Nice attempt to make RE portable, but could have been a lot better
The story of this game isn't considered canon but it's interesting, and for me it's the game's biggest strength. It follows Code Veronica but long before RE4, and you follow Barry and Leon's exploits against Umbrella, but instead of playing in a mansion you now play in a boat. The story is presented in cinematics that will remind you of the old 8-bit games, and was very nostalgic for me but others may find it a little primitive.
Gameplay obviously changed and you have a top-down view now, controlling your character like that. The catch is, you only move explore in this view but to actually engage characters in combat you change to a first-person view if you get caught by a zombie's attack or if you choose to fight one, and in this view you have a slide bar that is constantly moving, but you must hit the attack button only when the slide bar aligns with the zombies in sight; for me it was interesting to fight zombies this way. There are really no puzzles like in the other games, but rather hidden items which you must find to continue. Items are scattered throughout the place and sometimes it's a little annoying having to explore everything again, and third-person view is a little clunky at times.
Since this is a Game Boy Color game you shouldn't expect much in graphics, but these aren't that bad. Everything is well represented, and the cinematics are good, but the characters are a little small and there's slowdown. The game isn't graphically intensive for a Game Boy game, so the slowdown is just lack of polish. The same with sound, it doesn't feature a lot of music but there's some, and the theme is catchy but it sounds too primitive, and when zombies appear and groan the music will stop to play the groan and then resume, which is weird, and way older games mixed well sound effects and music, so again, more polish was needed.
The game is not very long. It'll take you some time to find some items but not really in engaging gameplay. It allows you to save your progress, which is very welcomed.
When I got this game it was really cheap, so I decided to try it out, and it features a cool storyline, but that's mostly it, the gameplay's not that good, and technically it isn't either. It's a decent attempt to make the series portable but now there's Resident Evil DS, so if you want a portable RE game, get that one instead.