By the time
Resident Evil 3
was released, the once-excellent graphics were stating to look dated because
they hadn't changed. Here everything moves along so slowly, even when you run.
Even the graphics from id Software's pre-Doom Wolfenstein 3D
looked better than this.
The sound is the best thing though. It loses the impact of menacing background
music, but there's some nice directional sound effects when bad guys leap out
at 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 go
through certain doors because they're locked, but if you go throug the ones you
can, you'll find the required key. Things like that just serve to waste time
as 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 you
never knew existed. This doesn't provide any kind of shocks and is just plain
irritating.
Overall
Overall, this really is a terrible game and one that made me nearly fall
asleep. There's references to the T-virus and G-virus and you can pick up
manuals to read as you can in the regular games, but none of this serves to
bring about any tension, nor does it particularly matter as the game it's
trying to emulate didn't try to bog you down with lots of stuff to read that
was meant to make you think.
In my
Resident Evil 3
review I said that it's now time to move on to something new rather than
re-hash the original with different puzzles. In this one there are no puzzles
of worth and it's a far cry from House of the Dead. Perhaps the
Quality 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 the
PC version of
Resident Evil 2
solved to some degree. Every time you go through a door you get the 'opening
door' sequence. It's very annoying if you need to go through a lot of doors to
get somewhere - and here the zombies tend to reappear even after you've killed
them which just wastes ammo! Therefore I feel you should only get the 'opening
door' graphic the first time you go through and stop having the zombies
reappear.
I doubt we'll get another Resident Evil game on the
Playstation, but I'll be very interested to see what advancements have been
made when Resident Evil: Codename Veronica comes to the Sega Dreamcast.
If you're after some more info on Eidos Interactive's games, you can check
out their official Website at
www.eidos.co.uk
DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV
connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and
played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
