The Haunted Hoard: House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn (Arcade)
There’s a graveyard of quarters built off the back of being a single shot short of survival in light gun arcade games, and if you could ask a player in that moment if they’d be fine with a faster firing gun and a large ammo pool before it’s time to reload, you would find few who’d turn it down. House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn’s guns feel like they’d be perfect for such jilted players, the weapon an automatic that you only need to hold down the trigger to fire and it will even reload automatically if you empty it. With such accommodating weaponry though, there is the risk that firing your automatic machine gun can start to truly feel like an automatic action, and despite having four mainline entries and some spinoffs to reference, Sega’s House of the Dead series making this design shift feels like it is stepping uneasily into the new territory this seemingly simple choice places it in.
House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn has an enclosed arcade cabinet where two players can sit down and shoot undead mutants together using large machine gun peripherals they only need to point at the screen. The weapons are fairly large, meant to be held two-handed with one hand handling fire while the other can press a button or flip a lever on the gun’s side to swap to secondary weapons. While a quick reload will happen if you deplete your weapon’s current stock of bullets, you can also point away from the screen briefly for a manual reload. More importantly, the enclosed arcade cabinet tries to be a touch immersive, the seats sometimes vibrating and air vents sometimes sending a puff out at you, but the moments the game chooses to trigger these are not all that memorable so it’s more a cute touch than something that enhances key events. More troublesome though is the way the game handles its sound, the cabinet having an option for traditional speakers or a dynamic one meant to come from different areas of the cabinet, but an issue arises not with how it helps the action sound more bombastic, but how it’s easy for either mode to lose the vital dialogue. Very few cutscenes feature any sort of subtitles, players interested in the story sometimes having to strain their ears or lean in to just try and hear the characters discussing the situation they find themselves in.
House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn follows Ryan Taylor and Kate Green as they attend a party at the Scarecrow Mansion owned by Thornheart. While hoping to investigate the unusual owner, it’s not long before instead it becomes a battle for survival as Thornheart unleashes his various human experiments upon his guests, Kate and Ryan having to fight their way through hordes of zombies and mutated creatures to work their way into the estate’s labs and get to the bottom of Thornheart’s ambitions. The good news about the sometimes hard to hear story scenes is that the story isn’t too complicated, Thornheart isn’t shy about reiterating his intent to evolve humanity with his work and the commentary from the two leads is often basic when it’s not just a corny pun delivered to a defeated monstrosity. There are ties to older House of the Dead games and their antagonists, but you aren’t missing much once you get the overall gist of things and the four endings that differ based on how few continues you used and your overall performance don’t say or reveal much so you aren’t denied crucial details for playing the game casually.
The first-person shooting in House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn is meant to be the star and where things can be a little uneven. Your machine gun is very easy to use and so the game tries to compensate by throwing hordes of undead at you in many situations. Large packs of shambling mutated humans will come towards you, but since your gun fires so quickly, you can effectively repel them with sustained fire. Thing is, clustering so many enemies together also lessens the danger they present. If they get close enough they will strike, and sometimes they may even grab you or your partner and the other player must shoot the zombies to save them, the game even having the potential to have both of you knocked down at once and forced to fight yourself free of a dogpile before the timer runs out to survive. However, it is usually easy to manage a crowd by just firing at the faces in the front, and there can be many moments you just hold your gun peripheral forward, sweep it left and right, and hold that trigger down until everything’s gone. Even on the particular cabinet I played with one of the gun’s having issues with its trigger, the player could still effectively play if they just held the trigger down tight, the few innocent characters you need to save not balking at being shot and few situation really necessitating you to not just be rapidly firing forward. The reload is at least not immediate though, the player still likely benefiting from some time pointing away to reload as their characters move forward automatically during quiet moments.
The unfortunate truth is the standard cannon fodder feels a bit too basic and takes up a bit too much time for how quickly you can gun them down, but some of the later groupings at least throw in more dangerous mutants at the same time so priority targeting goes beyond whoever is closest to the player. The player is given some control of the order they tackle three of the game’s five chapters, the lab, annex, and elevator lobby also having small moments where your path can split a touch, but the route to the end is mostly the same and the locations are just varied enough not to get stale. Small credit for the variety must go to the unusually high number of vehicles involved, this mostly indoors adventure still finding room to throw in a jeep ride and a canoe trip. The areas will start rolling out some of the new monsters, some variations on humans like the bulky ones who try to hurl barrels at you, axe-wielding fiends who can block your shots, and some inexplicable but delightful guitar-wielding undead who look a good deal like the guitarist Slash. Whether it’s little men with knives bouncing off walls or armored chainsaw-swinging maniacs though, you’re usually aiming at the enemy or an attack that’s coming your way to deflect it, but at least the bats, rats, and maggots come in small swarms where you try to wipe them out quickly before one can slip through and attack.
House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn can feel a little forgiving at times but at others it does try to get in a quick hit so you can’t ride a credit too far. Ninjas in particular are a nuisance, their appearance and subsequent attacks sometimes so swift that you’d either need good coordination with a co-op partner or foreknowledge to take them out before they land an attack, but you do have a few hits before you die per credit and you can even earn lives from things like earning a high ranking when the post-level scores are tallied. Something that makes House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn more interesting though is an element of player choice, the game allowing you to bring two weapons from a fairly wide selection into the level with you at a chapter’s start. These have limited ammunition, but you can bring something like a gatling gun for incredibly strong rapid fire, a rocket launcher for a single powerful shot, a shotgun if you fear crowds, and even oddities like a laser gun that fires slow but is powerful and the Energy Cannon that hits harder if you’re low on life. Sometimes a level will thrust one of these weapons into your hands for a dedicated section like bombarding enemies at the bottom of a staircase with grenades, and if you space their use right sometimes you can even hold onto some of that ammo beyond the set piece moment. There are definitely enough moments where the game puts the squeeze on you to get you to consider your back-up weaponry and for some of the tougher monsters there is always that looming thought you could overcome them if you’re willing to tap your limited reserves, so holding down the machine gun trigger is thankfully not the only thing you’ll find yourself doing even during standard encounters in House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn.
The game’s five chapters do go by a bit quickly and the bosses that cap them off range in how compelling they are to fight. Many of them use the expect light gun shooter boss format of rings appearing on the enemy’s body to indicate where to shoot, the player taking damage if they can’t deplete the life of the indicated spot in time. For some fights this works, often due to the speed of the battle and the areas you are asked to shoot at. A flying foe that torches his arena asks you to hit him as he swoops in and even work on extinguishing the flames at times, the fight remaining active and requiring you to be on the ball to wear down the rings adequately. On the other hand, The High Priestess, a giant sewer octopus, can sometimes spend quite a while doing not much of interest before the rings reappear, and with her health bar not noticeably reduced during much of the tentacle shooting the fight entails, it feels like a waiting game rather than a tense encounter. All of this comes together into a final boss that feels like it could have been exceptional if it had only allowed itself to continue on. With persistent weak points to wear down its main health, ring targets to protect yourself from upcoming attacks, and an impressive design that truly feels like an epic finale, it would be a superb capstone if the game hadn’t trimmed it short with an underwhelming final attack. The battle could have even been improved by just having the health bar adjusted to better represent the fight’s length, it feeling almost like you skipped some steps when the scripted finale kicks in. Like many moments in House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn, it unfortunately feels like it could have worked much better if not for a design choice that saps some of the fun out of an otherwise entertaining moment.
THE VERDICT: House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn sometimes feels like a theme park ride with the player blasting through swathes of undead, popping into strange vehicles, and encountering bombastic bosses all while the cabinet shakes and air vents blast them. However, your default gun is a little too effective and can become a bit too easy to use against standard enemies, the game certainly not overly easy but segments that rely on numbers over unique enemy types do lose their spark quickly. Getting to pick your back-up weaponry is a compelling touch, but House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn feels like it routinely struggles with figuring out how long or short certain sections should be and frequently makes the pick that leads to a less exciting experience.
And so, I give House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn for arcade machines…
An OKAY rating. The High Priestess being a bad boss battle hurts when there’s only four in total. The sequences where you shoot a packed bunch of normal zombies loses its luster quickly when you realize its barely counts as a threat. But House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn isn’t without the moments that make the player light up such as the odd vehicle sections, the moments that are tough enough that you pull out your hand-picked back-up weapons, and the bosses that do deliver on an engaging fight. Things do tend to loop back to the fact though that the machine gun was just the wrong choice for the standard action. Shooting all the bats, rats, or even zombies in a group is made a touch too manageable, the opposition still able to slip through at times but hardly enough to justify how often the game throws these situations at you. The rest of the enemy forces though at least can keep you on edge and actually thinking about where to aim, but one thing that shows the game almost understood how make this game excellent is the final boss. The final boss is able to take consistent damage through sustained fire on a weak point, the player still needing to make time to shoot elsewhere to protect themselves, but the fact your gun is constantly able to fire and reload quickly is accommodated for by a persistent target that is worn down constantly through the fight. You are making the active decision to focus on it or nearby threats, and this can crop up in miniature elsewhere when something like a large zombie about to hurl a barrel at you asks you to try and manage the flying danger with the need to wipe out the other living dead that are closing in as you do so.
Balance is rarely in the right spot in this light gun shooter, but that can lead to the curious case where enough works to cancel out what doesn’t. The High Priestess isn’t an agonizing fight, just a bit dull due to the slowness. Zombie swarms are easy to take out when they’re just standard packs of shambling people, but some situations mix up the environment or the presence of other monsters so there is some thought required and immediacy in the threats being presented. The important takeaway still feels like it should be that shots need to count even with a rapid-fire weapon, but House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn spends too much of its short runtime trying to figure that out that it ends up mediocre instead of electrifying.