Rick, for instance, has a fairly slow recovery time from heavy attacks which can be a real hindrance, and there are also certain enemies in the game that deliver an incredible amount of damage with one hit (even on the easiest setting). As such, you’ll almost certainly die during your Splatterhouse experience, probably quite frequently. You really do need to back off at times and wait for limbs to regenerate, which can be tough in such small fighting arenas with so many foes attacking you.
As you progress and enemies get a little trickier to beat and you face some of the enjoyable and challenging boss fights, you really do need to pull off the whole range of moves at your disposal; dodging, blocking, ground-pounding and making sure you time those charge attacks with perfection. Overall, it isn’t quite the slick combat system it could have been, but weapons such as cleavers, shotguns and chainsaws are fun to use and some of the sections that combine small amounts of puzzle solving, to open gates for instance, add a bit of variety to just mowing down the monsters.
Namco has also attempted to bring the combat a bit more into the 21st century by creating some brutal takedown animations. After you deliver a beating to a monster, they’ll glow red for a short period of time and you can then execute a takedown which involves a short Quick Time Event (QTE) that might prompt you to point your analog sticks inwards to cave a creature’s head in, or tap one of your face buttons to rip their heart from their stomachs. It’s not as gruesome as it sounds, because Namco has effectively masked the gory bits by placing an effect over the animation that makes it look very cartoon-like. These animations are great fun to begin with, but they do repeat over and over again. If there were more than one animation per enemy perhaps it would have added a bit of variety, but as it stands these animations often serve to ruin the flow of the fight as the game slows down and the cinematic plays out.
As mentioned combat is a repetitive affair – this is a brawler after all – but there are some interesting features thrown in, such as having to impale a monster on a spike by grabbing and kicking him to open gates. There’s also a couple of things you can do outside combat, such as searching for gramophones that unravel the story, or picking up photos which when pieced together create semi-nude pictures of woman. It was totally unexpected, but Splatterhouse blends violence with a bit of soft porn quite well, which can’t be a bad thing. It’s always worth straying slightly off the beaten track to search for that last piece of the puzzle that reveals a lady’s nipple or toned mid-riff (on that note, we really do need to get out more).
Splatterhouse is also much more graphic than the original so there’s a lot more of the crimson stuff as you impale monsters onto spikes, embed 2×4’s through skulls and rip out lungs. Despite the blood though, Splatterhouse isn’t scary or at all disturbing. The game has a graphic novel style, which means that it can be over-the-top with its violence, without upsetting too many people. It also employs special effects to tone down some of the really brutal stuff. Despite some of the footage you might have seen suggesting that Splatterhouse is obscenely violent, the clashes are actually more funny than shocking.
Overall, we’ve had a decent time playing Splatterhouse, but some poorly thought-out checkpoints, which make dying even more of a frustration than it already is, and having to wrestle with some poor camera angles that prevent it from being the visceral and free-flowing brawler that it might have been. Nevertheless, the gameplay does have some substance and getting to grips with the move-set is a lot of fun. You can’t fault the amount of content either. Splatterhouse isn’t going to reach cult status among its fans of yesteryear, but you should have a good enough time impaling horned beasts onto spikes and crushing zombie heads all the same.