Yet another bog standard Resident Evil spin-off. Capcom must be getting bored.

User Rating: 5.8 | BioHazard Outbreak (PlayStation 2 the Best) PS2
Having liked Resident Evil: Code Veronica X and thoroughly enjoyed Resident Evil 4 I decided to take a look at some of the other Resident Evil games available for the PS2 and this and its carbon copy of a sequel Resident Evil: Outbreak File #2 where the only ones I could find that weren't cheap light gun games.

Having run through this after buying it I swiftly sold it and moved on to better surival horror ventures. I was quite unimpressed with this game so I will try to keep this short. Its story is virtually non-existant because of the non-existant online mode (I live in europe) and all the game follows is a group of survivors working together to escape Racoon City in five completely un-connected senarios. While following the standard RE play machanics it adds enough new stuff to seperate itself from the core RE titles. And make it worse. The games first mistake is the inventory system as you can only hold four items at a time and the game doen't even pause when you use it so you'll be warmed by zombies whenever you try to heal/change weapon/complete a puzzle/reload, which again is because of the online that isn't there. The puzzles are uninteresting, there is too much backracking and combat is made a pain in the ass due to four item system, so they pretty much got everything good about the other RE games wrong. The scenarios are reasonably interesting with my favourite being the hospital and you can play as a selecion of different characters and none of them are all that different, with the most useful one carrying a backpack for an extra four items.

The graphics are okay but not stellar, same for the sound. You play each scenario as each charcter to make what story is there a bit different if you want to sqeeze some re-play value out of it, but thats really just playing the same game eight times. Overall I didn't like the game and thought it was a lazy attempt to do an online RE.