Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Almost, but not quite"

I didn't feel too kindly towards Resident Evil: Dead Aim at first, and that is because the game is only playable if you have both a GunCon and a DualShock handy. If you're missing either of these, the controls will frustrate you so much that you most likely won't bother finishing it. So anyway, after getting a GunCon and digging this out of my backlog and playing it as it was meant to be played, I felt a bit kinder.

The two main characters are Bruce McGivern, a crazy gung-ho dude who has to steal a sample of a T-virus from an Umbrella-owned ship (sounds a bit like Resident Evil: Revelations, don't it?) and Fong Ling, a Chinese operative who's ordered to kill Morpheus (the antagonist and an Umbrella researcher) and retrieve a sample of the G-virus. So you've got two agents running around on a zombie-infested ship to get samples of their own preferred viruses. The game actually doesn't have a lot of character development (actually the story is pretty bare-bones) which is sad because Bruce and Fong seem such cool people otherwise.

Now for the gameplay. As I said before, the game is barely playable unless you have both a DualShock and a GunCon. If you do, then what you've got here is a third-person and a light-gun shooter rolled into one. You shoot zombies who keep coming back from the 'dead dead', and it gets frustrating. Yes, I know this is a survival horror game and you're supposed to have less ammo and all that, but switching between firing and running repeatedly because they won't stay down is enough to drive anyone crazy. In the atmosphere department it's pretty creepy when you pick up a key card and are walking out of the room when a zombie gets up and starts trying to eat a chunk out of you. The music is creepy, and the terrible-yet-awesome voice acting of the series is intact here.

The wasted potential, from the robotic characters to the simple plot, is really saddening. Dead Aim could have been a really great game and bring the Gun Survivor series some glory. But it isn't. The controls are frustrating even with both controllers and hurt what could have been a solid offering. That isn't to say it's a bad game though. Resident Evil: Dead Aim is a decent game for survival horror fans.