While there are plenty of styles of games out there with a focus on high-quality storylines, clean graphics, and refined play, there’s something to be said for titles that quite purposely go in another direction. With its gritty grindhouse visual style, generally ridiculous plot and scripting, and frantic violent play, The House of the Dead series has never been accused of being subtle. Now that some time has elapsed since the release of the original, it’s time for its sequel to shine.

If you’re down for some blasting action, this series is well-known for being about as visceral as you could want. Blood will splash and splatter as you shoot up all sorts of nightmare creatures, whether they’re zombies, strange fish people, chainsaw-wielding maniacs, or perhaps a few random civilians if you’re not careful. The action tends to be quick and intense, with you doing your best with the joystick controls that don’t quite match up to a light gun, but can be effective if you simply keep firing and reloading as fast as you can. The thing is, precision will often be required when dealing with the game’s intimidating bosses and trying your best to save random people caught in the chaos. Given the fact that they can provide you with bonuses like some health, or even open up another route, you’ll want to keep an eye out for them and try to save as many as you can.

Of course, there’s nothing about this experience that you could consider to be terribly refined. It manages to look and sound pretty good, getting some benefit from the remake updates, but there’s still no mistaking that it’s from the past. In terms of the difficulty there’s no doubt that working with a friend is helpful, since the various monsters tend to be quite relentless, so you’re likely going to need to keep hitting that button to continue to go deeper into the game, especially solo. There are some options to tweak around with to change the core experience, as well as a crazy hard Boss Mode, but unless you’re really in it to try to save every civilian, see every ending, or simply continue to work on perfecting your runs… it’s likely that this will just be a temporary fixation, and good to break out for a little adrenaline rush, but not necessarily more.