A desire to play Outbreak on my laptop while at my girlfriend's place was thwarted by my forgetting to bring a controller, so I settled for playing Survivor using a keyboard, which was acceptable.

The first Resident Evil spin-off, and the first inarguably-a-spin-off title I've played (the Revelations games are contested), I had a great experience with this thing. Not because it was good, it certainly wasn't, but it was just so fucking weird. Seeing these creature models from games I legitimately adore placed in these jank-ass low-detail environments was surreal. Equally surreal were other series staples that felt so out of place here. Sometimes doors need keys, but they're always just a room or two away so there's no puzzle or anything, yet still they felt a need to include a "check" option which never tells you anything useful. One time you need to wind a clock to open a door, but after that it's all regular old keys and keycards.

There are survival-horror pretentions here, so we have slow movement, the herb system, reloading only happens in the inventory or when a clip is empty, you get unlimited handgun bullets... wait a minute. Yeah, so while other weapons have limited ammo which can be found exploring, the hanguns have unlimited. And as there's no active reload, often the quickest way to reload is to just empty the remainder of your clip into a wall. Kinda kills the surival-horror vibe when that's happening. And then the game has to gall to rank you based on shot accuracy? I'm sorry the fastest way to reload in your game is to shoot at nothing, but that's the game you made, don't blame me!

I know I sound negative, and this stuff is bad, but I honestly loved it all. Such a charming shitty mess. The voice acting and story are exactly of the calibre you'd expect, and all the more enjoyable for it. On a genuinely positive note, Survivor takes some cues from the Nemesis playbook, featuring randomisation and a few minor alternate paths, which would have been great for replayability if the game had managed to get the play bit right.

Survivor is a weird relic of the ridiculously productive and experimental first era of Resident Evil games, gesturing at the series' aesthetic and gameplay conventions without much consideration as to why it would do such a thing in a light-gun game, and I love it for that.

Tinha potencial, mas foi um fracasso

A Capcom sempre quis fazer um Resident Evil em primeira pessoa, tanto que a primeira ideia do jogo era que fosse em primeira pessoa, mas por decisões muito acertadas, mudaram para a perspectiva que vemos no primeiro game.

Nos anos 2000 tinham bons games em primeira pessoa, mas parece que a Capcom sofria de ansiedade para fazer nascer algo sob essa perspectiva e pegou tudo dos 3 primeiros, jogou no liquidificador com algumas outras ideias porcas e o motor gráfico totalmente falho para essa tentativa e deu nisso aqui, um jogo que tem potencial pq a ideia é interessante e o enredo é bem bom, mas o jogo em si é uma porcaria.

Falando sobre a gameplay, você vai andar e ter somente a visão da mira que é precária. A visão sempre travada no centro da tela (menos quando você mira, pq aí vc tem uma liberdade maior) faz com que seja tudo muito travado, até pq a movimentação é MUITO tanque.

O combate é igualmente ruim, tem os inimigos clássicos e a adição de outros, mas eles parecem simplesmente sem profundidade. O jogo abusa da aparição de Hunters e Mr.x para tentar causar tensão e, na minha opinião, deixar o pace do gameplay mais interessante, mas na realidade não deixa.

Como falei da única questão boa que é a história, ela é bem pesada e cria uma tensão com relação ao vilão e ao personagem que controlamos. Os files, por mais que sejam poucos, são muito bem escritos e passam totalmente essa visão de obscuridade que assola os locais que passamos (por mais que o level design seja MUITO fraco também). Mas é isso, no final, todo o bom pano de fundo fica pra trás.

Mas vamos para o pior de tudo? Deixei isso para o final pq não dá pra mim. Você percorrerá por algumas sessões e, em cada uma delas, ter 3 caminhos para ir. Em cada um desses caminhos, eventos diferentes acontecem, mas no final você sempre seguirá indo para o mesmo caminho. Acontece que, uma vez escolhido esse caminho, você não consegue voltar, então a exploração, uma das coisas mais legais da franquia, aqui é totalmente capado. Beleza que isso "força" o fator replay, mas é cansativo pq você teria que rejogar 3 vezes para explorar as outras salas e, inclusive algumas delas vão ter files, então você pode deixar passar alguma coisa da história.

Resumo da opera: não perderá nada da história se não jogar. Quer saber da história que é interessante? Aconselho fortemente pesquisar na internet. O tempo de leitura será menor do que pegar pra jogar isso aqui.

Um jogo bem simples, mas completamente anêmico. Ao mesmo tempo que não tem nada de muito ruim (com exceção do enredo e da atuação, que é ainda pior que a do primeiro jogo), tudo nele é tão sem graça que mal chega a divertir. Ao menos a curta duração (terminei em menos de 2 horas) impede o jogador de morrer de tédio.

O level design é irrelevante o jogo inteiro e raramente o combate oferece alguma coisa interessante, tanto que até mesmo o amontoado de Tyrants que aparecem são bem triviais (a ponto de ridicularizar esses que sempre foram monstros bem imponentes dentro da série). Os Hunters são de longe os inimigos mais perigosos e, sabendo disso, o jogo adora utilizá-los o tempo todo.

Enfim, não fede, nem cheira, mas valeu a pena jogar para matar a curiosidade.

Survivor is such incredible dogshit. It's mystifying that a game so haphazardly designed, incompetently written and laughably executed was made by professionals who are paid to create videogames to sell to people. From the major design oversights to the over-excited tie-ins to the main series' storyline and poorly integrated assets from previous games, I've never played a piece of licensed Sony Computer Entertainment software that felt so much like a fangame made by a 12 year-old. It's a marvel.

For the uninitiated, Resident Evil: Survivor is the Resident Evil lightgun game. Apart from in America, where they were nervous about games where you held a toy gun, and the G-Con support was patched out. It's not designed like a lightgun game, though - It's designed like the laziest Resident Evil game ever made. You play in first-person perspective, walking from rectangular room to rectangular room. You walk forward by pulling the G-Con's trigger while aiming off-screen, and turn by using the gun's A and B buttons. More intricate actions can be performed with awkward double-clicks, but the timing's too tricky to be reliable, so the developers have balanced out the difficulty by making every enemy encounter incredibly easy. If a zombie is in front of you, shoot away until he's dead - he's not really going anywhere. Avoiding enemies is considered an advanced play technique in Survivor, akin to those used by speedrunners. And if he does hurt you, you can easily recover thanks to the copious amount of healing items you'll be carrying - There's no limits to your inventory. No management. No planning. Just pick everything up and carry it until you need it. Pistol ammo is infinite, and the game's over in about an hour anyway.

Lip service is paid to Resident Evil's exploration and puzzles. You enter a new area and there's one locked door and one unlocked one. Go through the unlocked door and you'll find a key for the other one, floating right in front of your face. This is a hardline structural rule to Survivor's map structure that the game very rarely deviates from.

Character models are pulled straight from Resident Evil 2 - Quite an attractive game, given the limitations its artists were working with, and the atmosphere they were evoking. That was a game with a floating camera and pre-rendered backgrounds, though. The character models were never intended to take up three quarters of your television screen, as you determined which giant polygon face to aim at. The animation hasn't been altered either, making Resident Evil Survivor the stiffest-looking lightgun game since Hogan's Alley, where the enemies were supposed to be cardboard cutouts.

The storyline is schlock beyond schlock. I won't dare ruin the thrilling mystery of our amnesiac protagonist's identity for you, but he's without a doubt, the dumbest, most naive hero I've seen in fiction. A joy. I love him. The script is out of this world. The Resident Evil series has frequently utilised low-rate English-speaking actors and models who were within walking distance of Capcom HQ for its cast, but this time, the weird imbalance of English, American, Australian and bilingual European cultural influences seems to have been injected into the script too. I don't know how else to logically dissect lines like “They all had sleepy eyes. One of the girls even slavered.”

Survivor has so many marks of technical weirdness. The way when you shoot a Hunter in mid-leap they hang there like Wile E. Coyote, or the “Return” command appearing twice in your inventory list to mislead you you've scrolled through the whole thing when you're only halfway through your options, or the brightly-lit idyllic family home that sits between open sewer and barb wire fenced-off hellhole, or the implementation of crawling close-quarters enemies in a game where you can't manually look down, or the foley when you wade in thigh-high water sounding like someone pushing a mushy cabbage into a matchbox. It's a fascinating spectacle.

Survivor abandons the need for Ink Ribbons and Typewriters by just making the game very short. There's no mid-game saving. You get to do that when you complete it, as you'll doubtless want to see the alternate routes in New Game+. There's a couple times in the campaign where three doors are presented before you. Choose one, and you'll determine the theme that the next three rooms will take before the paths converge once more. Do you pick the arcade or the hospital? Which wallpaper would you prefer? It's cute that they attempted something.

In spite of all this, I remain very fond of Resident Evil: Survivor. This isn't just a bad Resident Evil game. It's not a miserable experience to play. It isn't Dead Aim. Survivor's most positive attribute is lack of ambition. It's short, simple, and disinterested in challenging the player. The most negative emotion it can evoke is boredom, and that's not much of an issue when it so rapidly takes such dramatic left-turns into sheer lunacy. It's not bereft of positive qualities, either. The texture work is genuinely pretty good, and makes me think they must have had some staff from the main studio work on the game. Before the internet was what it is today, Survivor served as a breezy, accessible way to see a bunch of Resi monsters. I never have a bad time with it. Ironic enjoyment has been deemed an unfashionable concept since the term “hipster” was first coined, but there's nothing insincere about how much pleasure this game brings me, or how hard I push it upon classic Resident Evil fans. I couldn't ever give this incontrovertible icon of badness anything above a 1/5 though. It'd be like giving the blunt force trauma a positive review because it made you talk funny.

underwhelming and unremarkable. story is completely token and has barely defined characters. in particular, the main twist of the game is very and incredibly obvious to see coming, and there's not much to digest beyond that. gameplay is serviceable but it lacks the depth that you really need in a game this short. i'm not inherently against taking a pseudo-light gun game approach, but this game fails to take any of the unique selling points of the LG genre, like being able to target weakpoints (headshots did virtually no difference than just shooting the body, if any difference at all), or requiring more precise aiming in general (L1 literally will autotarget you to the nearest enemy). you're taking inspiration from a genre but keeping only the surface level aspects of it, none of the complexity. also, who is the dumbfuck who decided that this game didn't need save points? sure, it can be beaten in two hours, but asking someone to beat this in one sitting uninitiated is a tall order, even for something as simple as this. this game isn't on rails and you can backtrack, there was no reason to deny the player opportunities to save.

the biggest problem is that this game lacks an identity. virtually every enemy is something from the previous game with little explanation as to why it's there or anything distinguishing it from a prior appearance. i know most people don't care about RE lore, but i would at least like something in the way of why hunters and plant 43 are here. and where ARE we anyway? tvtropes has helpfully informed me that this game takes place on "sheena island", but where is that? i did two of the three routes, so if the third route gives more context to that, okay, it's on me, but otherwise. . . what gives? the most i could make out is that apparently it's somewhere in or colonized by britland. this game is really scant on details, and all the diary entries seem to revolve around vincent when i really just want more context and characters. it's a spinoff title, whatever, but i'm asking for some depth in gameplay, story, setting, or lore, and coming up empty.

i don't recommend playing this unless you have a very slow sunday and you don't mind killing some time. i haven't played every single RE game (yet), but as far as i can tell, this one's rarely referenced by canon and requires 0 knowledge of RE1-3 to enter. it's really the most disposable entry in the series, which feels somewhat harsh to say. the tyrant 1 and 2 cheese strats are genuinely some of the funniest exploits in any game ever, so at least this game has that going for it.

same as with before. for what this is, it's not that bad.

certain branching paths are better than others with some having diabolical enemy spawns but it never gets too messy. once you realize how busted the handguns are (especially the one with the lowest damage output but fastest fire rate) on top of how easy it is to outrun most enemies it becomes a non-factor.

not even close to being among the better games in the series but this has so much replay value due to the brisk run time and gameplay format.

Em 1998.. Um desastre afetou a cidade de Raccoon.

Tirado direto do primeiro conceito do jogo original, com uma câmera em Primeira pessoa, Survivor é caótico em termos de Gameplay.

Em lore ele é incrível, Relação Umbrella - Shenna Island demonstra ainda mais o Poder da corporação Guarda-chuva.

(Tem literalmente uma Igreja com a logo da Umbrella no altar. Ao invés de um símbolo Religioso)

Além do mais temos mais detalhes sobre o processo de criação dos T-103 (Mrx) que enriquece ainda mais todo o universo da franquia.

I have no idea why this was made or who it was for. Sloppy and lazy in almost every way. Almost all the enemies that feature in the game are just reused from previous entries, including Mr. X, because why not? The gameplay is horrific and maybe the worst I’ve ever experienced honestly. The first person perspective could’ve been an interesting change of pace for the franchise, but in this it just feels completely wasted, making the experience far worse to play. The level design is also incredibly lazy and poor. It’s almost completely linear, so there is never much thought running through your mind while you play. You simply move from location to location without issue. Nevertheless, it only took me 1 hour 25 minutes to finish, so it wasn’t a massive chore to endure it, but that just makes the game feel all the more pointless.

So last night I learned about this neat program called MouseInjectorDolphinDuck that, stay with me now, injects the mouse onto certain emulators such as Dolphin, Duckstation, Mupen64Plus cores on Retroarch and Bizhawk, BSNES, and the 1.7.x nightly PCSX2 builds. I tried this with a few games such as Shadow Tower and Urban Chaos Riot Response, making new controller mappings for each that best fit their needs, and it’s seriously impressive shit. There’s something to be said about how this might influence the difficulty for each game since you're now using K+M format instead of a controller, but in the context for the subject here, I have a feeling this won't be case-by-case scenarios and instead can be generalized into minimal altercations factored into the equation.

Resident Evil Survivor, with or without the injector, is woefully trite, and for a survivor horror and a light gun style game, that’s the biggest mark you can slash against it. Controls for the mechanics themselves are alright, but the two-fold issues are about the actual enemy design. Firstly, the AI for them are braindead, even more than they actually should be. I faced off against a Hunter in a library with just the starting handgun, and stunlocked it then ran away to have it reload, and it only managed to get one swipe at me for pitiful damage. I went up against two Lickers in a connecting alley earlier, still using the handgun, and their jump charge takes just enough windup to swiftly walk up left or right, and continue taking potshots at them, and even if they were to use their tongue attack that also has enough windup time to simply move out of sight. This can be said for so many enemies in the roster, INCLUDING the Tyrants where their AI was so poor they couldn’t even squeeze through the door in a room I occupied, and the final boss who’s attack loop is so easy to dodge and maneuver against that I only got hit a few times and downed it with just the starting pistol after my shotgun and magnum ammos were gone, no healing item available. The only times I died were against later groups of Hunters and a new enemy type called Cleaners, but the first death was cause I fucked up and accidentally activated turbo instead of the menu, with the remaining deaths being cause they did actually manage to overwhelm me. Part of the appeal of both genres is being able to visually see and mentally check for openings with each animation, striking them down when the time is right, yet here I never really felt the need to do so because the gung-ho, shoot first manage never mentality is almost always the answer to every encounter.

I say almost always, cause a chunk of the time the simplest answer is to instead ignore everything and everyone and just move on. I haven’t touch the classic style RE games since 2018, but I don’t ever remember it being this easy to squeeze by the flesh-rotted squalls, dogs, abominations, spiders, etc etc. It’s a double edged sword because I want to, ya know, feel invigorated and tense fighting all these baddies, but at the same time this being so easy to do means that I can tap into the speedrunning mindset more quickly and focus on bumrushing to the finish line instead, so… that’s something? The Resi staples are at their most diluted as well. There’s the herbs and first aid spray but you’ll rarely if ever need them since taking damage even on Normal doesn’t account for much, weapons such as the Shotgun, a Grenade Launcher, Magnum, and the Rocket Launcher if you clear the game with an S rank are all here with their limited (er, infinite in the case of the RL) pool of ammo but since the Handguns have an infinite surplus of those it basically means you’ll just default to one of the four variants and stick with it the whole game, which is again, what I did since I somehow bypassed the Grenade Launcher, puzzles are extremely simple “take item A to location B” types or nonexistent, even the obvious reuse of what have been series traditions like the self destruction sequence or sewer montage are so vapid and simple. Kind of just screams the game was sort of made as a holdover due to Code Veronica still taking its sweet time to release on the Dreamcast.

Yet, despite these issues, I’m quite frankly stunned at the substantial negativity this gets thrown. To reiterate, this is a game that takes a little over an hour, possibly even less if you factor in emulator usage such as turbo and save states, as well as the innate ability to skip through dialog and the aforementioned “ignore everything” mentality, plus easy damage output makes it a case where cheese strats makes an underwhelming game slightly better since you’re spending less time with it. This also extends to the writing, yea I would’ve appreciated at least something regarding a plot but since what’s here is shallow enough to ignore entirely I can’t quite say this is a complete negative. Hell, all cards on the table, I’d say the sound design is even good, the ambiance is on point as usual, each guns sound unique from one another, and the OST legit has no right being as good as it is. This still allows for some level of replayability in the way of three different paths funneling into one single ending, having you centered on one of three different secondary villains as a result. Sure, a far cry from RE2’s Zaps, RE3’s Live Selection, or even RE1’s Jill and Chris selections, but hey, credit where it’s due, it’s at least something to give a gander on, and even I was tempted to do it myself. Shit, I might just do it anyway, just cause of how easy it is to blow over an hour or two. Not to mention, streaming this game to friends made some moments even funnier than they should've been, such as the Tyrant encounter I talked about before, or just stuff like the spiders vibrating in place and four zombies shuffling along like Weezer Blue Album. Good laughs were had all around.

Maybe this is just a case where I’m far removed from the context to truly understand the ire. If I was conscious when Capcom first introduced this series with hit after hit after… well OK I think RE3’s very adequate but it’s undeniably of good quality, and this was the next game under the newly made goldmine, then yea sure I can see myself loathing it to an intense degree. As a 1999-born lad who’s only now able to play this thanks to the power of emulation, though? Meh. I’ve played worse inside and outside of the light gun genre, and I’d very much attempt to replay this over RE6 and Code Veronica, since I’m not being bombarded by the shlockiest and insane (pejorative) sequences of elements from far better games, or an agonizingly dull and tedious iteration of the classic formula. I’ve still yet to explore much of the spinoffs, but if one that’s frequently touted as (one of) the worst RE game(s) only gets a shrug from me, then I have no idea how the others' quality will fare.