After a fourteen year wait the once Nintendo exclusive Resident Evil Zero becomes Resident Evil 0 for its Xbox One HD remaster. Resident Evil 0 gets off to a great start. S.T.A.R.S operative Rebecca Chambers and fugitive Billy Cohen are stuck on a runaway train as it hurtles through a rainstorm. Your mission to arrest Billy is put on hold as you unite and bring the out of control train to a halt. As with all Resident Evil games nothing is ever simple and all manner of horrors stand in your way.
When the game was originally released the trailers advertising it made it look like Resident Evil on a train and the beginning of the game does exactly that and the opening act is all the better for it. It's a tight opening with a good natural flowing feel to it and the backtracking is kept to a bare minimum. The problem is that this section lasts for merely an hour at most.
After this you're back in familiar territory with a spooky mansion providing the backdrop to the story. I was hoping that I would be taken to a myriad of different locations but the same old Resident Evil locations rear their heads time and time again. Apart from the opening act this is the original Resident Evil all over again. There are two game mechanics here that do set it apart from the original Resident Evil. The partner system let's you control Rebecca and Billy at the same time. And unless I'm mistake a Resident Evil game has never featured that before. For most of the campaign you will be together but fate will inevitably split them apart forcing them to find each other once again. Being split apart brings back the foreboding nature and horror the Resident Evil games use to do so well.
The ability to drop items also makes its first appearance here. Which seems like a good idea until you put it into practice. The item management is dreadful. Each character has six slots so when you're together that's twelve in total, which sounds like a lot. But with your gun and ammo that's two slots gone straight away pick up a shotgun and that's another two slots taken up with another one for ammo and you've only got one slot left for each character.
This is where the game's shortcomings start to really show. We all know how important health packs/herbs and puzzles items are but when space is this limited you are screwed because you will have no other option but to drop items. There is nothing more annoying than finding a key or gemstone that you need to complete a puzzle and having no other option but to drop an item you also need to keep hold of. The amount of times I had to drop an item, pick up something I needed to finish a puzzle, drop it where I need it and have to go all the way back to pick up the item I originally dropped and then make my way back to the puzzle location. I repeated this process time and time again. I never thought I would miss storage trunks to much. Backtracking has always been an integral part of Resident Evil games but this system just compounds the misery.
Resident Evil looks gorgeous in HD. The backgrounds pops out of the screen and have a great shine to them. The character models also look great but for some reason the cutscenes seem blurry and out of place. There is also an unlockable mode that allows you to play as Albert Wesker and run through the game in a much more action orientated experience. The tension that made the Resident Evil series so great is still here in spades and it's this that will keep drawing you back in.
Resident Evil 0 can't stand up to something like The Last Of Us but the horror game genre has moved on in leaps and bounds since its original release fifteen years ago. Putting the awkward control scheme and inventory system to one side I still enjoyed Resident Evil 0 but not as much as I would have liked.
Resident Evil 0 is available to download now from the Microsoft store here.
Review code supplied by XCN.