Wow, what a mess of a game. Where to even start?
I'll take the blame on not changing my control scheme after realizing how weird it was that Aim was L1 or L2, Fire was Square, and Reload was R2 on a DS4 controller.
There's no map, so everything's largely off memory, but the structure design for at least the first chapter is so very linear -- when there are multiple branching paths, there's really only one way to go.
The puzzles for the game amount to "find item or log book with code, use item or code to proceed".
Enemies that I encountered were...bad. Zombies don't care until you're within three feet of them (except for when they respawn later on the second floor of a building for no reason and suddenly run despite being the same models), the Short Hunters (they quite literally look like Hunters that are half your height) behave in a similar fashion. You can largely stunlock enemies with your weapons, leaving them defenseless while you knock them back out of your range just slightly while unloading 7-8 bullets to kill them (headshots don't matter).
The real charmer moment is when you realize that if you're within about a 60 degree angle of an enemy, you can hit them with the Fire button without ever turning toward them. Why, yes, I did shoot at one uncaring zombie that was on my left and then kept shooting to my left to hit a zombie at the bottom of the screen that didn't care about its zombie friend being hit.
Item usage is clunky, with everything requiring you to select it from your inventory, even if it could just auto-use a key item in the correct place or give you a save prompt if you have a Floppy Disk in your inventory. Safe rooms are safe rooms, with the usual chest full of your previous items present, as from the Resident Evil games this episodic dumpster fire attempts to emulate.
I mostly gave up when I died because the situation was laughable -- with your meager inventory space, you're expected to know which guns are worth bringing with you based on ammo you're expected to get. The problem is, without knowing what's ahead of you, it's easy to keep getting weapons and have no actual ammo for them.
I had a handgun, I STORED a shotgun because of lack of ammo, I had an Assault Rifle-of-sorts that I never saw rounds for, and I picked up a Grenade Launcher. I was carrying some extra handgun ammo because I didn't have any extra spares (other than some grenade rounds before I got the Grenade Launcher). I also brought one healing item just in case.
I work my way a couple rooms down with one spare slot in my inventory after taking a few hits and using a painkiller for one of the rare times where an enemy was able to connect on me. I go in, level the big monster (that doesn't do anything just like the not-Hunters and zombies), pick up painkillers...and discover that without inventory slots, I can't pick up the key (or the Magnum) in the room.
And this is where the game is really brilliant -- you cannot use healing items on yourself at full health, nor you cannot drop items if they have no use for you. In order to pick up the key, I have to unload the remaining eight spare bullets I have in my regular gun so I can reload my last bit of ammo and free up a slot. I skip on the Magnum because I have no room, head back two rooms...and am trapped in a room where I'm required to beat another big enemy, but I'm out of Grenade Launcher ammo, so I'm just firing my handgun until I'm empty. The doors just "jammed", so I'm forced to eat a death because I don't have a close-combat weapon or precognition to not bring the Assault Rifle and bring the Grenade Launcher rounds instead. Whoops.
The Magnum's probably good for this instance too, but I'm already frustrated that in order to die to the enemy that killed me, I had to wait about a minute because it kept running away, crouching down like it forgot what it was doing, then finally running back again just to swat me once before repeating the process.
You get achievements for dying -- four of them, one for each time you die. So, I reloaded and just went over to the not-Hunter room nearby and died three more times. Fun fact: you find anti-poison items throughout the game, but even when the not-Hunters spit poison on you or the not-poison-zombies do the same (yes, they exist, they just look like zombies with weird green particle effects surrounding them and behave like a combination of zombies and not-Hunters)...you never get poisoned. NEVER. ZERO TIMES.
So, I died three more times, got those trophies, and already have 70% of the trophies for the game, with two of them just being about killing enough enemies, one asking you to heal ten times (good luck with that), and one asking you to complete Battle Mode, something I didn't even want to bother with.
And...that's Outbreak in a nutshell. I easily could have continued from where I was and finished the first chapter in the episodic set that may or may not relate the chapters at all, but it was such a mess that I didn't want to waste more time on it. Other fun fact: the Volume button does allow you to adjust the volume, but doesn't actually do anything for how the volume sounds. It's always the same, no matter how high or low you go.
Skip it. Please, skip it. It uses standard controls that are relative to where the camera's facing, but aiming controls relative to where the player is facing and will invert movement automatically on camera changes. What a dumpster fire. I'm hard-pressed to give it even one star, but at least the environments looked okayish.
There's nothing to see here, just move on. You deserve better.
I'll take the blame on not changing my control scheme after realizing how weird it was that Aim was L1 or L2, Fire was Square, and Reload was R2 on a DS4 controller.
There's no map, so everything's largely off memory, but the structure design for at least the first chapter is so very linear -- when there are multiple branching paths, there's really only one way to go.
The puzzles for the game amount to "find item or log book with code, use item or code to proceed".
Enemies that I encountered were...bad. Zombies don't care until you're within three feet of them (except for when they respawn later on the second floor of a building for no reason and suddenly run despite being the same models), the Short Hunters (they quite literally look like Hunters that are half your height) behave in a similar fashion. You can largely stunlock enemies with your weapons, leaving them defenseless while you knock them back out of your range just slightly while unloading 7-8 bullets to kill them (headshots don't matter).
The real charmer moment is when you realize that if you're within about a 60 degree angle of an enemy, you can hit them with the Fire button without ever turning toward them. Why, yes, I did shoot at one uncaring zombie that was on my left and then kept shooting to my left to hit a zombie at the bottom of the screen that didn't care about its zombie friend being hit.
Item usage is clunky, with everything requiring you to select it from your inventory, even if it could just auto-use a key item in the correct place or give you a save prompt if you have a Floppy Disk in your inventory. Safe rooms are safe rooms, with the usual chest full of your previous items present, as from the Resident Evil games this episodic dumpster fire attempts to emulate.
I mostly gave up when I died because the situation was laughable -- with your meager inventory space, you're expected to know which guns are worth bringing with you based on ammo you're expected to get. The problem is, without knowing what's ahead of you, it's easy to keep getting weapons and have no actual ammo for them.
I had a handgun, I STORED a shotgun because of lack of ammo, I had an Assault Rifle-of-sorts that I never saw rounds for, and I picked up a Grenade Launcher. I was carrying some extra handgun ammo because I didn't have any extra spares (other than some grenade rounds before I got the Grenade Launcher). I also brought one healing item just in case.
I work my way a couple rooms down with one spare slot in my inventory after taking a few hits and using a painkiller for one of the rare times where an enemy was able to connect on me. I go in, level the big monster (that doesn't do anything just like the not-Hunters and zombies), pick up painkillers...and discover that without inventory slots, I can't pick up the key (or the Magnum) in the room.
And this is where the game is really brilliant -- you cannot use healing items on yourself at full health, nor you cannot drop items if they have no use for you. In order to pick up the key, I have to unload the remaining eight spare bullets I have in my regular gun so I can reload my last bit of ammo and free up a slot. I skip on the Magnum because I have no room, head back two rooms...and am trapped in a room where I'm required to beat another big enemy, but I'm out of Grenade Launcher ammo, so I'm just firing my handgun until I'm empty. The doors just "jammed", so I'm forced to eat a death because I don't have a close-combat weapon or precognition to not bring the Assault Rifle and bring the Grenade Launcher rounds instead. Whoops.
The Magnum's probably good for this instance too, but I'm already frustrated that in order to die to the enemy that killed me, I had to wait about a minute because it kept running away, crouching down like it forgot what it was doing, then finally running back again just to swat me once before repeating the process.
You get achievements for dying -- four of them, one for each time you die. So, I reloaded and just went over to the not-Hunter room nearby and died three more times. Fun fact: you find anti-poison items throughout the game, but even when the not-Hunters spit poison on you or the not-poison-zombies do the same (yes, they exist, they just look like zombies with weird green particle effects surrounding them and behave like a combination of zombies and not-Hunters)...you never get poisoned. NEVER. ZERO TIMES.
So, I died three more times, got those trophies, and already have 70% of the trophies for the game, with two of them just being about killing enough enemies, one asking you to heal ten times (good luck with that), and one asking you to complete Battle Mode, something I didn't even want to bother with.
And...that's Outbreak in a nutshell. I easily could have continued from where I was and finished the first chapter in the episodic set that may or may not relate the chapters at all, but it was such a mess that I didn't want to waste more time on it. Other fun fact: the Volume button does allow you to adjust the volume, but doesn't actually do anything for how the volume sounds. It's always the same, no matter how high or low you go.
Skip it. Please, skip it. It uses standard controls that are relative to where the camera's facing, but aiming controls relative to where the player is facing and will invert movement automatically on camera changes. What a dumpster fire. I'm hard-pressed to give it even one star, but at least the environments looked okayish.
There's nothing to see here, just move on. You deserve better.