Not worth 60 bucks, but one hell of a rent!
The gameplay is God of War button mashing with occasional 2X4, machete, pipe, shotgun, chainsaw, or severed limbs; my personal favorite being the shotgun. You can also combo attacks and throw in a slo-motion charged attack at the end to add a significant amount of damage to your enemy.
One of the things I liked was the fact that your enemies are the source of your health! You can be getting your ass whipped buy a swarm of dudes and then in a split second your back to life and your enemies are momentarily knocked out.
At first when I said this game is simplistic, I meant it. Aside from the occasional throwing a small guy at a spike or some huge gaping mouth, that's the closest thing to puzzles as this game gets. Every room involves beating up a bunch of guys in order to unlock the next room wherein the objective is to beat up a bunch of guys, and so on. So If you hate repetitiveness, you won't like this.
I didn't expect this game to be without glitches or issues but the one thing that I cannot excuse and at times ruined the flow for me are the abysmal load times. The load screens have high detail animations of certain enemies but they get old quickly. The 'cheap deaths" gamespot mentions in the side scrolling levels would not be nearly as frustrating if It didn't take 20-25 seconds to load! also there are in-game moments where you have to sit still while a portion of a level on the other side of a door loads and that takes like 4 seconds each time.
As far as replay value is concerned, there's a survival mode, and collectibles in each level. Each level in the main game and survival contains about 4 pieces of photographs of Rick girlfriend, some of them nude. The main story has about enough excitement for about one playthrough. After that is just going back to levels to get missed collectibles. If it's nostalgia you're after then you'll like the the three original splatterhouse titles. I was hoping they had the Turbografix version but unfortunately no such luck.
Overall I found this game to be very enjoyable, and damn good rental and definitely worth playing. It does not deserve the 4 that IGN and gamespot gave it. In my opinion, however, It is not worth sixty bucks. I wouldn't believe anyone who says it's worth buying, unless it's like 15 bucks at most.