Resident Evil Dead Aim

Here's the game that started it all for me Dead Aim. By that I mean I was planning to only play the "important" RE and Silent Hill games until I found an inexpensive copy of this at a used games store and that made me want to go all in on my dumb completionist quest.

I played this on my PlayStation 2. It's not like it's available anywhere else.

This game is... fine? I went into this hearing that it was the best of the "Survivor" games and, while it probably is, it also left basically no impact on me. It's a pretty bog-standard action game with some Resident Evil branding and enemies so while that's probably the most you can hope for from something like this it also means that the end result is a pretty by-the-books PS2 action game.

The story starts in media res and everything is self-contained enough to not impact anything else in the series, but it's all serviceable enough for a spinoff like this. The voice acting is decent (the main character's, Bruce McGivern's, voice surprised me a bit, though it's not bad) but the plot is a standard story of two spies on opposite sides working together to stop a common threat. The villain is named Morpheus and, despite being a guy, transforms into something that looks very... un-guy-like. It's a bit of an odd choice but he turns into a big ol' flesh monster by the end so it's still Resident Evil as usual. 

The ending seemed a bit "The Spy Who Loved Me"

The gameplay is an evolution of the other Survivor games, naturally. Where the first two emulated arcade lightgun games, this is structurally closer to an actual RE game. You're constantly being put into an open area that you investigate until you find some key item that you can use to progress to the next area. Between all of that, of course, there is a lot of shooting to do. Ammo is a concern, unlike the others, but pistol ammo is doled out frequently enough that it might as well be infinite.

The game alternates between first and third person and it even has two protagonists like many other RE games that you'll swap between at predefined moments. You are typically exploring its locales in third person but can enter first person at will to aim and fire your weapon. While aiming, you can still freely move so it seems like this is the first entry in the series to allow you to move and shoot simultaneously.

Zombies, frustratingly, don't move in an incredibly predictable manner and that means headshots are tricky to pull off which, while probably fun with a lightgun, made killing them with a slow on-screen reticle a bit of a chore. Speaking of enemies, this game has your run-of-the-mill zombies as well as Hunters, a Tyrant, and even a few specialized one-off monsters.

I like the stylized look of the Hunters in this.

As with the other games in the series, I've included my "results" screen. It's not as bad as I was expecting, to be honest, given I used some healing spray and had to hit "continue" a number of times.

All in all I don't know that there's much I can say about this game. It exists, it's totally alright, and it's pretty short. It's not a bad time but you're not missing out on much by not playing it.