Resident Evil Outbreak

This is yet another Resident Evil spinoff with some interesting ideas but which didn't fully work for me. Part of this is almost certainly due to the fact I played it by myself and had to deal with AI companions, rather than with other actual-human players, but even if I had played this under ideal circumstances I'm not sure I'd have loved it.

I played all of this on my actual PS2

I want to start by saying I don't think this is a bad game. Indeed, there are a number of things about it that are novel and worth highlighting. The thing is, without other people it's often pretty tedious and that tedium can be difficult to overlook.

Essentially, this is a Resident Evil game designed for three people. Without online features, that means it's a game with you and two AI companions. By default, each character has four inventory slots so the "puzzle" of it all largely revolves around juggling key items between characters because there are far more things to pick up than you'll ever be able to carry and there aren't any item boxes to speak of. In that way I was reminded of Resident Evil Zero with it's single AI companion. Characters can die in this so the game forces you to make sure your buddies have health items and/or weapons to take care of themselves, though they'll usually grab things on their own so you don't need to worry about micromanaging them.

The way this game generally works is that, depending on who you choose to play as, there'll be another potential player character puppeteered by the AI following you around while a third playable-character-controlled-by-the-computer runs around the map doing... whatever it is they're doing. Sometimes that means they'll run off and pick up a key item (saving you, the player, some time), but usually it just means they're offscreen and not really doing anything useful.

The story's not much to write home about, it's basically just a loose thread of a group of survivors trying to get out of Raccoon City as things start to collapse (setting the start of this shortly before RE2/3) but this series hasn't really ever been known for complex storytelling so that's not a huge surprise.

The final level introduces a villain in the form of budget-Wesker

Structurally, the game is comprised of five "scenarios" and each one has its own gimmick, essentially. The first level is a tense escape from hordes of zombies through the streets of Raccoon City (ending with a setpiece involving close to twenty onscreen enemies, an impressive sight for the series). The second has you running through the frozen lab from RE2, encountering enemies and locations that should be familiar to fans of the series. The third sets you in a hospital with an (effectively) unkillable monster slowly trudging after you constantly. The fourth is in a large, open burning building and the fifth and final level sets you in a university building not unlike the Spencer Mansion. There's a good deal of variety here and over the course of the game you'll basically run through a "greatest hits" of the series, which I found rather enjoyable.

There's a constantly ticking clock of your character's "infection" that'll slowly inch towards 100% (and death) as each level goes on, sand while there are ways to slow the infection, and ways for enemies to speed it up, if you don't know where you're going then losing due to it can be a real concern. There are typewriter save stations, but those seemingly will only allow you to quit the game and reload from that location at a later time (if you, say, wanted to resume at a later date) and didn't seem like traditional "saves" to me. As each level takes around an hour to complete, a failure late in a level can lead to a lot of lost time. Like any RE it means you get used to the layout of the levels and subsequent runs can be faster, but with how mazelike these locations were I never truly felt like I internalized any of their layouts.  

I generally enjoyed my time with this game but I think I may have liked it more with other people. As it stands it's a sort of frustrating thing alone but I'm still glad I played it.

I've included my clear screens for each of the levels below. I'm not sure what the difficulty changes but I decided to play on "Easy" because playing with AI companions seemed like enough of a challenge already. I've tried out each character at least once (if a name isn't mentioned here it's because I tried them on an attempt that failed). Having double inventory space as Yoko was just too hard to pass up once I'd exhausted all other options

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I've changed my mind since my end of January post, I'm just going to soldier on in chronological order. So that means Silent Hill 4 is up next, then Outbreak File #2 (even if the latter is just going to largely be more of this, which is what my gut is telling me).