Gore! Gore! Gore!

April 24, 2023

Gore! Gore! Gore!

Dead Island 2 finally became a real thing you can buy. Better yet, it’s quite good! Dambuster Studios can be proud of reviving this purgatory project successfully. What Dambuster can and should be most proud of is how splatastic Dead Island 2 is.

It’s not just that it has a few jugs of claret flying about and a bit of dismemberment. No, Dead Island 2 gets downright anatomical with its violence, There’s so much gore of all kinds going on. Every stomp explodes a zombie head like a melon with a stick of dynamite in it. Jaws get smacked so hard they just hang off an undead skull like a novelty yo-yo. Guts spill out of sliced stomachs. In my head, I screamed ‘Gore! Gore! Gore!’ constantly as if I was Paul Heyman commentating on a Rhyno match.

Yes, I do like a bit of over-the-top gore. Ever since Lionel lifted that lawnmower in Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive/Braindead, I’ve had an appreciation for the jaw-dropping visceral absurdity of outrageous gore. It’s an art that’s easily misinterpreted. See much of the torture porn sub-genre of horror films that don’t understand how to apply it. It’s like sunscreen. You need to apply it evenly until you get to the end and then dive into a vat of it.

It’s not that Dead Island 2 is particularly explicit. Sure zombie skin melts off with caustic substances and broken hands end up looking like a tree of flesh and bone, but Greg Nicetero has been doing worse to the undead for years. It’s just the kind of disgusting carnage that makes you (well, me at least) cackle at the grisly silliness of it. Something something about horror and comedy. Again, it goes back to the puerile, putrid brilliance of Braindead for me.

Of course that got me thinking of what other game gore I’ve ‘enjoyed’ over the years, so yes…this is a listicle.

Prodeus

I grew up on the likes of Quake and Duke Nukem 3D, so unsurprisingly I’m keen on that which is deemed ‘Boomer Shooters’. Prodeus is one of my favorites and a small, but significant reason for that is its beautiful gore.

Blood in Prodeus gets everywhere. Your gun, the walls, the fucking ceiling! It’s made up of voxels I guess (I just write about these things, I don’t know all the terms y’know), and that gives it a very distinct style. Get in a confined space with a few enemies and watch the whole bloody room turn red in seconds.

God of War 3

Once upon a time, nothing got in the way of gruff dad Kratos. In the original God of War games, he is a monumental prick hell-bent on satiating his bloodlust. He offs plenty of mythical creatures and deities in the Greek mythology run, but when he made the jump to PS3, oh boy did Kratos go into bloody murder overdrive.

Maybe it was the extra horsepower of the PS3. Or maybe it was just the culmination of Kratos’ grim obsession with turning every resident of Olympus into bloody nectar. Either way, he absolutely destroys the Gods that remain in God of War 3. You know the infamous bit of course where Kratos decides Helios being beaten to shit isn’t quite enough. So he rips the God’s head off in a display of violence that is eye-opening. The tendons in Helios’s neck go taut as the skin rips and pulls before the whole damn bonce just comes right off. Kratos is not fucking around.

The Darkness II

I don’t think The Darkness II is quite in the same league as some of these games in terms of gore, but it sure does revel in cruel bloody punishment. Your twin demon tentacles like a gangster-flavored snack and you really get to see just how much they enjoy it. Once again, the vengeance angle is the cherry on top of the ultraviolence cake. It’s satisfying to see the goons that want hero Jackie dead get torn limb-from-limb by demonic entities.

Manhunt

To be honest, I think Rockstar could commit actual war crimes and I’d still probably give them a pass because of the majesty of a game they made two decades ago.

No, not Grand Theft Auto Vice City. Not Bully (though that is up there). No, I’m talking Manhunt. A game all about creating and selling violence from the studio that made a living out of it. Its gore is slightly subdued by some modern standards, but there’s something about it that feels far more shocking. It’s just so blunt, uncaring, and necessary.

The Punisher

The PS2 Punisher game is a perfect example of horror and comedy in gore. Like Manhunt, there’s an unflinching necessity to it, but unlike Manhunt’s reluctant protagonist, ol’ Frank Castle loves to put his imagination into offing bad guys. Even the censors couldn’t make Frank feel tame.

Among the many highlights of Frank’s escapades are death by,