Review by: Jeff McAllister

What happens when you and your girlfriend visit the local college’s nutty professor in his mysterious mansion on a stormy night in the middle of nowhere? Nothing good that’s for sure and if you happen to be Rick Taylor. If you’re Rick, You get disemboweled while the good doctor makes off with your lady friend. Thankfully in the hubbub of getting a gut full of serrated edges, a white skull-like mask tumbles out of a coffin and talks you into putting it on. When you do, you become a hulking behemoth of a man wearing nothing but the mask, running shoes, and jean shorts with a wallet chain- presumably so no one steals your Subway Club card.

In this remake of the classic side scrolling title, it seems Dr. West has been robbing the town of its citizens for quite some time and has been performing some rather sick experiments on them in the dungeons of his majestic and maleficent mansion. Once Rick dons the “terror mask”, he becomes fully healed and starts his rampage through the house- and beyond- to find his woman and put a stop to the Doctor’s experiments.

Splatterhouse is one brutal game. There is enough blood and gore and just all around disgusting instances to make even Quentin Tarantino blush. Ear removal? Ha. Child’s play. The first time you pull the limbs off a creature and then proceed to beat it to death with them, the screen is splashed heavily and the blood flows like an unending river of red, covering the ground, walls, yourself- and continues over and over with each enemy you encounter. Aside from the gushing fluids and removable limbs, enemies can also be dealt with up close and personal when they become outlined in red. When this happens you will need to perform a quick time event which leads to you perversely tearing their head off, or their arms off, or even their colon out through their ass, in a separate animation scene.

Each time you take down an enemy, you’ll get rewarded with blood –of course- which will fill your Necrometer. The Necrometer allows you to harness the blood that has been spilled and permits the mask to take over, letting you become even more powerful and virile in your attacks. You can also use blood to upgrade your attacks and learn new, more devastating moves. In addition to the moves you can perform and learn, true to the original games, you can pick up weapons found on the ground and use them to go to town on the groups of shambling enemies. Cleavers slice bodies in half, 2x4’s and lead pipes splatter bodies against walls and the shotgun blows them to itty bitty bits.

The majority of the game finds Rick and his tormenting mask moving from one arena battle to the next- locked in a fight against a group of enemies until they are cleared out- and the door opens allowing you to continue. Once in a while the game view will change and in a regression to the original games, will become a side scrolling sequence. While fun for the nostalgia effect of it, the actual mechanics of the sections are lacking and oddly enough suffer from some noticeable frame rate issues. Having to run and jump in Splatterhouse is a simple feat – No wait, scratch that. Running and jumping in any other game is a simple feat. In Splatterhouse it is awkward and clumsy and will be the death of you many times. When Rick runs, he will only charge- running a few steps and then abruptly stops, which can get you into some hot water if you miss time your charge and come up short at an obstacle. Jumping is stubborn and feels very unnatural and makes the platforming sections of the game much more difficult than it should be.