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.

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..

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.