File this one under '`M' for 'Mediocre'
File #2 once again gives you eight ordinary citizens of Raccoon City to guide through various missions during the T-Virus outbreak. Starting the game, there's a training scenario to teach you the controls and four different areas to try and survive: the city zoo, the subway, an abandoned hospital in the woods and the R.P.D building from Resident Evil 2. There's also a fifth mission that's unlocked when you complete the first four. In the single player mode, you pick one character to play as and two others who will be controlled by the computer. In the online game you can have up to three team mates in a game.
The single player mode is the easiest to start out with, but that's not saying much. One of the biggest problems with Outbreak remains communicating with your team mates. Your AI allies are functionally clueless most of the time. They'll run around and occasionally pick up an item or shoot an enemy, but for the most part they're like overzealous five-year olds you're supposed to baby-sit. You can command them to use items, give you an item from their inventory or you can give them items from yours, but that's about it. You can't order them to attack an enemy and you can't switch between characters. On top of that, they may not even obey your request. The online gameplay suffers from similar problems since there's no headset support and you can only communicate with the other players using a set of pre-existing commands. This is horribly inadequate given the demanding puzzles and problem solving required to get through the game. This could have been resolved easily by adding offline multiplayer, but it's nowhere to be found here.
Combat in the game... could be better. Capcom has finally made it possible to move and shoot at the same time, but there is a fundamental problem with the system. Taking the auto-aim function from Code: Veronica X, you can automatically target the enemy by hitting L1. Sounds good, right? Except that the L1 button also activates a quick reload. Hit the L1 button too soon and your character will stop to load another round into a weapon instead of targeting. Reloading is one of the more awkward aspects of the game. Unlike other games in the series, your character won't automatically reload an empty weapon when you try to fire it. You have to reload using the inventory screen. Since the game continues while your character is reloading, the extra seconds needed to do this can be a real problem.
And yes, the game continues, no matter what. There is no way to pause the action. This makes sense for the online play, but the single player doesn't give you a break on this. This is a real problem given the fact that there's a time limit on each mission. Playing the game there's a T-Virus infection meter that slowly goes up. It speeds up for players who are injured and slows down if you find special medicine to treat it. If it hits 100% you turn into a zombie, and in the single player, that's game over. Given how confusing the game can be combined with the amount of backtracking you'll have to do, this time constraint makes thing worse especially since you can only have one save file. Get stuck in a corner in a mission, and you may have to start all over again.
The final issue is one that has plagued Resident Evil for some time, namely inventory management. Each character only has four inventory slots, with the exception of Yoko, who's backpack allows her to carry twice as many items. There aren't any item boxes to store things in either, so everything is managed by item swapping. Since you might not know which items you need to complete your objectives, this can be hugely frustrating.
Outbreak File #2 isn't horrible. The controls are okay and anyone can log a few hours of zombie killing action from the game. It's just a shame that an idea like this remains so completely flawed. Fans of all things RE may not have a problem with it, but if old school Resident Evil is what you're looking for you'd be better off putting in Code: Veronica X instead.