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Resident Evil: Dead Aim Review

Mark Simons

16/07/2003

We investigate Capcom's interesting fusion of lightgun shooting and third-person adventuring...

The Resident Evil Gun Survivor series hasn't had the best of times; whilst we appluad the concept of combining free movement with a gun game in a first person view, sadly Capcom happened to make the games rather rubbish, but they must have sold a few copies, or at the concept is one they want to get down pat before it is written off totally.

Wisely realising that previous titles hadn't quite hit the nail on the head; Capcom have shifted the perspective to a more traditional third-person perspective, which switches to a first-person view whenever you pull the trigger or hit the shoot button. It's a nice idea, however befitting the Gun Survivor series, it just doest come off and feels like a confused amalgamation of different game types.

After a lovely piece of video that sets the scene rather well, you find yourself on a boat owned by the Umbrella Corp, trapped with lots of zombies all wanting a piece of your lovely tasty neck. As ever the only way out involves a lot of shooting and some head scratching puzzles, the format will be somewhat familiar to Resident Evil fans.

What won't be too familiar, unless you've had the dubious pleasure of sampling some of the Suvivor series, is the control system. The best setup is to use the dual shock pad for movement, with the shoulder buttons toggling strafing and walking, and using a gun for the obvious. Capcom have managed to make control system actually feel rather intuitive, it won't take you too long to be wandering around strafing, shooting, and sneaking around corners. The only problem is that it feels as sluggish and un-responsive as we have come to expect from Resident Evil - one of our major problems with that series as awhole. And for some reason, in the first person view you cannot control where you look on the vertical plane, your character will automatically look up and down at zombies, but why can't we have control over this?

However, the ability to have full freedom of movement in a lightgun game has actually been realised to provide some degree of enjoyment, and if you like the style of adventuring as seen in the Resident Evil series then you might get on quite well with this. The only problem is that the game doesn't actually seem that scary. Perhaps its the loss of the fixed camera angles has something to do with this, or it could be that after seeing things like Silent Hill 3, having a few zombies moan and groan and jump out at you doesn't freak us out as much as it did in the past.

As always with Resident Evil titles you'll have to keep an eye on your ammo, and to some extent the fiddly nature of the controls when you're in a panic, mean that sometimes it will be more prudent for your long term survival to run away, rather than kiling everything you can. This makes a bit of a change from most gun games where thinking doesn't normally extend past trying not to shoot the muppets who get into you line of sight without any guns - civilians I think they are...

Technically Dead Aim is satisfactory; there is some quite nice lighting effects and having half a dozen or so zombies on screen is quite pleasing to see. Slowdown in an internal environment that isn't drawing that far into the distance is not what we want to see, especially when the graphics aren't mindblowing. Code Veronica was nicer to look than this, and that game is an aging Dreamcast port... At least there are no door opening sequences, and very little loading time, negligable really, between the rooms.

Sonically things are what you expect, zombies sound suitably dead, shuffling along groaning, something that is rather soothing as opposed to scary. Perhaps that's just us being a little messed up in the head. Capcom's music is suitably atmospheric, but there isn't anything here you'll be humming in your head as you take a walk down to the shops.

Dead Aim is a short, not too sweet game, it's the first time we've seen this concept work quite so well, but the traditional Resident Evil gameplay is getting dated, in our opinion at least; this is even more obvious when playing from a more traditional third person view without the excellent direction that was the trade-mark of the series. If you think of this as a gun game however then Dead Aim is an interesting little title, and probably worth a rent at least. The problem is replayablity doesn't seem too high compared to games like Time Crisis and Virtua Cop, because those score based arcade titles are designed to be fun time and time again.