This game is similar in a lot of ways to Resident Evil (2002) which is one of the few games I’ve ever given a perfect score. Same movement scheme, same unbelievably gorgeous pre-rendered backgrounds, same classic RE survival horror combat, etc. RE0, however, is the first mainline RE entry to introduce significant changes to gameplay despite having essentially the same DNA as other classic RE titles. RE0 introduces simultaneous control of two player characters and also removes item boxes. Both of these changes, especially the latter, impact the game significantly.
First let’s talk about the use of two player characters. I actually didn’t mind this mechanic and thought it provided a nice change of pace from previous Resident Evil entries. Billy and Rebecca are different enough that choosing which character to use for different scenarios or whether to use both in tandem allows for some fun strategizing. Billy is more resilient than Rebecca and thus more suited to combat encounters. Most players will probably spend the majority of their time playing as Billy because of this. A lot of the strategy of the 2 character mechanic comes from deciding whether or not to bring Rebecca along to take advantage of her inventory space and perhaps to have a second attacker to take on enemies. Health pickups - especially at the beginning of the game - are sparse and having to characters exploring means having two characters that can get hurt and need to heal. This dilemma - weighing the pros and cons of having Rebecca tag along during exploration - was fun to navigate.
As for the second change - the removal of item boxes: this is an absolutely baffling design decision that almost single-handedly brings this games score down from a 7 or 8 to a 6. To compensate for the removal of item boxes characters are now able to drop items, which is a nice quality of life change that would arguably improve any classic RE title, but doesn’t nearly make up for the hassle created by not having item boxes. Most players that are familiar with RE games will attempt to circumvent the removal of item boxes by just dropping all their extra resources in a save room, which is exactly what I did. The big problem with this, however, is the need to move all of these resources to new save rooms as you advance through the game lest you need to backtrack across the whole map to grab an item you need. This process of moving items easily took up two hours of my playthrough and was one of the most unnecessary chores I’ve ever endured in a video game. One of your key items - the hookshot - goes from an inoffensive tool to one of the most annoying items in the series because of this. You’re probably going to have to backtrack across the whole map at least once to schlep this thing to a puzzle that needs it. To try to compensate for the removal of item boxes, the designers generally place the specific ammo you’re going to need for tough encounters in the room right before these encounters happen. This certainly makes playing through the game easier and more convenient but had the unfortunate side effect of removing most of the strategy and tension involved in load out selection. The stress of not knowing when you’d be facing a tough enemy and weighing the pros and cons of using up valuable items slots for a full heal and your most powerful weapons just in case was one of the things that makes the other OG RE games so strategic and tense and engaging. Why should I try to strategize and plan ahead if the ammo I need for a fight is given to me right before it. Why would I ever worry about unexpectedly running into a tough enemy if their presence is always signposted with treasure troves of ammo and healing items in adjoining room. A huge amount of RE 0’s tension dissolves the instant you realize the game is doing this. The removal of item boxes and the cascading design choices that result from it are honestly baffling to me. I can’t think of a single gameplay benefit that could possibly have resulted from it. Was it to make the game harder and more tense? On paper it seems like this would be the case, but in reality it makes the game easier, less tense, and downright tedious at times for the reasons I stated before.
Difficulty in this game is also very front loaded, which is something I pretty much always think is a negative even if it doesn’t spoil my enjoyment of a game. I’ve gotten pretty decent at classic RE gameplay and because of this found the pretty difficult opening act of RE 0 to be a nice challenge, but for people unfamiliar with the series this could easily cause them to put down the game for good. I actually couldn’t help but laugh on several occasions at how many tough enemies this game throws at you in the beginning and the relative lack of resources to help with this. RE 0 is actually one of the harder games in the series overall. Unlike Code Veronica, which was difficult mostly due to scarcity of resources and the need for good player strategy, RE 0 is difficulty due to enemy design. There are some particularly nasty standard enemies in this game that are very fast and difficulty to hit even if you’re packing the optimal weapon to take them out. The monkeys in this game are infamous for being lightning fast, hard to hit, and often appearing in groups that can easily swarm and overwhelm players. The bat boss is also one of the hardest bosses I’ve fought in an RE game simply due to how difficult it is to hit. It can be killed with direct hits from flame grenades which are hilariously provided to the player along with a typewriter and a full heal in the adjacent room. As a result this should be a super easy boss. However the boss is so hard to hit you can easily use up all of your best ammo and healing items without damaging it once. I had to reload a couple times because by the time I had actually killed the boss I had wasted all my best resources. For any prospective players: definitely don’t try to go through the RE series in timeline order and accordingly pick this as the first game you play in the series; you probably won’t have a good time with it.
Puzzles in Resident Evil games are somewhat famously easy - especially when compared to puzzles in adventure games for instance. Each individual player will have their opinion on whether or not this is a good thing but at the very least Resident Evil’s puzzles are almost never cryptic and never require the use of moon logic. There are also occasionally some legitimately fun and somewhat challenging puzzles like the portrait one in Code Veronica. RE 0 mostly follows this pattern but unfortunately contains the first couple of puzzles in the series that I ever found to be legitimately cryptic and poorly implemented. I’m talking specifically about the animal statue puzzle and Rebecca’s ability to carry random chemicals in the key item she uses to mix herbs, which is never hinted at and will likely cause a lot of confusion for players who are primarily interacting with objects in the game world with Billy. Other than that the puzzles are fine, and I enjoyed the ones requiring both characters to work together from a purely puzzle design standpoint. Switching back and forth between characters and trading items for puzzles when they’re separated, however, is very tedious, which can make these puzzles a huge slog even if they’re designed well and provide one or two nice “aha!” moments.
As for story, writing, and acting: the story of RE 0 is relatively mid as far as RE stories go but works well enough. Writing and acting however is actually some of the best in the series up to this point. The tried and true premise of a nice girl and a cocksure bad boy forced to work together and going from openly hostile to having a deep bond and understanding has been successfully used in film since the advent of the “talkies” and is utilized here in a formulaic but nonetheless successful way. Billy’s voice actor also really hit it out of the park and added a lot of humanity to his character, which could have wound up feeling cartoonish and cliched with a worse performance. I wish there were more cutscenes showcasing and developing Billy and Rebecca’s relationship in this game because the dynamic is very engaging and at times surprisingly touching if not a bit cheesy. The rest of the writing and performances are just okay. Wesker appears in this title and is surprisingly bland and poorly acted. Wesker is usually the highlight of the games he appears in due to how delightfully campy he is, but he’s strangely flat and reserved here. It almost seems like the voice actor didn’t receive any proper direction due to how out of character the performance is and how Wesker’s voice bizarrely vacillates between a British and American accent. Wesker thankfully plays a very small role in this game, so the underwhelming performance doesn’t end up being too disappointing or distracting.
Being a prequel, Resident Evil 0 seeks to flesh out the lore of the series and does so in a successful but disappointingly limited way. We get to find out who released the T-Virus in the Arklay Lab, why Umbrella was founded and by whom, and we get to witness their early research into B.O.Ws. All of this is fun to learn about, but I wish it was all more fleshed out. We mostly learn about these things from files scattered around the map, which are all very short. I can’t help but feel like this expansion of the lore would have been more interesting if the files were longer or ideally if we were actually shown Umbrella’s origins and the start of the T-Virus outbreak through cutscenes and gameplay.
Overall an enjoyable game that could have been a really good one were it not for some small but ultimately very impactful design and writing choices. Worth playing for RE fans and definitely not near-unplayable like some people say but be prepared for tedium and frustration if you decide to give this one a try.
First let’s talk about the use of two player characters. I actually didn’t mind this mechanic and thought it provided a nice change of pace from previous Resident Evil entries. Billy and Rebecca are different enough that choosing which character to use for different scenarios or whether to use both in tandem allows for some fun strategizing. Billy is more resilient than Rebecca and thus more suited to combat encounters. Most players will probably spend the majority of their time playing as Billy because of this. A lot of the strategy of the 2 character mechanic comes from deciding whether or not to bring Rebecca along to take advantage of her inventory space and perhaps to have a second attacker to take on enemies. Health pickups - especially at the beginning of the game - are sparse and having to characters exploring means having two characters that can get hurt and need to heal. This dilemma - weighing the pros and cons of having Rebecca tag along during exploration - was fun to navigate.
As for the second change - the removal of item boxes: this is an absolutely baffling design decision that almost single-handedly brings this games score down from a 7 or 8 to a 6. To compensate for the removal of item boxes characters are now able to drop items, which is a nice quality of life change that would arguably improve any classic RE title, but doesn’t nearly make up for the hassle created by not having item boxes. Most players that are familiar with RE games will attempt to circumvent the removal of item boxes by just dropping all their extra resources in a save room, which is exactly what I did. The big problem with this, however, is the need to move all of these resources to new save rooms as you advance through the game lest you need to backtrack across the whole map to grab an item you need. This process of moving items easily took up two hours of my playthrough and was one of the most unnecessary chores I’ve ever endured in a video game. One of your key items - the hookshot - goes from an inoffensive tool to one of the most annoying items in the series because of this. You’re probably going to have to backtrack across the whole map at least once to schlep this thing to a puzzle that needs it. To try to compensate for the removal of item boxes, the designers generally place the specific ammo you’re going to need for tough encounters in the room right before these encounters happen. This certainly makes playing through the game easier and more convenient but had the unfortunate side effect of removing most of the strategy and tension involved in load out selection. The stress of not knowing when you’d be facing a tough enemy and weighing the pros and cons of using up valuable items slots for a full heal and your most powerful weapons just in case was one of the things that makes the other OG RE games so strategic and tense and engaging. Why should I try to strategize and plan ahead if the ammo I need for a fight is given to me right before it. Why would I ever worry about unexpectedly running into a tough enemy if their presence is always signposted with treasure troves of ammo and healing items in adjoining room. A huge amount of RE 0’s tension dissolves the instant you realize the game is doing this. The removal of item boxes and the cascading design choices that result from it are honestly baffling to me. I can’t think of a single gameplay benefit that could possibly have resulted from it. Was it to make the game harder and more tense? On paper it seems like this would be the case, but in reality it makes the game easier, less tense, and downright tedious at times for the reasons I stated before.
Difficulty in this game is also very front loaded, which is something I pretty much always think is a negative even if it doesn’t spoil my enjoyment of a game. I’ve gotten pretty decent at classic RE gameplay and because of this found the pretty difficult opening act of RE 0 to be a nice challenge, but for people unfamiliar with the series this could easily cause them to put down the game for good. I actually couldn’t help but laugh on several occasions at how many tough enemies this game throws at you in the beginning and the relative lack of resources to help with this. RE 0 is actually one of the harder games in the series overall. Unlike Code Veronica, which was difficult mostly due to scarcity of resources and the need for good player strategy, RE 0 is difficulty due to enemy design. There are some particularly nasty standard enemies in this game that are very fast and difficulty to hit even if you’re packing the optimal weapon to take them out. The monkeys in this game are infamous for being lightning fast, hard to hit, and often appearing in groups that can easily swarm and overwhelm players. The bat boss is also one of the hardest bosses I’ve fought in an RE game simply due to how difficult it is to hit. It can be killed with direct hits from flame grenades which are hilariously provided to the player along with a typewriter and a full heal in the adjacent room. As a result this should be a super easy boss. However the boss is so hard to hit you can easily use up all of your best ammo and healing items without damaging it once. I had to reload a couple times because by the time I had actually killed the boss I had wasted all my best resources. For any prospective players: definitely don’t try to go through the RE series in timeline order and accordingly pick this as the first game you play in the series; you probably won’t have a good time with it.
Puzzles in Resident Evil games are somewhat famously easy - especially when compared to puzzles in adventure games for instance. Each individual player will have their opinion on whether or not this is a good thing but at the very least Resident Evil’s puzzles are almost never cryptic and never require the use of moon logic. There are also occasionally some legitimately fun and somewhat challenging puzzles like the portrait one in Code Veronica. RE 0 mostly follows this pattern but unfortunately contains the first couple of puzzles in the series that I ever found to be legitimately cryptic and poorly implemented. I’m talking specifically about the animal statue puzzle and Rebecca’s ability to carry random chemicals in the key item she uses to mix herbs, which is never hinted at and will likely cause a lot of confusion for players who are primarily interacting with objects in the game world with Billy. Other than that the puzzles are fine, and I enjoyed the ones requiring both characters to work together from a purely puzzle design standpoint. Switching back and forth between characters and trading items for puzzles when they’re separated, however, is very tedious, which can make these puzzles a huge slog even if they’re designed well and provide one or two nice “aha!” moments.
As for story, writing, and acting: the story of RE 0 is relatively mid as far as RE stories go but works well enough. Writing and acting however is actually some of the best in the series up to this point. The tried and true premise of a nice girl and a cocksure bad boy forced to work together and going from openly hostile to having a deep bond and understanding has been successfully used in film since the advent of the “talkies” and is utilized here in a formulaic but nonetheless successful way. Billy’s voice actor also really hit it out of the park and added a lot of humanity to his character, which could have wound up feeling cartoonish and cliched with a worse performance. I wish there were more cutscenes showcasing and developing Billy and Rebecca’s relationship in this game because the dynamic is very engaging and at times surprisingly touching if not a bit cheesy. The rest of the writing and performances are just okay. Wesker appears in this title and is surprisingly bland and poorly acted. Wesker is usually the highlight of the games he appears in due to how delightfully campy he is, but he’s strangely flat and reserved here. It almost seems like the voice actor didn’t receive any proper direction due to how out of character the performance is and how Wesker’s voice bizarrely vacillates between a British and American accent. Wesker thankfully plays a very small role in this game, so the underwhelming performance doesn’t end up being too disappointing or distracting.
Being a prequel, Resident Evil 0 seeks to flesh out the lore of the series and does so in a successful but disappointingly limited way. We get to find out who released the T-Virus in the Arklay Lab, why Umbrella was founded and by whom, and we get to witness their early research into B.O.Ws. All of this is fun to learn about, but I wish it was all more fleshed out. We mostly learn about these things from files scattered around the map, which are all very short. I can’t help but feel like this expansion of the lore would have been more interesting if the files were longer or ideally if we were actually shown Umbrella’s origins and the start of the T-Virus outbreak through cutscenes and gameplay.
Overall an enjoyable game that could have been a really good one were it not for some small but ultimately very impactful design and writing choices. Worth playing for RE fans and definitely not near-unplayable like some people say but be prepared for tedium and frustration if you decide to give this one a try.