Friday, March 25, 2011

Resident Evil: The Darkside Chonicles

So I just beat this game yesturday with my friend and had some good times with it. I'll try not to ruin anything but it's hard in a review. Anyways I'm going to split this up into several sections; now onto the review:

Story 8/10

Now the story, for all I have to say is corny as hell. The voice acting is cheesy and the scenarios are just nigh implausible, with zombies popping up out of nowhere and monsters just attacking you for no reason. Now if you know zombies and monsters you know that they are pretty much uncontrollable unless you're so badass motherfucker who can ruin everybody's shit (i.e. me). Here however it appears as if these monsters are controlled by the main protagonist of the scenario. They will throw tyrants and giant snakes at you whenever they feel like. Zombies come out of nowhere and attack you but never anybody else. You will see civilians, people that are unarmed and have no fighting skill whatever, just run past these guys like it was nothing. Also 1 of them is a 12 year old kid named Sherry and she's just ridiculous.

Not afraid of anything


Also at times she would just run away from you for no reason. Yes, let's run away from the nice normal humans and run towards the head eating licker shall we? The reason I give this an 8 is because the corniness and unbelievability of the whole situation your in just adds to the amusement. It would try to take itself seriously but fall flat on it's face the next moment. It's so bad it's good , is one way to put it.

Gameplay 8/10

The game itself is an on-rails shooter similar to games like House of the Dead or Time Crisis in the arcade. The difference is this isn't a light gun game and instead relies on the Wii motes pointer in order for you to aim. So you will always see a scope on the screen for where you are going to shoot. I personally like these types of games so I might be a little bit biased but I'd say it was done very well. You start with a handgun with infinite ammo and to reload you just shake your remote, relatively easy to do but can cause some strain to your arm/wrist. You get new guns as you progress by finding them around the areas you visit and you can customize every gun you get. Each gun except for the handgun comes with limited amount of ammo, but again you can find more as you progress through the areas. Every upgrade becomes more and more expensive as you progress but you also get more money as you went on.

It adds some variety and sometimes having enough ammo for the gun you need can make or break you. The main enemies are zombies but there is some variety such as lickers, hunters, giant spiders, etc. At the end of the stage you are scored based on how fast you completed the stage, head shots, score and how many enemies you killed. This can be frustrating sometimes because sometimes you will see a bunch of enemies, prepare to dish out a bunch of head shots, but instead you move on and skip them. You have no control over this so when you have this happen to you the first few times it can be disorienting. Eventually you learn that you just have to use explosives to quickly take out the amount of enemies you take instead of preparing for a battle with 5-6 zombies.

Graphics 8/10

What can I say? It can be a little bit grainy but other than that the graphics fit the game and aren't too bad. Not everything is destructible but that's probably hard to do. This game is usually nice enough to indicate which objects you can destroy and which you can't but it can be a little bit hard at times. Nothing to really complain at other than that.

Miscellaneous

Here I will talk about small things I liked/disliked and improvements they could have added to the game to make this a lot better.

First of all the pacing. Sometimes you will go through a section really slowly. Almost unbearably slow. They will take their time climbing up and down ladders, navigating corridors and peeking around corners that nobody cares about. To spice up the action I would have liked it if there were more saturation of enemies so I don't become bored.

I liked the co-op feature they put in. Nothing is worse when you want to play a game with your friend at your house and you find out that A. the game doesn't suppose multiplayer or B. in order to get play together at all you would need 2 consoles, 2 games and be online. I. FUCKING. HATE. THAT. Several games that would shine in offline on the couch multiplayer are only given online multiplayer or none at all. It really pisses me off when this happens so kudos to Capcom for including this feature.

Give more money during the campaign. I don't really mind grinding but with the slow pacing sometimes and the little amounts of money I only had enough money to max 1 gun at the end of the game. It wasn't even the high end gun either it was the hand gun so there definitely wasn't enough cash being handed out

Knife is almost useless, either make it more useful or get rid of it.

More monster variety and gun variety would have been nice.

Overall 8/10

Good game through-out but the flaws don't let me give it a higher score. If you're looking for a good on-rail co-op shooter than pick this up or rent it. The campaign is relatively short but there's many unlockables and several difficulties so the re-playability isn't bad.

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