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Hands-on: Resident Evil Survivor

The import version of Resident Evil Survivor recently arrived in the office. Check out our hands-on impressions.

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Capcom's Resident Evil series are generally acknowledged as the games that defined the survival horror series, so it's no wonder that fans of zombies and gun wielding women got excited when they heard that Capcom was working on another game. But this time it's a little different. Capcom's scrapped the 3rd person perspective found in every other Resident Evil game to make Biohazard Gun Survivor a first person, lightgun-blasting adventure.

People have described Gun Survivor as a House of the Dead set in the Resident Evil universe, but that description really gives you the wrong impression. A much more accurate description would be Echo Night meets Resident Evil, as you spend most of the time lumbering around in a first person perspective, exploring rooms and walking through doors. Once you run into something to feed a few bullets to, the game changes to this odd shooting game with poor auto-aiming features and an incredibly slow rate of fire.

To navigate your way through Gun Survivor's universe you'll fire the gun offscreen and use the A and B buttons to turn. Pulling and holding the trigger once moves you forward, while double tapping moves you backwards. Like most first person exploration games there's no strafe, and navigating corners can be taxing. The actual shooting is a real disappointment as well. It doesn't appear that shooting zombies in vital areas such as their head or chests hurts them anymore than grazing their elbows does, and pulling the trigger doesn't always fire a bullet – as the fastest you can fire is an incredibly slow two bullets a second. On top of that, enemies like to crouch or roll under your field of vision, and since you can't control where you're looking, you're incapable of shooting an enemy at your feet.

All the regular enemies from the Resident Evil games are in Gun Survivor. You'll run into Lickers, zombies, evil dogs, green herbs, first aid sprays, keys, and, of course, better weapons. You can manage all your items in your inventory screen, ala Resident Evil. Still, basic tasks such as reloading your clip are amazingly tedious, as you have to switch to your inventory screen and reload from there.

The graphics are a mixed bag. All the backgrounds look pretty good in Gun Survivor - it's just many of the characters look bad. Zombies stumble about in an incredibly unrealistically manner, and the shooting animation is simply terrible. The sound is nice, with dark brooding music and Resident Evil's nefarious zombie moaning noise, however.

Biohazard Gun Survivor tries its best to be a fusion of two drastically different genres, and unfortunately limits itself with difficult control and tedious gameplay. Variety is definitely the spice of life, but perhaps Capcom should have simply stuck with the tried and true formula.

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