Video Game / The House of the Dead: OVERKILL

aka: House Of The Dead Overkill

Isaac: Shit! I fuckin' hate these zom—
G: Mutants. How many times do I have to tell you to not use the Z word?

OVERKILL is a prequel to the original House of the Dead series. It takes the unintentionally bad voice-acting the series is known for and runs with it, resulting in an over-the-top mid to late-1970s B-Movie vibe, heavily inspired by Quentin Tarantino's and Robert Rodriguez's double feature Grindhouse.

The plot of the game follows Agent G and reluctant partner Detective Isaac Washington. They're hunting down the deranged crime lord/pimp, Papa Caesar, fighting through the waves and waves of mutants he's unleashed. While they're tracking down Caesar, he causes the death of Varla Guns' brother, leading the hottest stripper on the Bayou City club scene to track down Caesar herself to take her revenge. She'll have to get in line though; as Washington wants to get revenge for the death of his father, also caused by Caesar.

Initially released exclusivity on the Wii in 2009, an Updated Re-release, the Extended Cut, was later released for the PlayStation 3 with PlayStation Move support in 2011. The Extended Cut features sharply improved graphics, new bonus weapons, and two levels not seen in the original Wii version, "Naked Terror" and "Creeping Flesh", which focus on Varla Guns' story.

A PC version followed just in time for Halloween 2013, as The Typing of the Dead: Overkill, including two play modes: the mode it's titled for, a follow up to the Cult Classic The Typing of the Dead released on the Dreamcast and PC as well as the Japan-only The Typing of the Dead 2 for PC, and another mode that essentially gives a straight PC port of the Extended Cut. This version also offered several purchasable dictionary DLCs which change the words needed to type with William Shakespeare, Filth and Love based dictionaries available. Eventually, the ability to import user-created dictionaries was added in March 2015. In addition House of the Dead: Overkill - The Lost Reels was released for iOS and Android devices on April 25, 2013.

They've come for tropes. You'll give them... examples:

• 20 Minutes into the Past: Takes place in 1991 and was released in 2009.
• Achilles' Heel: In accordance with the House of the Dead tradition, all bosses have one pointed out just before you enter the fight.
• Action Commands: In the Extended Cut, represented by "dunk tank" targets that pop up onscreen to either let you fight off a close-up attacker or avoid a highly damaging attack.
• Action Girl: Varla Guns; heavily lampshaded in her introduction voiceover. She slowly turns out to be a Faux Action Girl, though, which is itself lampshaded too, but the Extended Cut, in turn, defies that status by putting her and new character Candi Stryper in the spotlight via the all-new exclusive Naked Terror and Creeping Flesh episodes.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: The steam achievements for Typing are pretty much nothing but these including: Painful Punctuation, Lascivious Lexicon, Critical Clause, Grotesque Grammar, etc. The default phrases you have to type at Coco in "Naked Terror" are also alliterative.
• Appendage Assimilation: Nigel and Sebastian, a pair of conjoined twins (Nigel fully-formed and Sebastian less so), can heal (including during the fight against them) by eating people. Nigel is happy to chow down on anyone he can get his hands on; Sebastian is disgusted, but only because Nigel settles for mutants who stumble into their tent when "good eating" like G and Washington are right there.
• Anachronism Stew: The game is set in 1991, yet:
  • The Assault Rifle in the game is the XM8, a canceled prototype introduced for testing in 2003 and perpetually shelved as of 2006.
  • The SMG in the Director's Cut and Typing version of the game is the Minebea PM-9, which was fielded for use in 1999 and never exported outside Japan.
  • Ballistic Trauma has some of the event posters dated around 2005 or 2008.
• An Arm and a Leg: Candi's right arm gets chopped off by Meat Katie's giant axe/cleaver when it falls from a steel beam above them. She dies from the blood loss.
• Artifact Title: Subverted in a metaphorical sense. While only the first level takes place in an actual sort of mansion that even comes close to the Curien Mansion, a good deal of the levels take place in other kinds of "houses", i.e. the fun house, the big house, the whore house... plus, the presentation is very grindhouse-inspired.
• Artistic License – Law: Intentionally so to mirror the grindhouse B-movies that inspired the game: It takes place in Bayou "County", Louisiana, even though Louisiana does not have counties; it instead has "parishes".
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The Minigun. No need to explain why it's awesome, but its cool-down period is relatively long if you allow it to overheat, leaving you a sitting duck for a good three or four seconds— which is an eternity in games like this. Restricting it to firing short bursts can help avoid the problem, but that kind of defeats the Minigun's purpose, and it's a totally unworkable strategy in the final boss battle, where you're forced to use it.
  • The regular ol' Shotgun is very cool in that old-school "shk-shk-BOOM" sort of way, but reload times are the main Achilles' Heel with your guns, and each shell has to be loaded into this gun one at a time. What's more, the presence of the Auto-Shotgun makes it practically obsolete right out of the gate.
• Awesomeness Meter: The game's combo system (the main way to get bonus points) is rated Extreme Violence, Hardcore Violence, Ultra Violence, Psychotic, and then Goregasm. Getting into Goregasm! mode means additional mutant kills will net you a 1,000 points each.
• BFG: Isaac and G use miniguns during the final boss fight. How they got access to them becomes a Noodle Incident, as the first part of the boss fight simply shows "missing reel", and when the "movie" resumes, they're standing victorious with the miniguns.
• The Big Easy: The setting is around a theme park version of New Orleans called "Bayou City". The issue is muddied by a few characters mentioning the "county" they're in, but that's exactly the kind of mistake a real grindhouse-era B-movie would make^*The state of Louisiana has parishes, not counties..
• Bittersweet Ending: G and Isaac stop Papa Cesar and Clement from unleashing their plans, but Varla's brain ends up getting separated from her body, and they can't undo that because the last boss fight was against the mutated form of said body. To make matters worse, the audio tape Caesar sent G and Isaac reveals his true motive: to inform them of the underground facility of Clement's and the powerful men pulling the strings behind (Curien, Goldman and Thornheart). Granted, Isaac is very likely to be unaware of this until it is too late. Plus, his father is stated to be still alive.
• Blaxploitation Parody: Isaac Washington is basically a straight sendup of the average blaxploitation hero, who uses "motherfucker" like most of us would use a comma.
• Body Horror: Many of the enemies, especially Nigel and Sebastian (two twins horribly fused together) and the Lobber from Overkill. And from the same game, Varla Guns, after Warden Darling put his mother's brain in her head... and apparently forgot to reattach the back of her cranium. Extended Cut adds the Dual Boss Sindy & Coco, respectively a Distaff Counterpart to the above Lobber in the looks department (complete with open section atop her head to expose part of her brain) and a mutant monkey stripper.
• Bond One-Liner: Washington is the king of these and is the primary delivery method of one-liners since G is too straitlaced to bother.
• Boom, Headshot!: As always, the best way to kill the mutants is to shoot them in the head.
• Bragging Rights Reward: The Gwendolyn, from the Extended Cut. Easily the best gun in the game by a wide margin, but by the time you obtain it you've already beaten the game twice to unlock it (the second time using only the basic AMS Magnum) and then beaten several more stages to farm enough money to buy it.
• Brain in a Jar: At the end Varla Guns is nothing but this, having lost their original body due to bullet-related reasons.
• Brick Joke: Washington calls G "Agent Gwendolyn" at the beginning of the "Carny" chapter; G doesn't protest until two chapters later after being kicked awake. As above, it also turns out to be the name of Washington's very favorite gun.
• Camping a Crapper: Agent G makes a discovery that mutants use the toilet like ordinary people and mentions it'll go in his report as a "potential weakness". Washington is less than impressed.
• Circus of Fear: The aptly named Carny level sees our protagonists shooting clown mutants as they try to navigate the local theme park.
• Cluster F-Bomb:
  • A good alternate title for this game would be The House of Swear Words. Someone personally counted 370 of them. And that's not everything!
  • Lampshaded in the last level:
    G: Care to dial down the swearing, Wash?
    Isaac: Fuck that, motherfucker!
  • G lampshades again when he notices that, of all the things they saw, the only thing Washington didn't call a "motherfucker" was Warden Darling, who actually was a literal mother fucker.
  • The PS3 version of the Extended Cut plays with this: the speech is censored by default in both voice and subtitles. How do you restore the dialogue to its foulmouthed glory? By shooting the censored words during cutscenes.
• Comically Missing the Point:
  • Washington is prone to this at a few points, such as claiming G can't "ease the pain" for the first boss and demanding he just shoot him, and a point in the "Carny" level where G comments that things are looking bad after he notices an explosion in the distance and Washington agrees, noting the high prices on everything.
  • In the Extended Cut, the opening to "Naked Terror" has Varla trying to use several euphemisms to explain that Candi's boyfriend is dead gently, every one of which Candi misunderstands (assuming he's "gone" because another woman stole him away) or takes too literally (he can't have "taken the great chair lift to the sky" because "his only went up one floor") until Varla finally just tells her "he's fucking dead".
• Contemplate Our Navels: The end has the characters discuss the true meaning of their ordeal, with Washington thinking it's a postmodernist deconstruction of modern feminism. And swear gratuitously... even G, though he's just mocking Washington.
• Continuity Nod: The version of G's theme tune that plays over the main menu is titled Suffer Like G Did, referencing the taunt that the first boss of House of the Dead 2 said to the protagonists of that game.
• Critical Existence Failure: No character will even comment on being hit, so if you're not paying attention to your health meter, it can be surprising to see the game over screen. The exception is in the Extended Cut version of the first boss battle, where Washington will comment on how disgusting it is to be hit by a flying arm or what have you.
• Cowboy Cop: Isaac Washington, judging by his enthusiasm for shooting everything and not bothering with warrants at any point in the game, would probably be this if we saw him do police work instead of shooting mutants.
• Damsel in Distress: Despite being able to handle herself fine in the Extended Cut levels, Varla Guns gets kidnapped twice afterward.
• Dead Man's Switch: The Warden has one at the end, threatening to blow up the entire prison complex if G and Washington kill him. He gives it over to G on one condition, that being literally returning to the womb to atone for his sins. He doesn't even bat an eye when Washington tells him that as soon as they're on the helicopter out of there, he's tossing it out the window and letting the place blow up anyway.
• Dead Weight: In the first few stages fat mutants are the earliest kind of Giant Mook, taking a few more body shots than normal enemies. The manual explains that a mutant's health is directly proportionate to its mass. They're also fast.
• Deconstruction: A parody of zombie movies in general. For example, in the ending, G and Isaac wonder what the underlying metaphor of this game was, with G suggesting "love isn't always right" and Isaac calling it a "damning indictment of contemporary feminism", pointing out that there are few other interpretations to "two dick-wielding cop cliches" taking down a "hundred-foot birthing mother". For another, during The Fetid Waters, Isaac asks G why they're immune to whatever it is that's creating all the mutants and nobody else is. They aren't; the compound has a short lifespan and, as they weren't exposed to the initial dosing, they simply haven't been infected - G because he only got into town after the chaos started, Isaac because he was at his mom's.
• Deep South: Takes place in Louisiana, with all that the setting implies.
• Disposable Woman: Varla Guns, who dies after being used as an unwilling body donor to Clement. The trope is lampshaded and discussed by G at the end of the game.
• The Dog Bites Back: Jasper, forced to work with Caesar when Varla, who raised him, is threatened, eventually declares that no one threatens his sister and injects himself with a serum that turns him into the first boss of the game.
• Double Unlock: You don't unlock special weapons straight away; you instead unlock the option to buy them.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Papa Caesar is killed in the electric chair by Warden Darling, cheating Isaac out of his revenge. Candi also gets this in the PS3 version when a giant cleaver the boss was using drops from the rafters it had got caught on and slices off her arm. She winds up dying from blood loss in Varla's arms.
• Dual Boss:
  • Extended Cut adds a dual boss in the first new chapter, but one of the two mutants in question is so massive that it literally can't do anything except send a Shockwave Stomp or two at you, leaving you to deal with the smaller one for the whole fight.
  • The incoming behemoths at the end of "Jailhouse Judgement" look to be this... and then they turn on each other, leaving only one (Brutus) to fight you.
• Dude, Not Funny!: Invoked: Isaac has one of these against Agent G's joke that he makes if you fail to save a survivor at the Carnival level.
  G: I guess he ordered ketchup with that.
  Isaac: Tasteful, agent.
• Dumb Blonde: Candi, the second player who accompanies Varla in Overkill - Extended Cut. In accordance with the game's B-movie tone, Candi is the dumbest of the protagonists, not that it stops her from being just as good with a gun as the others.
• Early-Bird Cameo: The second of two chapters added to the Extended Cut "Creeping Flesh", lets you catch a quick glimpse of "Scream Train"'s boss, the Crawler.
• Establishing Series Moment: You know this game is going to be different in tone from the mainline games when the first cutscene in the game features Isaac sucker-punching G and greeting him with "What's up, motherfucker?!" Also an Establishing Character Moment for him. The narrator's tone further establishes that this is not like the mainline THotD games.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Clement loves his mother more than literally anything else. Although in this case it would have been kinder to the audience not to show that kind of love.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: Exaggerated at the end of the first chapter:
  G: Tasteful ride.
  Isaac: Don't disrespect my wheels! She's my pride and joy.
  (Isaac's pride and joy promptly explodes for absolutely no reason)
  G: (Beat) Mm, we'll take my car.^* And then his car explodes at the end of the next chapter as well. Again, for no reason.
• Falling Chandelier of Doom: The player can invoke this trope in the foyer of Papa's House of Pain by shooting its chain to kill many mutants at once.
• Fan Disservice: Plenty to go around in the Naked Terror level (exclusive to the "Extended Cut" edition) with all the zomb.. ehhh... mutant strippers. Specially the two bosses of the stage, who were strippers that got heavily mutated before Varla and Candi arrived.
• Fanservice: The opening credits play over a live-action pole dance which has nothing to do with anything, possibly as an homage to Planet Terror.
• Faux Action Girl: Before the extended cut was released, Varla's only screen time was basically driving around and being held hostage. This changed once the extended cut shows that she was shooting up the mutants with her own partner while Isaac and G were doing their own thing.
• Filth: Typing of the Dead has one DLC package named Filth that replaces the words with dirty ones.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Overkill begins with Isaac sucker-punching G. Later in the game, after multiple others have asked G to just answer the damn question, Isaac crows "the 'G' stands for 'genocide', motherfucker!" after the two mow down another wave of mutants during one point in "Jailhouse Judgment". Isn't that sweet?
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • An irritating one; in the Crawler boss fight, wherein the circle highlighting the boss's weak spot is marked too high on its arm, and trying to shoot there won't do anything. Shooting it in the same spot it said to on the other side will cancel its attack and deal damage.
  • The "Carny" chapter in the Wii version is very glitchy compared to the rest of the game. Its boss fight in particular is difficult to get through without the game freezing for whatever reason.
  • The "Extra Mutants" mode appears to be an afterthought, as the added enemies tend to spawn in inconvenient locations. In one scene in "Ballistic Trauma" where hospital doors blow open and mutants swarm out, one female mutant only present on Extra Mutants can get stuck behind one of the doors. You can't kill her, and the scene won't advance until all on-screen enemies are dead. Unintentionally Unwinnable ensues. On very rare occasions, the game will also forget you're in cutscene mode and have enemies attack you while you're unable to fight back.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Regardless of what the player actually chooses to use, G and Washington are shown almost exclusively using handguns, save for the final level where they have assault rifles for the opening cutscene. Averted later, where they suddenly get miniguns during the missing scene and the player gets to use that to fight the final boss.
  • Varla and Candi have assault rifles in the cutscenes to "Naked Terror" from the Director's Cut, even though as the second chapter in that version of the game, they probably won't have access to it (much less the funds to purchase it) by that point.
• Gatling Good: You get these for the final boss. How you found them, the game intentionally does not show. The gameplay change is represented in Typing of the Dead: Overkill by letting you mash on the keyboard.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: The Crawler boss is almost literally this with one explanation being that the mutagen doesn't only affect humans. Alternatively, given its additional human anatomy (human-like skin, a ribcage, feet with five toes, etc.) it is a severely mutated human, much like Meat Katie.
• Girlish Pigtails: How Candi wears her hair.
• Gory Deadly Overkill Title of Fatal Death: The game's title is already an example by itself. In game the levels are a deliberate send-up of its parent franchise by means of turning it into a seventies exploitation film, with level subtitles such as "Papa's Palace of Pain" and "Jailhouse Judgment".
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Candi's momma taught her that if she can't say anything nice, then say nothing. Candi took that literally, and so actually uses the word "nothing" in place of swears.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Jasper, Meat Katie and Nigel & Sebastian all hurl severed body parts at you as a means of attack. Nigel and Sebastian go the extra mile by throwing mutilated clown torsos.
• Groin Attack:
  • Overkill being the kind of game it is, its manual takes the time to mention that this does not work any better than any other non-headshot.
  • Played straight with the Screamer, though. Look closely at the weak-point markers.
  • A well-timed kick to the 'nads can also be used against the burly convict mutants.
• Guns Akimbo: Isaac has a habit of dual-wielding his AMS Magnums, and it's actually a requirement that you dual-wield Wiimotes for some gallery achievements.
  • It goes a step further: one of the post-game bonuses is a "Dual Wield" option, wherein a single player plays, using two guns as normal, but instead of switching between the two using both at the same time. This includes shotguns, assault rifles, and even miniguns.
• Hate at First Sight: Agent G and Isaac Washington meet this way, with G scoffing at the small-town cop Isaac, and Isaac punching the suited Agent on sight, before they start earning each other's respect.
• Hide Your Children: Notably averted for a House of the Dead game. The "Greg" enemies, introduced in "Ballistic Trauma", the hospital stage, are obviously diaper-clad mutant babies, showing that local children did not escape the mutant outbreak unscathed (or without being shot, as it turns out).
• Hong Kong Dub: As a parody element, it pops up in several cutscenes, but especially noticeable in this one.
• Hostage Spirit-Link: Downplayed; you lose 5,000 points for killing a survivor, but it doesn't take away any lives.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Bitch [easy], Agent [normal], and Motherfucker [hard].
• Instant Mystery, Just Delete Scene: Wearing its inspiration from Grindhouse on its sleeve, Overkill has a similar sequence near the end, where Isaac Washington and Agent G both solemnly prepare to do battle with the Final Boss... then one MISSING REEL later, the two of them are standing outside the burning laboratory, remarking how convenient it was they just happened to find those gatling guns. Then they fight the Final Boss for real. (The "Director's Cut" version later adds the supposed missing sequence back in.)
• Infinity +1 Sword: In the Extended Cut remake of Overkill, it's Isaac's favorite guns, the Gwendolyn. It has the power of the automatic shotgun, the range of the handgun, and it has Bottomless Magazines. Slightly mitigated by the fact that it doesn't have the crowd control of the shotgun, but why would you need it anyway? To get it, one must clear each stage (in any order) on Director's Cut once in "Classic Mode," where you're only allowed to use the default AMS Magnum.
• It's Personal: Papa Caesar killed Washington's father and indirectly killed Jasper. Then, Varla has to watch Candi bleed to death, making it extra personal for her.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Isaac is crude, standoffish, extremely foul-mouthed and generally shows little in the way of tact or couth. That said, he acts annoyed at but ultimately doesn't correct G's assertion that, deep down, he actually likes G. Isaac also accidentally reveals that he avoided the mutant outbreak because he was visiting his mother.
• Kick the Dog: Papa Caesar is introduced as a bastard from the beginning, but the way he treats Jasper (who is almost totally paralyzed) is downright assholish. He calls him an "impotent cripple", whacks him in the face with his cane and warns him that continuing to insult him will jeopardize his sister Varla's safety before calling him a "fucking cabbage."
• Kill the Cutie: Candi, the most upbeat of our heroes, dies of bloodloss due to having one of her arms severed. How very mother-nothing sad.
• Lampshade Hanging: In the last scene, the characters pick apart almost every single trope that was used in the game (and the Exploitation Film genre), including Washington's excessive cursing and the fact that the only (decent) female character has absolutely no impact on the plot and ends up as a brain in a jar).
• Large Ham: The Narrator:
  Narrator: GOOOOREEGAAAAASMM!!
  • Everybody, with the exception of G. But then, keeping in line with the "B-Movie" presentation of Overkill, the joke is that he's a poor 'actor'.
• Lemony Narrator: The narrator, again, often goes into over-dramatic tangents in regard to plot developments.
• Lighter and Softer: Reconstructed. While it's still no-holds-barred when it comes to the scenes of death and destruction and good ol' zombie Gorn, the dialogue, full of Isaac's potty mouth and G's Straight Man tendencies, helps lighten the mood a lot. Considering this is a prequel to the main story, it's not too surprising.
• Locomotive Level: "Scream Train", which takes place entirely on a train hurtling through a dark forest, possibly serving as a shout-out to Resident Evil 0.
• Loves the Sound of Screaming: Papa Caesar, as he himself admits while delivering a monologue.
  Caesar: As you well know, Isaac, I enjoy pain. It's like a good Chinese dinner, you know, with the sweet and the sour. Expanding on that analogy, I will smile with delight (that's the sweet) as you scream for your fucking life (of course, that's the sour). (hits the Big Red Button) Ciao!
• Ludicrous Gibs: Intentionally taken to ridiculous extremes, as the game takes every opportunity to show bodies getting torn to pieces by guns and explosions.
• Male Gaze: The camera lingered at Varla Gunns' cleavage before going back up to her face at the end of "Ballistic Trauma". Not to mention the live-action pole dance featured over the opening credits.
• The Man Behind the Man: Warden Darling for Papa Caesar, as the former was the one who hired Caesar to develop the mutant formula.
• Mercy Kill: What's done to Jasper. Lampshaded through the entire scene in question.
  G: I can help ease the pain.
  Washington: No you can fuckin' NOT! Shoot the motherfucker!
  G: Don't you do tact? That's what I am going to fucking do! Y'know-
  Washington: Shut the fuck up and shoot! Shit!
  (G shoots Jasper twice in the head)
  G: Happy now, fuckwit?
• More Dakka: The machine pistol is one of the cheaper alternate weapons. With enough cash, you can also spring for the more powerful assault rifle. And for the final boss, you get the minigun, after which you can bring it along to the rest of the game with some serious cash.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Nigel and Sebastian, by virtue of two people being conjoined together. Washington even yells for them to put all their arms up. Ultimately, though, Sebastian's extra arms don't factor much into the fight since he's so deformed compared to Nigel; he's simply Nigel's weak point.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Isaac Washington is, for all intents and purposes, an Expy of Samuel L. Jackson.
  • Varla's design is an Expy of Model Vikki Blows
• Noodle Incident: The first phase of the final boss fight, which is skipped over in an alleged "missing reel". The dialogue immediately afterward suggests that it would have been awesome.
  • Subverted in the Director's Cut mode of the Extended Cut, where they reveal that they did find the miniguns and fought Mother by destroying pillars.
• Not Using the "Z" Word:
  Isaac: Shit! I fuckin' hate these zom—
  G: Mutants. How many times do I have to tell you to not use the Z word?
• Number of the Beast: The end of the train level shows that the train's locomotive has has the number 666 on it.
• Oddball in the Series:
  • The game was developed by the UK-based studio Headstrong Games, rather than Sega's Wow Entertainment division or any of their other Japanese divisons for that matter.
  • The game is presented in the style of 80's B-movies, a far different take from the main series.
  • None of the bosses employ the usual Tarot card naming and Type numbers.
  • It is the only game to be exclusive to consumer platforms; it has never had an arcade release.
  • The game is much longer than its arcade counterparts, taking about 3-4 hours to complete in one sitting, assuming minimal breaks between chapters.
  • With the exception of G, none of the characters have explicit connections to any characters in the arcade games. Papa Caesar's message in the ending mentions that Clement Warden has "powerful friends", but it's never made clear who those "friends" are.
  • The game is intentionally comedic in tone.
  • The game has a focus on clearing individual chapters rather than doing the whole game in one shot. Thus, score and lives do not carry from one chapter to another.
  • There is no Mercy Invincibility; you can be hit multiple times in succession. To compensate, you get a lot more Hit Points.
  • Unlike the main games, which only have very, very occasional swearing, this game's script employs swear words with so much gusto it made a world record for it.
• One-Letter Name: Agent G, which annoys everyone who hears it.
  • "You ever gonna tell anyone what the fuckin' G stands for?" "...No."
  • Isaac walks right through that open door when he once calls his partner "Agent Gwendolyn" in the intro movie to "Carny", and later on in "Jailhouse Judgement", he says "The G stands for 'Genocide', Motherfucker!".
• Our Minotaurs Are Different: Meat Katie, a slaughterhouse worker who has mutated into a minotaur-like beast wielding a gigantic cleaver.
• Packaged as Other Medium: It has a cover meant to look like a movie poster. The whole game is presented as a movie, with each level having its own poster (complete with credits) and a "missing reel" in the final boss fight.
• Parental Incest: Warden Darling almost definitely had this relationship with his mother, transplanting her brain into the body of Varla Gunns and making out with her. In the end, after the main characters kill the giant mutant version of his mother, he insists on returning to the womb in order to undo his wrongs. Agent G then notes the irony of Washington referring to everyone and everything as "motherfucker" except for Darling, which he translates into Washington not meaning any of the insults that he had said, and therefore actually liking G as a friend.
• Postmodernism: In the ending of Overkill, the characters discuss the symbolism of their adventure, a Mythology Gag regarding the fact that zombie media often has some sort of symbolism regarding culture, politics, or some such.
• Prequel: Was advertised as one to the entire series, taking place seven years before the first game. Alluded to further in the ending, where Caeser's tape mentions that Clement, who developed the mutant compound, has "powerful friends". It is unknown if it is canon in the original universe, however, as Takashi Oda had next to no involvement with Overkill's production and has yet to acknowledge it as a mainline entry.
• Promotion to Parent: It's rapidly explained that Varla raised Jasper after their parents died... right before Jasper became a mutant himself.
• Rapid-Fire Typing: The Final Boss in Typing can be defeated simply by typing "anything, as long as you type like a motherfucker." You do inflict bonus damage for typing phrases that fit the current on-screen category, but it's easy enough to win simply by mashing the keyboard.
• Real Men Wear Pink: At one point, Isaac refuses to dissect open a recently slain mutant...because he just got a manicure the day before.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: You can buy a Hand Cannon that comes with its Firepower maxed out, which equates to everything that isn't a boss dying in one shot. A tad subverted - you need to be really fucking accurate with it, and you have to carefully time your reloads during downtime because they take very long. The automatic shotgun is better at chaining combos and ammo capacity, firing about as fast but with spread, meaning you don't have to be pinpoint accurate with it.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: This trope is invoked word-for-word by the narrator. Varla tries to go on one... but miserably fails. Twice.
• Ruder and Cruder: OVERKILL has more profanity compared to all the games that came before it, most of it coming from one of the game's protagonists, Issac Washington. In fact, the game had so much dirty language that it won the Guinness World Record for most swearing in a video game...only to be dethroned by Mafia II a year later.
• Sequel Hook: The ending establishes that, at the very least, Bayou is not even close to mutant-free. And the poster for the last level says "They're just getting started." Not only that, there's the tape which Caesar leaves to Washington:
  Caesar: You know of Clement Darling, yes, the cretin prison warden? It was he who originally discovered the mutant compound in a secret lab beneath his prison. Clement's ambitions are small minded, Isaac. But he has friends, powerful friends. (Curien and Goldman, if you haven't guessed it yet.)
• Shout-Out:
  • The whole game is one long one to grindhouse films (especially Planet Terror).
  • There's also one bit where you fight through a zombie-infested train and fight a giant insect as a boss.
  • "We're on an express elevator to Hell, going-" "Shut up and press the button!"
  • One of the ranks for making consecutive kills without missing is "Ultra-Violence".
  • "Suffer Like G Did" is also a quote spoken by Zeal (of the Judgement boss) in The House of the Dead 2.
  • The boss "Screamer" (and associated color and sound effects) resembles female J-horror monsters like the one from The Ring.
  • At one point, a phone rings from inside a person's chest.
  • So many of the phrases in The Typing of the Dead: Overkill are references. For instance, you might have to type "Main screen turn on," "Make your time," or "Move ZIG" or "Looking for sailors", or come across a pair of mutants with "Careful now" and "Down with this", or "Fork Handles" and "Four Candles".
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Isaac Washington is rather famous for this due to his habit of saying "fuck" in nearly every single sentence.
• Sophisticated as Hell: After Cluster F Bombing his way into the Guinness Book of World Records, Washington manages this in Overkill's ending:
  Washington: Frankly, Casanova, I'd be more worried about reading the last 24 hours as a damning fucking indictment of contemporary feminism.
  G: ...Beg pardon?
  Washington: I just think two dick-wielding cop cliches taking down a hundred-foot birthing mother is a statement fairly limited in its interpretations.
• The Stinger: The game ends its credits by playing the tape Caesar left for the protagonists at the beginning of The Fetid Waters, which reveals that "powerful friends" (presumably Curien and Goldman) have access to Clement's compound, and more surprisingly, that Washington's father isn't actually dead...
• Stylistic Suck: The game mocks the previous games' bad acting, running with it and turning it into a grindhouse film.
• Super-Scream: The Screamer, of course. Her methods for attacking G and Issac are melee strikes and screaming loud enough to shatter glass.
• Sunglasses at Night: Agent G has his pair of sunglasses on throughout the whole game, which takes place in a single night. It doesn't affect his performance any.
• Tattooed Crook: Varla, who is a stripper and somewhat legally dodgy due to being wrapped up with Papa Caesar, has a red, lipstick-kiss tattoo on her left breast.
• This Is the Final Battle: Washington states that it seems like "this is it" as Mother prepares to attack them. G likewise gets sentimental with him for a bit before they both take aim... MISSING REEL
  • Although the "missing reel" is seen in the Director's Cut.
• Title Drop: The last chapter in Overkill is appropriately titled "Overkill", with its intro detailing "Operation: Overkill".
• Title of the Dead: The game's title counts, justified due to the series its a part of.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Ceasar's love for Chinese.
• Tragic Monster: Well, almost every single monster in the game was an innocent civilian before they turned into mutants. Two stand out, though: Jasper, per Transformation Trauma that was initially since he wanted to kill Papa Caesar, and the Screamer, who's an unfortunate test subject used in Papa Caesar's experiments.
• Transformation Trauma: Jasper turns himself into the first boss by injecting himself with the virus. Given that he starts the game as a quadriplegic, his status as a boss is justified by his new Psychic Powers.
• The Unfought: Papa Caesar and Warden Darling, neither of which is fought directly by either pair of heroes.
• Updated Re-release: Two of them: first, Extended Cut for the PS3, which upgraded the graphics and added two new chapters; then Typing for PC, which was a port of the Extended Cut with both the standard light gun-style and Typing of the Dead-style gameplay modes.
• Vasquez Always Dies: Or, in this case, Varla Guns has her brain replaced with an old woman's and her body mutated into a horrible monstrosity.
  • Ironically, this traditional "Tomboy of the Tomboy and Girly Girl pair dies" part of the trope is inverted in Varla's exclusive chapters of the PS3/PC version of Overkill, which ends with Girly Girl Candi getting her arm cut off by Meat Katie's blade, and bleeding to death. Considering this is set just before Varla devolves into a Faux Action Girl, this raises the implication that she underwent a Heroic BSoD, and couldn't get out of it for the rest of the game.
• Vengeance Denied: Before Isaac can avenge his father by killing Papa Caesar, Warden Darling kills him instead, and mocks Isaac over the missed opportunity.
• Was Once a Man: In addition to the usual mutants, Meat Katie's name tag and parts of the Crawler's anatomy suggest that they were human at one point. Varla also suggests Sindy and Coco were once acquaintances of hers before they were mutated.
• Went to the Great X in the Sky: One of the diplomatic euphemisms that Varla tries to use to tell Candi about Jasper's death in Extended Cut is that he went up the great stair lift in the sky.
• What Does She See in Him?: Varla explicitly asks Candi why Jasper went with her. Candi starts to explain, though Varla tells her to shut up about her brother.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: For Washington, who is unflappable until he has to get on an elevator and starts to freak out about it.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Averted. As soon as Clement reveals himself as the Big Bad, Isaac Washington immediately takes aim and shoots... only to discover that there's a pane of bulletproof glass between them.
  • Played straight at the start of "Scream Train" when all three protagonists have Caesar right where they want him, but their arguing over who gets to kill/arrest him allows him to get away. It goes on for minutes before any of them notices. Even better, Isaac shoots Caesar while he's monologuing and promptly apologizes and asks him to continue.
• Ye Olde Nuclear Silo: The final level of the game, since it's where the mutagen originally came from.
• You Killed My Father: Papa Caesar killed Washington's father, which serves as Washington's motive for going after the crime lord in the first place.
• Zombie Puke Attack: Some zombies puke acid, with Not Using the "Z" Word explaining this as a genetic mutation in the victims.

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Caesar: As you well know, Isaac, I enjoy TV Tropes. It's like a good Chinese dinner, you know, with the sweet and the sour. Expanding on that analogy, I will smile with delight—that's the sweet—as it ruins your fucking life—that's the sour. Ciao!

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