Brutal takedown animations
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.