Survival/horror games come in all
shapes and sizes. In 2007, Capcom proved that Resident Evil was ready for one
more variation and released The Umbrella Chronicles, a Wii-exclusive on-rails
shooter that splattered thick blobs of blood on The House of the Dead’s grave
and made no attempt to apologize for it. The Umbrella Chronicles was by no means
a new concept, but when a game makes the same-old-thing fun again, players will
take notice.
They took notice so quickly that
they found the plastic Wii Zapper contraption to be worth its $20 – $25 price
tag. But alas, after two years of replaying some of the most exciting lightgun
shooter battles ever conceived, gamers were in need of a sequel. Capcom is not
one to hold back, thus releasing The Darkside Chronicles earlier this week.
Well, don’t you look familiar.
Starring Leon Kennedy, Claire
Redfield and other familiar faces, The Darkside Chronicles is very much the game
you expected it to be, plus a few changes. This sequel, more than the first
game, is a shooter with levels that are more fun to play after you’ve been
through them once. It’s a strange development choice – those who haven’t played
The Umbrella Chronicles are probably scratching their heads and wondering, “How
can a level be fun later if it isn’t any fun now?”
Well, that’s the thing. The Darkside
Chronicles is fun in the beginning. But it gets better with time.
Like the first, Darkside is horribly
brutal, and not in the visual sense. Even on the easy setting, the boss battles
aren’t too forgiving; on medium or harder, prepare for a serious fight. Item
placement and retrieval is a bit weird – you can’t hold more than one health
spray at a time, which means you won’t survive death more than once. Green herbs
are dispersed so infrequently that you’ll be lucky if you have the strength to
avoid using every one you find. Bullets are acquired in the same manner as
before: you must find them on the screen (often in plain sight but additional
weapons/ammo can be found hidden within the destructible portions of the
environment) and manually click on them.
By the time you make it to the sixth
or seventh stage, it’s going to be very difficult to survive. Capcom knew this
would happen. The developers saw the torture coming a mile away. Accordingly,
they once again included the replay-a-level feature that lets you re-experience
the thrill of previously conquered adventures while keeping every piece of ammo
you find but don’t use. This also gives you the chance to earn more gold, a very
scarce resource, which can be used to upgrade the painfully weak weapons you’ll
acquire throughout the game.
Hey! You look familiar too! What is this
place!?
New – or perhaps I should say
different – monsters are found all over the place. Zombies are just the
beginning; the oversized spiders are back, as are two versions of the lickers
from RE2. There’s a creature that resembles a frog (several of them, actually),
and there are dozens of cockroaches, mutated fish, giant maggots, and a cluster
of boss battles that’ll make you want to replay old levels just to stock up on
ammo.
As you play through those old
stages, stronger with new and/or upgraded weapons and likely more powerful with
a better stock of ammo, the game is much less frustrating. Suddenly, the
shooter-fest that it was supposed to be, it has finally become. With a dozen
magnum rounds, a few dozen shotgun shells, and a few hundred Uzi bullets, you
can run around and shoot without worry that you’ll run out of ammo later.
Don’t get me wrong – I wasn’t hoping
The Darkside Chronicles would be like RE5, where ammo was so plentiful the game
was practically a cakewalk. But this isn’t a distinct sequel in the franchise;
it’s an offshoot series with an entirely different gameplay style. If limiting
our ammo was the only thing the developers could do to make the game tough, then
they surely knew the difficulty wouldn’t last.
But as it turns out, that isn’t the
hardest part of the game. The boss battles are surprisingly enduring, and their
health meters (most have more than one!) are just one of the challenges. Many of
the bosses can only be killed within a scripted event, forcing the player – or
players, if in a co-op game – to fire repeatedly until the boss is in the
game-designated position. It’s fairly confusing and frustrating, to say the
least. But it isn’t the hardest part of the game either.
Players will be stopped dead in
their tracks by a sneak attack they never expected: the camera system. The
developers must have thought of The Umbrella Chronicles was a low-key experience
since they decided to turn The Darkside Chronicles into a visual roller coaster.
Basically, what you see is what the character sees. Consequently, if someone
were to fall down the stairs, get knocked down by a zombie, or nearly lose a
limb in an explosion, the camera will jerk around to correspond with the view
that character is experiencing. Every footstep, every time the character looks
up, every time he or she decides to turn around – every part of it is displayed
on screen.
Boss battles are everywhere.
While this might sound cool for a
survival/horror game (it’s definitely something other developers should look
into), it doesn’t work too well in an on-rails world. In these kinds of
shooters, the player controls the gun, nothing else. Unlike The Umbrella
Chronicles, you have zero control over the camera, which would be fine if the
camera stayed still. I’m not looking for sluggishness – nobody is. But what’s
the fun in trying to score a headshot if the camera is moving so fast that it’s
all but impossible? Where’s the fun in noticing a key item on the screen if the
camera is going to prevent me from getting it?
These are not the kinds of questions
RE fans should have to ask, especially when they didn’t have to while playing
The Umbrella Chronicles.
By now you probably know the story,
and if you ignore the rest of this review to avoid any details, you’d better
avoid the back of the box as well. Really though, there isn’t much to reveal
since the majority of the game is a ridiculous re-creation of Resident Evil 2,
bits and pieces of Resident Evil 3, a slice of CODE Veronica, and a hint of some
others. I say “ridiculous” not because the shooter action doesn’t deliver, and
not because the environments – which are now made of polygons (let’s not forget
that the RE series began with stiff, pre-rendered CG backgrounds) – aren’t any
good.
Rather, the absurdity comes from the
developers’ unexplainable choices. Every fan knows how corny this franchise can
be. We’re also well aware of the cheesy dialogue that fueled Resident Evil 1 and
2. But the RE remake for GameCube gave us hope for a darker, scarier, and more
realistic tomorrow, as did RE4. Those dreams were squashed with RE5, but still –
did this series have to get any cheesier? You can’t pass a stage without hearing
badly written and horrendously acted dialogue. Though it may have nothing to do
with the way The Umbrella Chronicles plays, it is a distraction to the gameplay,
and that makes it inescapably detrimental.
He’s coming for you.
Resident Evil: The Darkside
Chronicles doesn’t surpass the quality of the original. In some ways, it takes a
couple of steps backward. But if you loved the carnage of The Umbrella
Chronicles, would like to re-explore the joys of older Resident Evil games, and
have been dying for another replay value-driven on-rails shooter, The Darkside
Chronicles is worth playing.
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Gameplay: 7.5
Fans of The Umbrella Chronicles will thoroughly enjoy most of what The
Darkside Chronicles has to offer. But they won’t be blown away by it, and they
won’t in any way think of this game as a replacement – or even a true successor
– to the original.
Graphics: 7.9
Dark and gritty, The Darkside Chronicles is a good-looking game that could
have been a visual showstopper if the backgrounds and characters weren’t so
washed out.
Sound: 6.5
Nowhere near the caliber of the standard Resident Evil music, and the voice
acting is unexpectedly worse.
Difficulty: Medium
One of the more challenging (and also more frustrating) on-rails shooters
for Wii.
Concept: 7.8
Capcom made some ballsy choices in trying to create a survival/horror
on-rails shooter that was played from behind the eyes of a character. It didn’t
work out very well in this environment, but the camera perspective is still
quite unique.
Multiplayer: 7
Two-player co-op that allows you to party like it’s 1995.
Overall: 7.5
Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles is a good on-rails shooter, but it’s
only a decent sequel.
