Resident Evil The Darkside Chronicles review

The Darkside Chronicles is an on-rails shooter which not only lets you play through a story in South America with Leon Kennedy and Jack Krauser, but also relive the events of Resident Evil 2 and Code Veronica. What’s great about the game is that they’ve slowed down the pace of the game since Umbrella Chronicles in a fashion similar to Dead Space Extraction. What this means is you get a much more intense, immersive experience and less of the feeling that you’re just playing through an arcade game waiting for the message ‘Insert Coin’ to appear when you die.

What’s also good about the game is the graphics and reliving some gaming moments you may remember. Remember encountering the Licker for the first time in the police station corridor? Or the shoot-out in the gun shop? Well it’s all here complete with Tyrants running about and those big spiders deeper into the lab which are sure to give people with arachnophobia sweaty palms. When it comes to weapons you have a pistol which has unlimited ammo but also grenades, a shotgun, bow gun, sub-machine gun and magnum to play with. These can also be upgraded with money you find around the place to make them more powerful, increase their fire rate or capacity.

There are also some bad points to the game which fundamentally sometimes really spoil your fun. The first one is the shaky camera. It’s fine to do this to make the game immersive between shooting but it also insists on doing it when you’re trying to take aim.

Sometimes you’re trying to shoot bugs and other small enemies and it’s almost impossible. I don’t mind a difficult game but this just doesn’t seem fair. It’s also strange that you have to go into the menu screen to use herbs and swap your weapons around. Again, this completely drops you out of the first-person experience and since playing Dead Space Extraction, I expect games to be at least as good and intuitive as EA’s on-rails shooter.

You can also play the game with a friend which is probably a good idea because the AI in the game is pretty useless. It’s also a pity a friend can’t just jump in mid-level to help out. Again, it’s a design flaw which appears to have been overlooked.

Darkside Chronicles is by no means a bad game and if you’re a Resident Evil fan who’s prepared to put up with the bad points, you should have some fun with the relatively lengthy campaign and its replayability factor. Darkside Chronicles gets 7 out of 10.

Related: Dead Space Extraction, Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles review, Resident Evil The Darkside Chronicles review