Review: Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles , Repetition on Rails
By: Ken Barnes
Posted: Nov 20, 2009
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For a time, it seemed that on-rails shooters were a thing of the past. Namco kept plying us with new hardware for use with Time Crisis and Sega brought us three versions of The House of The Dead series to be going on with, whilst Capcom brought us the poor Resident Evil: Outbreak series, but there was never any real heat keeping the genre alive.
Then, Nintendo released the Wii and developers started to realise that they could provide on-rails shooters without the need for the user to purchase additional hardware.
It appears that the uptake has been slow one, but a revitalised House of the Dead experience from Sega – in the form of this year’s Overkill – has shown developers the way. Clearly the strongest light-gun game for many, many years, the game has well and truly set the bar high. Capcom put in a fair performance with Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles a while ago and now fills in the blanks in recounting the remaining entries in the series in an on-rails format.
Yes, The Darkside Chronicles takes us back to the utterly stunning (at the time) Resident Evil 2, and the equally impressive Code Veronica, as well as throwing in a new mission set in South America. Typically, the latter is the better looking of the entries, but just giving new life to the other two scenarios is a boon in itself. Graphically, things are relatively solid. Minor enemies are rendered well enough, with decent shot selection rewarding you with exploding heads and limbs that fly all over the show.
In each scenario, these are but a mere visual morsel before the main course kicks in though, with that treat being provided in the form of somewhat larger and more impressive bosses than you will have seen in a game of this ilk before. Given that we’re looking at a Wii game, I’d say that a good deal of credit should be lavished on the developers for getting so much oomph out of what is hardly a graphical powerhouse.
What The House of The Dead: Overkill showed us though, is that spectacular graphics aren’t the be-all and end-all when it comes to the light-gun genre. Gameplay – as with most, if not all genres – is the key, and the ability for the game engine to provide a shock or two when the moment is right is absolutely paramount here. Unfortunately, The Darkside Chronicles is far too predictable for players to ever be genuinely surprised or shocked whilst playing and what veterans of the series will tell you, is that tension and shock value are two of the franchise’s focus points.
The problem is that pretty much every scene begins with you taking one or two steps forward through an empty area, whilst you and your in-game buddy have a short exchange of words about what’s happening. During this conversation the camera is as steady as it could possibly be, until an enemy is about to appear. Then, your point of view is shaken as your character sees or hears something to shoot at, and this precursor to the surprise that Capcom is so clumsily and obviously trying to grab for has the effect of making the subsequent events appear to be something of a let-down.
There are also some points in the gameplay that make little sense; take those impressive bosses, as an example. A boss appears (complete with a health bar) and you and your AI or player-controlled ally start to fill it with lead. The energy bar begins to deplete and the tension is rising as you realise that you’re taking too much damage but are out of health-restoring herbs. Oh, no! But, with accurate shooting, that bar continues to come down until you’re sure that one more bullet will kill off your foe. Only, that doesn’t actually happen with all of the bosses.
With a good percentage of them, you can completely wipe out their health and then watch as they just carry on with their predetermined course of action for another thirty seconds or so – essentially meaning that they can take another swipe or two at you – and it turns out that whilst the boss is technically dead (as it has no health remaining), you actually have to wait until it gets to a certain point on screen and then drop something on its head or electrocute it in order to finally kill it off. If the health bar is utterly irrelevant, why provide one? This makes little sense, and can be incredibly frustrating.
Elsewhere, this is very much standard on-rails shooter fare. Pickups are collected by aiming and pressing the A button, whilst your nunchuk stick quickly selects one of your four equipped weapons. On occasion, you’ll get a good, old-fashioned QTE thrown at you to break up the shoot, walk, shoot, walk repetition, and whilst these do get the old ticker racing at times, you’ll still find that you’ll have a severe feeling of déjà-vu for the majority of the time that you spend with the game.
As always, getting a friend in to play through in co-op is far better than the utilising the particularly lethargic AI to cover your back when playing through the campaign mode and, as you’d expect, they will indeed have to be present since the only online options included here are of the leaderboard and ranking variety.
Whilst Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles provides a nice trip down memory lane to the days when we were less concerned about the colour of our virtual enemy’s skin and more worried about how they were going to give us a heart attack, it doesn’t really do anything that hasn’t been done before.
Resident Evil’s patented shock value is missing, and the shaky-head camera can be utterly disorienting (in a bad way) with completists sure to become annoyed as pickup after pickup is missed because the game has decided that you were only going to get milliseconds to target and select the prize on offer before it was rendered out of reach until the next play through. The Darkside Chronicles still somehow manages to retain a level of playability that – to be brutally fair – is somewhat assisted by the nature of the genre.
It really is hard to get a title such as this incredibly wrong but what this attempt proves is that it’s even harder to get it incredibly right – even on your fourth attempt.
