After 11 years, you would think that we’d have finally ridded ourselves of Resident Evil-like door-loading cut-scenes. But no, they’re very much alive and, unfortunately, kicking. It’s just that now, they’re portable.

Rather than Resi’s cinematic gameplay, however, living either side of Dead Head Fred’s doorframes are rooms of fidgety enemies that must be fought using a rather convoluted attack system. And while it’s all very well using different head attachments with differing attributes to fuse strategy into its combat and puzzles, the appeal is diminished when the method of accessing them appears to be targeted at ambidextrous savants. Everything in the game has this abhorrent stop/start feel to it. Stopping to witness a cut-scene of a door opening. Stopping during a confusing button mash to hold down a shoulder button, wrestle with the analogue nub and watch your character supplant the relevant head on his shoulders as an impatient zombie takes chunks from your energy bar.

It’s a game that’s been either strangely mis-marketed or shamefully mis-targeted. The story is rammed with cringeworthy dialogue that only kids who watch TV shows with double-barrel monikers, like Sam & Mark and Dick And Dom, will ever find mildly amusing. And yet, throughout, the narrative is given a smattering of naughty taboo words, like ‘shit’, which, of course, feels grossly out of place and makes your ears double take until they get dizzy and drop off.

So where exactly is the output of all those door-loading scenes going? It’s not the levels, which, save for a few generic destructible wooden crates, are littered with generic disinterested objects. It’s certainly not the puzzles, which consist of pressing Triangle on two objects that live next to each other, handily flash ‘Come get me’, ala Resident Evil, and are thrown down your throat by a camera that scans the rooms on entrance, catching their twinkle in its lens voyeuristically. It makes you wonder if the developers did this to ensure the number of door openings that occur in game would be dramatically reduced. Oh, and while we’re on the subject of Resident Evil similarities, this game also has a puzzle that requires you to kill a deadly weed using pesticide.

Inside Dead Head Fred exists the cadaver of an interesting game concept that’s sadly been eroded by poor controls and an army of doors. Oh, the doors! And it’s all the more tragic when you consider Scrubs’s John C McGinley has been roped into lending his voice to Fred. Not even his witty alter-ego Dr Cox could defibrillate this game back to life.

Stuart Hunt