Bad camera, bad gameplay, bad writing = bad game
Darkside Chronicles covers Resident Evil 2, and some added scenarios unique to the game. Resident Evil 2 was a great game, but the story was hampered by some cheesy scenes, awful translations and grammar mistakes (most often, they're actually hilarious, but that breaks the eerie mood a horror game should create). Characters say the cheesiest lines you will ever hear on this side of Army of Darkness, and those lines are riddled with grammatical errors that are obviously the cause of not hiring decent translators even after ten years of huge commercial success. I suppose this problem is alleviated if you speak Japanese, and are playing that version of the game, but for everyone else the story will never be engaging because of the sloppy writing and translation work. This is most prevalent in sections of the game from Resident Evil 2. It is not as horribly evident in new sequences, like the one in the beginning with Leon and Krauser (still cheesy as nachos though). This flaw is not new to the series, and the dialogue is pretty much all taken from the original Resident Evil 2 game, but they really could have just taken a couple of hours to rewrite the dialogue.
The gameplay in Darkside Chronicles has somehow become worse since Umbrella Chronicles. The camera is the main problem. It is ALWAYS shaking. This makes sense if the character whose eyes you see through is actually moving, but even when standing perfectly still in a shooting position, the camera shakes all the same, making the accuracy demanded for critical head-shots absolutely unfeasible.
Darkside Chronicles is a standard on-rails shooter affair, release amidst a flood of great on-rails games to the Nintendo Wii. Improvements these games made revived a largely dead genre. A unique scoring system in House of the Dead: Overkill and strategic dismemberment in Dead Space Extraction made the outdated genre feel fresh. Enter Resident Evil Darkside Chronicles immediately after Umbrella Chronicles. There are no improvements at all. The gameplay is a carbon-copy of its predecessor. There is no reason to beat your own high score, or replay levels- hell, there is no reason to play them before you replay them.
The graphics in Darkside Chronicles are aged. There is definitely some enhanced detail to the characters, but overall, the graphics are no better than the previously released Darkside Chronicles. Lighting is noticeably bad, with poor use of layered lighting. A room with a single light will be pitch black in the corners, but well lit in the center. You can shoot out lights in search of items, but the trade-off is that the room becomes more darker than it should. I would suggest adjusting the brightness to your television in that case. Cutscenes look decent, but there is something wrong with the frame rate. When the camera turns in cut-scenes, I noticed there was screen tearing.
The sound in Darkside Chronicles is all over the place. Sometimes the sound is great, with a decent track supplemented the moans of zombies in the background, and the creaking of wood as you slowly walk down a hallway. Then, there are some annoying tracks that don't fit the gameplay or mood of the game at all, and the groans and other sounds zombies make are constantly recycled over and over again- ruining the atmosphere. The sound is the one thing that actually improved since the Umbrella Chronicles, which subjected players to a constantly poor soundtrack. In Darkside Chronicles, at least there is some tolerable audio.
Darkside Chronicle has a lot of gameplay to offer. There are much more levels and time to be spent playing here than in other on-rails shooters; and you can spend up to 20 hours finishing them all, and this will include restarts as this game can be very difficult at times. The problem is, this otherwise great value is hindered by the fact that the 20 hours is a grueling ordeal considering how many noticeable flaws the game has. I would not recommend buying or renting the game, even to hardcore Resident Evil fans. On-rail shooters such as Extraction and Overkill have made Darkside Chronicles obsolete. Yet truthfully, this game was probably never intended to be good, only to milk Resident Evil fans of their hard-earned money on a mediocre game. For those Resident Evil fans, I would suggest the Gamecube version of original game instead of this.