Resident Evil: Survivor on PS1

Resident Evil: Survivormust have seemed like a great idea on paper. Take a popular game that’sbeen established over the past four years on the Playstation (ResidentEvil) and combine the idea with one of the arcade’s hottest gun-totinghits (House of the Dead). Both have stacks of zombies wondering aroundhaunted houses – it can’t lose!

Presented in a first-person perspective, waking up and not knowing who you are,you eventually establish your identity as Vincent, but how can that be? You’rea nice, kind person who wouldn’t harm a soul, not the sort of person who getsan anonymous phone call stating :

…after which I was expecting Ned Flanders to add “You’re amur-diddly-urderer!”.

Graphics, Sound and Playability

By the timeResident Evil 3was released, the once-excellent graphics were stating to look dated becausethey hadn’t changed. Here everything moves along so slowly, even when you run.Even the graphics from id Software‘s pre-Doom Wolfenstein 3Dlooked better than this.

The sound is the best thing though. It loses the impact of menacing backgroundmusic, but there’s some nice directional sound effects when bad guys leap outat you.

For something that’s trying to emulate the “play it as you like” original,the gameplay here is so linear in this game it’s unbelievable. You can’t gothrough certain doors because they’re locked, but if you go throug the ones youcan, you’ll find the required key. Things like that just serve to waste timeas does the pointless exercise of reading diaries and logs.

Pressing L1 does help to find the nearest enemy, door or something-to-do,but too often you’ll find you’re getting eaten from behind by zombies younever knew existed. This doesn’t provide any kind of shocks and is just plainirritating.

Overall

Overall, this really is a terrible game and one that made me nearly fallasleep. There’s references to the T-virus and G-virus and you can pick upmanuals to read as you can in the regular games, but none of this serves tobring about any tension, nor does it particularly matter as the game it’strying to emulate didn’t try to bog you down with lots of stuff to read thatwas meant to make you think.

In myResident Evil 3review I said that it’s now time to move on to something new rather thanre-hash the original with different puzzles. In this one there are no puzzlesof worth and it’s a far cry from House of the Dead. Perhaps theQuality Control were shut for the day when this was due to be checked.

And still it has the most annoying feature of all, which was something thePC version of Resident Evil 2solved to some degree. Every time you go through a door you get the ‘openingdoor’ sequence. It’s very annoying if you need to go through a lot of doors toget somewhere – and here the zombies tend to reappear even after you’ve killedthem which just wastes ammo! Therefore I feel you should only get the ‘openingdoor’ graphic the first time you go through and stop having the zombiesreappear.

I doubt we’ll get another Resident Evil game on thePlaystation, but I’ll be very interested to see what advancements have beenmade when Resident Evil: Codename Veronica comes to the Sega Dreamcast.

If you’re after some more info on Eidos Interactive’s games, you can checkout their official Website atwww.eidos.co.uk

Also, check out Capcom’s site at www.capcom.com

GRAPHICS
SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC
PLAYABILITY
ORIGINALITY
ENJOYMENT



OVERALL