Resident Evil is a universe ripe for exploration via genres other than survival horror, so it only made sense that after the explosive success of the original trilogy a spin-off title with a different genre would be commissioned. Director Hiroyuki Kai decided to make a light gun shooter, but instead of focusing on a tightly-designed on-rails experience, he decided to blend it with the survival horror formula that the series had been known for. Unfortunately, the team at TOSE was unable to pull this off, creating what many people consider to be possibly the worst game in the franchise.

The game's story, written by Noboru Sugimura and Naoyuki Sakai, is rather silly and poorly told. Say what you will about the narratives of the previous entries, the problem mostly lay in somewhat haphazard execution, rather than the scripts themselves. In Survivor, the narrative's problems exist on a conceptual level as well. You play as an unnamed man who, after a helicopter crash, wakes up on an isolated island overrun by a T-Virus outbreak. Suffering from severe amnesia, he believes he is a man named Vincent Goldman, an Umbrella executive that the game makes sure to let you know is unbelievably and cartoonishly cruel. Vincent had been performing inhumane experiments on kidnapped children, inflicting as much pain as possible to almost literally extract fear from their brains, which is used to manufacture T-103 Tyrants. Of course, our protagonist is revealed to not be Vincent, rather he is Ark Thompson, a private detective sent to the island at the request of Leon S. Kennedy. This plot twist could be seen coming from a mile away and any sort of mystery it could have possibly added is just wiped away by how obvious it all is. It's already hard enough to believe that this doofus is a detective, let alone a cruel scientist.

Well, the story is always secondary in Resident Evil, right? The main focus is usually the gameplay and how it creates the horror that we love to experience. Being a light gun shooter, I expected Survivor to be more "horror-themed" than actually scary, but I didn't expect it to be so dull. The game isn't a traditional light gun shooter; instead of being an on-rails experience, the player is allowed to roam freely and even avoid enemies altogether. This sounds like an interesting concept until you realize that they ridiculously simplified the mechanics, due to the Namco GunCon controller only having 4 buttons. The game tries to add variety by allowing you to take different paths, but at no point can you backtrack to see what you missed, making it feel overly linear despite TOSE's poor attempt at the illusion of free choice. Puzzles are ridiculously simplified. All they amount to is finding a key in one room and unlocking something in the next. I understand that RE puzzles were never Silent Hill-level mind-benders, but these can barely even be qualified as puzzles. The actual shooting doesn't manage to feel satisfying either, especially when the camera continuously jerks around when any fast-moving enemies are encountered. Movement is very awkward too. The "run" and "move backward" options are mapped to the same button that makes you move forward, so it's kind of confusing how to trigger one or the other. There isn't any strafing so all movement must be done manually, which isn't necessarily a major problem as much as a minor annoyance. All of these problems would be eliminated if TOSE just made it a normal light gun shooter a la The House of the Dead, but the insistence upon trying multiple things means it fails at all of them when it could have excelled at one.

The game is also a bit of a visual nightmare. Most of the assets are from previous games, which looked pretty good in those due to the camera's distance from models, but up close, they are a blocky pixelated mess. The environments are very basic and lack detail, which would be fine if it was released earlier on in the PlayStation's lifespan, but this was released in 2000, right as the PS1 was breathing its dying breaths. Considering Silent Hill was released the previous year and looks worlds better, this isn't acceptable. Cutscenes are also hilariously poor, with characters animating like stick figures, with horrible cinematography that sometimes obscures characters for whatever reason. Like the previous three games, Survivor uses full-motion video for some of its cutscenes. Previous games used either live-action film or CGI animation to show sequences that the PS1 was simply incapable of rendering believably. Survivor, on the other hand, might as well not even have them. The FMV cutscenes use the same assets as the in-engine cutscenes and all animate the same, so it's pretty confusing why they decided to go through the effort of pre-rendering them all when they look no better.

Resident Evil is infamous for its voice acting, so Survivor living up to that infamy isn't exactly a bad thing as many think it adds to the franchise's cheesy b-movie charm. I think it's worth noting, however, that Survivor's voice acting is miles worse than even the original Resident Evil, and has just as many hilarious lines. Such examples include "I AM NOT VINCENT. I AM ARK!!" "Am IIIIIIIII, Vincent?" and "VINCENT. YOU. ARE. A. MURDERER.". It's generally hilarious stuff and I can't complain about it considering the series pedigree.

If there's any bright spot in this otherwise tedious game, it's the soundtrack composed by Shiro Kohmoto. It's a bit formulaic, lacking in any genuinely memorable tunes, but it does build a half-decent atmosphere and sounds mostly in line with RE2 and RE3's OSTs. It's just more of the same, but it works, which is more than can be said for the rest of this game.

Resident Evil Survivor is an awful game and a sorry excuse for both an RE title and a light gun shooter. The game cannot commit to its premise, the story is silly and unengaging, it's dull to play, and is just generally ugly to look at. Clocking in at only three hours of playtime, I can imagine it being a rather disappointing purchase back in the early 2000s. I suppose if you're a die-hard RE fan it's not the worst way you could spend an afternoon, but that energy is probably best spent playing something else. Both RE fans and fans of the genre should stay away.

Survivor cometeu o leve deslize de tentar trazer algo de diferente em uma época onde as pessoas ainda estavam muito familiarizadas com as mecânicas da trilogia clássica, e queriam mais do mesmo. Embora sua história seja um tanto quanto rasa e não empolgue muito, sua jogabilidade consegue ser divertida; e isso me agradou bastante. Em resumo, Resident Evil Survivor tentou fazer em 2000 o que Resident Evil 7 fez em 2017: trazer a franquia para primeira pessoa. Para o seu azar, os fãs ainda não estavam preparados para essa mudança..

A 2.5 isn't that good of a score but for something that can be played through in just over an hour on average and that is otherwise functional I have no complaints. Much better than its reception had me believe. This is no doubt thanks to how little of the combat in this game is actually necessary. Dodging enemies with the first person movement is incredibly easy in comparison to nearly any other kind of Resident Evil game.

Otherwise this kinda plays like any other RE game of this time period transported from fixed camera angles to first person with the puzzles removed or heavily simplified. The messy plot and voice acting is here and probably even stronger than even the original game in terms of how bad things can be at times. If you find charm in the original game's bad acting, I don't see why you can't here.

Worth a visit (or three) since it's so short and it has branching paths. I'm looking forward to giving it at least one more run in the future.

Despite this being pretty bad... Ive actually finished it more times than any other Resident Evil game.. Maybe it was the fact I had less games when I was younger. Maybe it was naivety.

More its because the game has no mid-game saving and can be cleared in just a few hours. Some branching paths do provide some replayability as each path does heavily affect each run.... but...

The game also feels like a total clunker. Slow movement speeds and recycled animations just show this was a rushed out side project. A rather easily read story and a total lack of polish all builds to a rather grumpy game thats really only worth playing if you HAVE to play everything Resident Evil.

This was one of the few RE games I never played so I decided to try it out, well there is a reason I never played it. Survivor is a light gun game with no light gun and a RE game with none of the elements that make RE great.

It tries to be a first person RE game where you walk around a locations, opening doors and picking up items as you would in a normal RE game. But instead of elaborate maze like locations you get a series of mostly linear locations, no puzzles and no inventory management at all. You can pick up as many items as you want and your gun has infinite ammo, this means the core of what makes the old games great is missing.

All you are left with is the combat which in a light gun game could be fun if it actually tried to be a proper light gun game. Enemies have zero hit detection, it doesn’t matter what you shoot at it’s all the same. This results in very boring shooting where you just aim at a zombie and unload waiting for it to drop. Hunters and kickers provide harder challenges, better weapons are key but it’s still a lot of just aiming and shooting with no strategy. One can also simply run past basically all enemies, I found this out later on when struggling to hit a fast moving dog with my slow ass cursor, just run and nothing hits you.

It’s a short game with a little over an hour of play time. My only enjoyment came from the familiarity of the PS models, everything is taken directly from the other RE games. This game adds about two new enemies and they are terrible. There is only one boss, it is a pain in the ass but at least it required some thinking. The music is atrocious, it sounds like whoever did that horrible RE DC dual shock version got another job scoring this. The story is bad even by RE standards but I’m a sucker for this terrible old RE voice work style to make an appearance.

Light gun games are supposed to be exciting and have creative ways for the shooting to interact with the environments but there is none of that here. What you are left with is a super short RE like game with the same boring combat and none of the elements that make the series great.