I wasn't a huge fan of this one. Coming after the REmake, which was one of the best in the series I've played up to this point, I had high hopes for Zero but, unfortunately, they weren't met. Zero, for those who aren't aware, is a prequel that follows Rebecca before her foray in the mansion.
I played the HD re-release of this on my PS5. |
Mechanically it's similar to the REmake in quite a few ways. Tank controls on the d-pad and "free" 3D movement on the left stick, though the biggest change over that game is that it has two playable characters. For a majority of the game you'll be playing as one character while the second either waits in an area for your return or follows after your controlled character.
You can also freely control that second character with the right stick, which is neat but only ever situationally useful. If that second character has a weapon equipped they'll attack enemies that come into range so, under the right circumstances, you can have two characters unloading rounds into zombies and just kinda wrecking shop.
The other big change, one I take issue with, is the lack of item storage. Where other games have had a shared pool of items you could store and access from one of several locations, this game instead allows you to drop (and retrieve) items at will. This has its pros for sure, temporarily dropping something is convenient and being able to leave items in certain popular hub areas is useful, but needing to travel to a specific location to retrieve an item, especially when you only have six inventory slots, gets tedious fast. If you want to stay armed, want ammo, and want at least one healing item, that's half of your inventory in use leaving only three spots for other things.
Most of the time you can use your inactive player character as a pack mule of sorts, leaving you with 12 effective slots, but the game will split the two of you up without warning on a number of occasions making that a pretty risky strategy.
As a prequel it's... fine. Wesker and a man (who I think is Birkin?) have some evil scheming that doesn't really go anywhere outside of reminding the audience about the other games, but the game never quite justifies why this should've been about Rebecca. Maybe my memory is just bad, and minor spoilers here, but this game ends in the morning with Rebecca out in the open air and doesn't quite explain how or why she ended up in the mansion in the first place. She has a reason to go there, yes, but after going through an entire dang Resident Evil adventure of her own I don't understand why she'd willingly walk into yet another zombie-mansion-with-a-secret-base-under-it without, you know, getting some more backup or whatever.
At one point Wesker leaves suddenly because he remembers he's needed in the original game. |
As before, I've included my completion screen below. I think the only thing this game takes into account for Rank is time and I, um, didn't know what I was doing. I also wasted a lot of time ferrying items back-and-forth.
I've been pretty negative throughout this but I ultimately enjoyed the game by the end. It has some issues but the lack of an item box and the dual-characters give this game a unique identity of its own that make it an interesting followup to the more traditional RE1 remake. I just wish some of the changes felt better.
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