It’s a rare event when a game in development actually has its release date moved up the calendar, but Capcom’s now positioned Resident Evil 6 to debut in less than six months. That gives us only half a year to accomplish a little project we’ve dreamed up — replaying all the past RE games. First up, Resident Evil Zero.
Let’s pull no punches right from the start here — in hindsight RE0 is clunky. It used the same stiff, dated control scheme of tank-like character movement the series had featured since 1996, but patience for it had worn thin by 2002. Now, 10 more years down the road, it’s hard to have any patience for it whatsoever. It just feels archaically bad.
This isn’t going to be an issue for 6, of course, as Capcom has since had the sense to reinvent the series’ control scheme and visual presentation — shuffling around like an awkward robot in pre-rendered, static screens is wholly a thing of the past. The fan reaction to Zero’s control choice, though, is what may yet echo into the future. Because this was a pretty major case of unmet expectations for the Resident Evil faithful.
That’s what the really problem was. It wasn’t so much that we couldn’t adapt to the clunkiness and still experience the game, it’s that we thought we shouldn’t have to. And Resident Evil 6 will have to face that same hurdle — fans are already forming opinions of how the game should look, should handle, should be. And it will have to meet those expectations.
Besides its chronological positioning as a prequel to the events of the first Resident Evil, Resident Evil Zero’s other main hook was that it was the first game in the series that allowed you to play as more than one character — at the same time. Earlier games had given you a choice between protagonists, but here you got to direct the actions of S.T.A.R.S. Bravo Team member Rebecca Chambers and fugitive murderer Billy Coen as a simultaneous duo.
This is the part of Zero that, to me, still holds up as fun and interesting. Rebecca and Billy each have different strengths — she can mix herbs, he’s physically stronger — and you can either send them running through zombie-filled train cars and Umbrella research facilities together or separate them to explore two different locations at once (while handheld radios keep them in contact if the one you’re not currently controlling gets attacked off-screen).
It was a good dynamic, and still is today — which is why we may be seeing it used again in Resident Evil 6. Capcom has made it clear that both Leon S. Kennedy and Chris Redfield will be playable (alongside newcomer Jake Muller) in this installment, and each will be paired with new partner characters. So when you’re running through the different storylines featuring those duos, think back to good old Rebecca and Billy, who paired up first.
A final gameplay enhancement that Capcom proudly promoted for Resident Evil Zero was its new ability to remember where you left dropped items, no matter where you dropped them. Longtime players of the franchise know that item management was another clunky piece of gameplay to deal with in the earliest games, as you’d get your character easily over-encumbered with armfuls of ammo boxes, green herbs, door keys, ink ribbons and puzzle-solving tchotckes and be forced to spend more time juggling them into storage boxes than actually fighting the undead.
Well, in hindsight, this new solution wasn’t much better. You’d have to hike all the way back across the game map to get back to an old storage box with the old system, but here in Zero a key item you dropped on the floor could be sitting abandoned literally anywhere — and if you don’t remember where you left it, you’d have to scour the map screen to remind yourself.
And that’s Resident Evil Zero in a nutshell, with three potential ways its 10-year-old design may affect the new sequel we’ll all be playing six months from now. We’re not done revisiting the game after just this article, though. Head on over to IGN’s Resident Evil YouTube channel to watch a full playthrough video of the entire game.
Lucas M. Thomas thought it was super cool that Resident Evil Zero shipped on two GameCube discs. “Wow, this game must be massive!” (Now he’d prefer not to have to get up out of his seat to swap them.) Join him on his IGN blog and Twitter.
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The strategy elements also leave much to be desired, as there’s very little to think about outside of making sure to send your Water guys to take out the Fire guys. In the end it felt like a limited version of both genres rather than an innovative fusion of the best each has to offer. Given the premise, I expected something more complex, more innovative, and far more engaging. The game’s graphics were also fairly rudimentary, especially given the Vita’s impressive hardware. The backgrounds and character models were unremarkable and unmemorable, doing a poor job of making up for the lackluster gameplay.
