Resident Evil: Dead Aim
An RE shooter? Wait! This one actually doesn’t suck!
Tags: Resident Evil: Dead Aim Categories: PS2 Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Oct 1st, 2003
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Resident Evil: Dead Aim (title page) | |||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Action | No | ||
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Light gun-based games are a pain in the butt, most of the time.
Invented, basically, by Nintendo for the original NES, the first light gun games were the equivalent of hunting games. Duck Hunt was one of the first, unless memory fails me. As the genre evolved, the graphics got better but it has remained one of the least-evolved genres of games over the past 20 years or so.
As recently as the last crop of Capcom shooters prior to this one, light gun games usually meant a predictable formula: a story segment, enter an area in first-person POV and proceed to have a ton of monsters tossed at you to shoot at. Survive and push forward to enter the next area and repeat. Pretty boring stuff. No exploration. No interaction. Just lots and lots of shooting. Some gamers like it but for most, it was a pretty shallow genre, and the stories reflected that shallow gameplay experience.
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Not so with Resident Evil: Dead Aim. Aside from being GunCon 2 compatible, it would be hard to distinguish RE:DA from a normal installment of the Resident Evil series … and that’s a good thing. For one thing, the story is solid, beginning with a typically top-notch opening cinema to set up the scenario. And when it’s over, you’d in a third-person perspective, ready to explore, just like in any typical chapter of Resident Evil, or Konami’s Silent Hill for that matter.
And there is plenty of exploration: an entire ocean liner full of T-Virus infected corpses to start off with. As you make your way through the ship, you never know when one of the dead is going to rise up and become an attacker; some will, some won’t, and that’s the fun of the normal RE games. Finally, that same fun is reflected in a shooter-style RE. It’s a lot more suspenseful to worry where the next attack is coming from than it is to just be overwhelmed by more zombies than you can shoot and try to survive.
Strategy also plays a hand here; ammo is often in short supply and you can’t just blast away endlessly. While that “flee to survive” element is typical to Resident Evil games, it’s not been reflected in most light gun games. In most light gun games, if you need ammo, some will fly improbably out of some of the corpses you shoot, as will healing packs. Pick them off with your gun and you’re resupplied. Not in Dead Aim, though. Instead, you explore and find the ammo and items you need to progress … just like in any typical Resident Evil game from the main series.
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Were this a typical installment of Resident Evil, these design choices would be ho-hum and expected, but their inclusion marks an entirely new approach to light-gun games: making them as deep and immersive as their standard-control counterparts. Now, you don’t need a GunCon2 to play RE:DA, but you waste a lot less ammo if you have one. Playing with a DualShock2 is workable, but you’re likely to miss more, meaning more ammo wasted. Not a good thing.
The only downside of RE:DA being a light gun game is the way it limits your arsenal when taking on the walking dead. Part of the fun of Resident Evil main series games is that you don’t always just shoot to defeat your opponents; sometimes you can use a baseball bat or a can of gasoline and some matches. That kind of innovation is lacking because the combat engine is all about shooting. But then, it IS a light-gun game after all. It just so happens that THIS light gun game is far better, far deeper, far more immersive than any other light gun game this reviewer has ever played.
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It’s almost enough to make one finally decide a GunCon2 is a worthwhile investment. It’s not that there’s a lack of GunCon2 games; just that, until RE:DA, there was a lack of really good, deep GunCon2 games that were about more than just nonstop shooting.
While there are some old-school light-gun gamers who may be dismayed that this game ISN’T just a steady stream of zombies coming at you to blast, for most gamers, the changes to the genre that RE:DA represents will be a GOOD thing. If Capcom continues to make RE light-gun games like RE:DA, then let GameCube have the main RE series; more games like RE:DA will do PS2 owners just fine.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
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-- Controls allow 3D movement, unlike most RE games. -- Plays from more comfortable third-person perspective. -- Storyline and level structure are solid this time. -- Lots and lots of zombie-blasting survival action. |
7.3 |
| What Doesn't | |
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-- DualShock 2 controls not as smooth as GunCon2 controls. -- Game length short compared to normal RE games. -- Shooter structure means less variety of weapons. |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| Unlike earlier RE-based shooters, Dead Aim will feel familiar in gameplay to the main Resident Evil series. A marked improvement! | |
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Tags: Resident Evil: Dead Aim
Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Oct 1st, 2003 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
