Resident Evil 0 HD Review Impressions

Riding the nostalgia train

Resident Evil 0 HD is a prettied-up version of the gamecube game from the early 2000s, back when the Resident Evil name meant cheesy adventure games with clunky combat and gloriously goofy characters. You could always count on a mix of zombies and freaky bad guys, gothic horror and semi-serious action movie tropes. It's an era I miss - stumbling around gruesomely beautiful environments, blasting the undead, and delighting in cheerfully terrible dialogue. At least, I miss it precisely until the clunkiness stops being charming and starts to be a pain.

Resident Evil 0 is the consummate early 2000s Resident Evil. You control both Rebecca Chambers (a doe-eyed medic on her first big job) and Billy Coen (a Grindhouse stock "good soldier gone rogue" type). You play as one character, while the AI acts as a companion until you need to split the pair up - to push switches or compete character-specific tasks.

This was a big step up from the limited character-switching in earlier games, and a fresh take on the puzzles. It still feels good to, say, use the hookshot with Billy to get to a closed-off compartment and unlock a door for Rebecca. Or to send items between the two via a kitchen elevator, so the trapped Billy can unlock a door and Rebecca can slip through a crawl space, freeing them both.

My favorite moments of 0 reminded me how much fun the pure adventure elements of the early games were. The puzzles don't always make complete real-world sense (I mean, why the hell do you need to add up nine numbers to use the e-brakes on a train), but there's a consistency to them that feels perfectly in line with the series and its roots in the point and click genre.

The setting is great fun, at least at first. The game begins on a train, during the very same dark and stormy 1998 night that the events of the first game transpired. Rebecca and Billy race through half-destroyed cars, fighting off undead in cramped compartments and queasy aisles, opening up new areas with every successful puzzle solution. It's a perfect Resident Evil setting - the small spaces give credence to the dramatic camera angles and the runaway nature of a speeding train lends a sense of urgency to the affair. Eventually, you make your way past that section, but I was sad to leave the Ecliptic Express for more familiar mansion and laboratory territory.

While there are some major improvements to Resident Evil 0 HD - namely the cleaned up visuals and the welcome option to use a modern control scheme (avoiding the "tank" controls) - this is very much a survival horror game from 2002. That means the combat is deliberately unintuitive, the inventory management is strict and the save system is archaic.

Much has been made of the elder Resident Evil games' clunky combat being integral to the experience. That it's not easy and smooth to mow down zombies is supposed to elicit a sort of panic reaction in the player - it's far scarier to face an enemy this way. I'm of two minds on this, as I've always been: sure, that moment of "oh shit! Gotta get my gun just right!" does add something to the experience. But it can also be frustrating, especially when coupled with a system that doles out saves as a precious resource.

I lost two hours of progress at one point, because I made a rather simple mistake (I didn't grab a particular item just before a timed sequence). That's old Resident Evil, I know. And maybe I'm getting soft as I get older, but it just felt harsh.

There are other annoyances - those fun puzzles that require all the character switching also necessitate aggravating inventory management. Each character only has six slots to work with, some items take two slots, and Billy can't mix healing items. This deadly combination means I spent way too much time throwing items on the floor, redistributing them between my heroes, and awkwardly dancing around, trying to pick them up again.

You mileage may vary on the other ways the game shows its age. The setup is pure horror cheese, but Billy's attitude towards Rebecca carries a whiff of sexism beyond the usual tropey machismo. It doesn't help that Rebecca is supposed to be an experienced medic and also somehow 18 (!) years old, but she handles herself well, considering the circumstances.

They just don't make games like this anymore, and that's a crying shame. Resident Evil 0 HD can be a cranky, crochety pain in the caboose - but it's also a fun, appropriately wacky adventure in zombieland. It's best played like you never left college - at 2am, with the dorm lights out, a bunch of buddies, and popcorn to throw at the screen for the clunkers.

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I enjoyed this.
# Jan 19 2016 at 10:33 AM Rating: Decent
Great read! Thanks for writing this up. I'm looking forward to giving the updated version a try.
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