It's not bad, but it's inconsistency and aesthetics keep it from winning the silver.
I never always hated Capcom, quite the opposite in fact. About twenty four years ago, Capcom was one of my favorite game developer/companies. They were like Nintendo in that they were kind of company that could make a game series based off the design philosophy of the second or third game in the series and no matter how bad the story was or how repetitive the game was, there was plenty of room for fun and excitement. Even when they ripped off Frederick Raynal's Alone in the Dark I couldn't help but enjoy the games they made.
But the 2000 era serves as the new age of Aquarius for everyone, one that has promised more pain and meaningless malevolence than one could imagine, coming from more directions than one could imagine and 2000 for me was the year in which I realized something very wrong happening with one of my once favorite companies. Such was the case for Resident Evil Code Veronica, the once new turn for the Resident Evil series and in retrospect a turn for the worst.
Things start off incredulously when we meet up with Claire Redfield who has gone on a search for her missing brother Chris and in the process has found herself sifting through some secret documents in an Umbrella research facility in Europe.
She eventually gets caught, but not without running into a Hollywood movie set in which she somehow avoids getting gunned down by two assault rifle wielding guards and a helicopter as well as one stupid slow-mo scene in which she conveniently runs into a pile of guards stupid enough to stand in front of flammable canisters.
She's then taken to Rockford Island, a sort of prison camp owned by Umbrella where she stays in a single cell (lucky her) for her snooping where she's given a serial number and forced to take a nap. She wakes up hearing the sound of jets streaming overhead and rockets blowing up in the distance upon which she learns from her injured guard that the island has been attacked and the guard releases her so she can do as she pleases. From there on, we play once again as Claire so she can explore the island and try to escape, but it's not going to be easy... especially when she finds a familiar virus running rampant on the island.
Because the game is now all in 3D, you'll notice right away that the game refuses to feature the old AitD camera angles and replaces them with set cameras that for the most part follow the character around while still being set at different angles. It's pretty much like with Dino Crisis in that the camera is considerably free roaming, but is still set on a track that never changes even when you approach the camera angle from a different direction. All of this does eliminate the dodgy and occasionally unintuitive set/stationary camera angles glued on to the original games, but in practice still manages to cut off different areas which occasionally disable you from getting a better view of items and comparatively sometimes lacks the atmosphere the old angles had.
Having a camera that constantly follows the character on a track removes the sense of claustrophobia established in the previous games (and Alone in the Dark, Martian Gothic and Deep Fear) and the strange feeling of imperiousness that a mere wall or ceiling corner posed as it stared down at you. For the most part though, the new camera positioning still manages some atmospheric wiggle space particularly in the first half of the game where Claire discovers that the T-virus is running rampant.
One thing that bothered me about Code Vero is the simple fact that it omits the trademark Resident Evil gore involved: Every time you shoot a shambling zombie in the head with a shotgun, chunks of messy flesh fly from the head, but the head stays completely in-tact! Also none of the zombies or corpses are really grotesque, at least not like in Nemesis where Jill would investigate a corpse only to find it completely disemboweled and some of the zombies skinned faces just look laughable.
The game's biggest gimmick I guess is that you eventually switch between Chris and Claire who encounter slightly different areas in the same facilities. All of this is nice, but unfortunately it's let down by the unspoken attribute of item location. When the moments you switch between Chris and Claire happen, they occur so soon that the feature catches you with your pants down: The first time it happened, I approached the near-end of the Claire portion armed to the teeth with ammunition and different items, but when I shifted to Chris, I found that all the items Claire had stayed on her leaving Chris to fend off with an amount of bullets to kill a single zombie dog before he ran out.
Of course what this feature lacks in action friendliness, it gains in exploration and puzzle elements: namely, any and all puzzles Claire didn't have the time or items to solve, Chris is left to do so and exploring new areas as Chris is a very refreshing attribute to say in the least.
Being in full 3D though means that the movement is going to look as realistic as possible, which makes Claire's movements feel a little jerky and slow at times. If you pick up an item, Claire will stoop down so slowly and steadily you'd think her knees would give out.
This might sound a little nit-pickish on my part, but I state it for a reason: During the game you encounter a death-trap puzzle that requires you to quickly pick up an item before getting crushed by a falling slab of concrete. Rather than just doing the logical option such as swiping the item from underneath the concrete after it falls and starts to rise, you have to place Claire under the concrete slab as it lifts itself up into place and you have about two seconds to pick the item up (doing so will somehow cause the concrete slab to lock in place). But because Claire's item retrieval speed is so gentle, careful and prolonged you can bet that in most cases, the slab will fall right on her because she HAS to be directly under the damn thing and she HAS to take her sweet time in picking up an item she could've acquired by shooting the container it was in rather than needlessly crushing it.
The game isn't unplayable, though. The combat is still pretty much the same as you hold down the trigger, fire at enemies and occasionally kick them in the face when they bite your ankles. Some of the newer enemies are a bit of a pain such as the stretching rubber enemies that have no motivation in life other than to grab your head and break your neck or at the very least slap you to death. I'm not too sure if it was a good idea for Capcom to allow the X button on the Dreamcast to equate the use of the X button on the Playstation though because if you end up playing on a Dreamcast after awhile, you tend to use the A button to fire and confirm inventory decisions, so having a secondary button serve as the primary button of use can be a little bewildering at first.
The sound recycles a lot from previous Resident Evil games while adding a few new extra bits such as the obvious departure of crows being replaced by bats, thus replacing the sounds the crows made. There are a few sounds that add to the atmosphere such as an eternally swinging overhead lamp in a messy cafeteria and the sounds of dogs munching on corpses.
The biggest down-side to the sound department however is the music. I guess the earliest warning signs of lowering music composition qualities showed up in Nemesis, but they're multiplied here in Code Veronica. The music sounds a lot like the soundtrack of a Sci-Fi Channel exclusive movie that over-uses synthesized flutes and harps like you just entered an ancient Roman bath-house.
There are some VERY nice atmospheric songs that don't fall into unintentional goofiness, but if you amass them those atmospheric songs only count to about THREE songs out of fifty. Code Veronica attempts to make itself sound less like an adventure into horror and more into an adventure in horror from the perspective of either a 1990 Sc-Fi straight to video Z grade movie and/or an adventure in horror from the perspective of a fearless, tragedy-less soldier, both of which don't always adhere to the horror setting of the game. Most the time I ended up finding more fear in areas of the game that lacked music completely.
I have to admit that all of this felt like the early warning sign that Capcom decided to take things a little too far with the series presentation; I've heard people say it was 'damn scary' for it's time, but I assume what they were referring to the few moments in the game that Capcom remembered they were making a horror game, such moments all seem to be ostensibly attached to Claire (save for maybe her obnoxious opening action scene).
The atmospheric moments with Claire included feature the introduction of the dogs, the investigation of a local residence, and other prison facilities, but if you were to compare them to the rest of the game or parts that were scary that you weren't playing as Claire, then those moments alone would make a nice short horror film, and everything else would equate to a sort of gory action adventure.
Every other character in the game practically kills the atmosphere every time it tries to pop up such as when the acrobatic action packed-b@$tard and Leonardo Dicaprio look-alike Steve Burnside shows up who, despite being just about the only other character in the game that had some empathy attached to him second to Claire and having the most lucid back story, was the one character I hoped ended up dying the same way Ben Bertolucci died in the Leon A scenario of Resident Evil 2... only slower. And involving his anus.
Every time Steve pops up, he kicks the game's atmosphere in the head so hard the atmosphere suffers from a concussion. His voice actor makes him sound so adolescent and whiny you can't go one minute without wanting to smack him one, every single-handed gun he touches instantly gets infinite ammunition, he has the ability to fire said handguns at 15 shots per second and never needs to be reloaded, he possess the ability to jump through windows and off of watch towers without harming himself as well as the obnoxious ability to freeze the camera as it rotates around him and kick monsters so hard they fly five feet back all of which sounds like the inspiration to Dirt: Origin of the Species if you catch my drift... Of course this is all balanced by the simple fact that when we play as him, none of his abilities are in effect, which thankfully leaves a little room for atmosphere on the player's part, but the inconsistency makes him even more detestable for being over-hyped by his creators as a man among men.
And then there are the antagonists, all of which happen to be natural blondes (which makes me wonder what Capcom has against blonde characters above the age of twelve in this series) and the majority of which happen to be English seeing how the Umbrella corporation originated there and Capcom just had to throw in at least one racial stereotype. One of the villains you'll all recognize right off the bat as Albert Wesker, the first human bad guy in the series which at the time his reappearance in Veronica didn't and doesn't really make sense if you beat every inch of the first Resident Evil and saw who turned on the self-destruct system when Wesker wasn't in the Tyrant room with you and even though it's been explained in Umbrella Chronicles it still hardly makes sense because the explanation feels like a tacked on and hollow excuse to allow a one-time two-dimensional villain with good looks another chance at life which in reality is equal to a very parasitic existence.
Next to him however is the rifle wielding girly voiced Alfred Ashford, the base commander of the Rockford prison facility who laughs like the Joker (and the Riddler) from the old Bat Man live action TV series. I'll admit there were moments when Alfred seemed like a unique character once we learn some of his secrets, but his presentation is played off like that of a Saturday morning cartoon villain who always knows where all the heroes are and is always able to communicate with them to let them know that he's watching. Nor is he even remotely scary or creepy, but then again none of human antagonists of the Resident Evil games were ever REALLy scary except for Chief Irons from Resident Evil 2: if you combined the bad-guy qualities of Alfred Ashford, Albert Wesker, Nikolai Zinoviev and every single spin-off villain (y'know from side story games like Gun Survivor, Dead Aim, Zero & 4), Irons would still end up being the scariest, creepiest human antagonist of them all, probably because he's the only one that seems the most realistic and credulously designed.
I'll admit that as mediocre as the Resident Evil/Biohazard plot has been, I always pondered as to what Umbrella's true purpose was behind their research. Sure it's been revealed that they wanted to make bio-weapons, but I always wondered why in hopes that the next sequel in the series would answer it, hoping that the reason was going to be so amazing and horrifying that it would need three game sequels just to tell it. But I should've realized around the time Nemesis came out that I'd never get the answer I expected because the reason why Umbrella dedicated themselves to evil and playing God's work was lost in a plot hole sometime after the first game came out.
Code Veronica tries to answer that long desired question, but needless to say, what little answer Code Veronica provides you with will make you feel like you endured a long and perilous quest with your closest friends where you're the sole survivor and you lost not only them but your own fertility, only to discover at the end of the adventure that the treasure you had been looking for had rusted away long before you were even born. Code Veronica introduces new and uncovered plot holes from minor to major including a stupid screaming Tremor rip-off which I can't help but ask how the **** the stupid thing was made in the first place seeing how none of the files mention it as well as how the T-virus on the island was contained enough for a small strike force and air-strike could've somehow accidentally unleashed it by blowing up two or three barrels full of gasoline on the island's surface.
In conclusion, Code Veronica is only a decent horror-adventure game and had Capcom multiplied the moments of atmosphere better to the point of it inundating the action and idiotic new character (and had kept Wesker dead for Christ's sake), then it probably would've been a game to match with its predecessors. But Code Veronica's attempts at horror and fright are let down by its own aesthetics and in its attempts at trying something new and fantastic it fills the screen with events and sounds that none of which contribute to an atmospheric experience in any way.
I guess I'd recommend it to older fans of the series like myself who dropped a load when they played the original back in 1996 who don't mind having a flashy addition to the series that plays the same but looks better with a highly questionable action oriented approach. For me, Code Veronica is a fitting end to the series because it was the warning sign that showed us just how batty and ignorant Capcom was getting and every horror/adventure game post Code Veronica supports that evidence completely.