Resident Evil Zero HD Review

The Verdict

Resident Evil Zero HD is Resident Evil Zero in a prettier dress. I hope that’s what you wanted to hear going into this review, because if not, I suggest you swiftly move on. I thought I spoke Resident Evil, but revisiting Zero 14 years after the fact feels like reading cuneiform. The only way I can possibly imagine enjoying the game is viewing it through glasses so thickly rose-tinted that any bit of nostalgia bait would seem a hidden gem. And in those circumstances I’d sooner recommend playing a dated game that’s actually fun.

The Positives

• Let’s deal with the big white elephant first: this is a very pretty remaster. For a game originally released for the GameCube in 2002, Resi Zero turns heads. Fire, rain and other particle effects pop and dance to the tune of modern engines, greatly improved lightning and refraction lend environments an equally improved sense of space, and characters are smoother than ever.

• Resident Evil games are nothing without their cloying, dreadful atmosphere, so it’s fortunate Zero has it in spades. You creep and crawl and puzzle your way through eerily Victorian train cars, busy laboratories, abandoned factories and many other horror staples, each one possessed of the same cagey design. Things never get genuinely scary—the increasingly ridiculous enemies make sure of that—but it keeps your mental string taught throughout.

• Gameplay is split between protagonists Rebecca Chambers and Billy Coen, letting you jump heads on the fly. Billy has the advantage of being able to soak up damage like a Destiny Strike boss, whereas Rebecca can craft more powerful healing items. The real success of the system is its impact on level design, as it allows for puzzles and scenarios impossible alone. Locked rooms, estranged buttons and keys, and sharing information quickly become staples of exploration, and everything between is improved by the sheer agency of dividing and conquering.

• This is a classic, pre-Resident Evil 4 game, controls and warts and all. I say this now because I want it visually as close to the incoming list of negatives as it is practically. If you like old Resi games, this is a bonus for you. If you are on the fence, just know that this was archaic, brute-force, acquired-taste design in 2002 and time has not sweetened it. Combat is still a chore, inventory efficiency is at an all-time low, and bosses are either cheap or repetitive. If anything, it has aged like milk.

The Negatives

• Though it is leaps and bounds above the original graphically, Zero HD doesn’t make many technical improvements. Load times are long and frequent, requiring upwards of four seconds to transition between even small, undetailed rooms. It doesn’t help that the objects and textures on display in loading screens didn’t see a drop of HD paint and regularly jerk you out of the moment.

• Just as annoyingly, the game freezes for a half-second each time the camera jumps to the next fixed point, turning even loaded rooms into a game of red light, green light. I would gladly have been docked a few pixels to smooth over faults like these, as they’re far more offensive than rough textures. (Note: Readers have suggested that these technical hitches are unique to the digital version of the game, which was used for this review. Your mileage may vary with a hard copy.)

• Criticizing the writing of a Capcom game is like fighting a wildfire with a Super Soaker, but given Zero’s origins, it should be noted that the protagonists are dull as can be. As a prequel, Zero exists primarily to flesh out the backstories and circumstances of its characters and of later games, yet it succeeds only in proving Rebecca to be a thoughtless misty-eyed doe and Billy a cardboard cutout loosely based on a Yakuza underling. It’s a good thing the two spend so much time apart, because together they deliver all the rip-snorting chemistry of water and oil.

• Zero’s stabs at puzzles are hit and miss. The good ones leverage the dual-character system to liven up otherwise samey or simple tasks, but the more numerable bad ones are so pants-on-head retarded that even adventure games would question their logic. Any game that contains an item called “panel opener” is so deep in its own contrivances that it can’t see the sun, let alone sense. But again, wildfires and Super Soakers.

Capcom can be said to command several distinct franchises, but I’d say they're closer to speaking multiple languages. When it comes to Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, Devil May Cry and so on, you either understand them completely or you haven’t got a clue—what they’re about, what you’re supposed to do, and why people are still banging on about them.

This is especially true for Resident Evil, a franchise founded on tangled canon and torturous controls. There’s a bit of a barrier there. To the uninformed onlooker, the series is a mess. But for those fluent in tank controls, rehashed characters and absurd boss battles, the series is a mess that fills a very specific and satisfying niche. When the planets align, Resi’s intimate and fiddly inventory management, objectively claustrophobic combat, theatrical plots and characters, and unrelenting atmosphere provide a unique experience that really sings.

But sometimes it never gets past the point of Resident Evil Zero.