It seems ragingly appropriate to me that, seeing as how Resident Evil is one of my favourite ever games, that I'd get my knife out for this one. Not only am I getting my knife out, but I'm murdering this game in the senate house and leaving it to bleed to death. Gun Survivor is one of the most painful piles of crap I have ever been forced to play. Everything about this game is horrible; the graphics, the enemies, the gameplay, the story, the acting, the characters…there is nothing redeeming in this game. It’s just horrible. Lott and Lilly Klein, the token children-that-need-protecting of the piece, should both be shot and ground into powder. Ark Thompson, the guy you play, has the natural appeal of a shop mannequin with body odour problems. His voice sucks too. The shock is the way Ark Thompson is crowbarred into the story; Capcom never give us a dull or unimaginative story in Resident Evil, and yet in this game they relied on the awful cliché of the Secret Agent type waking up with no memory of his surroundings or who he was. Controlling the game is clunky and difficult, fighting off anything that moves faster than a slow motion athlete is challenging and your enemies are just really badly used. You get attacked by different Tyrants (boss characters from the previous Resident Evils, for those who don’t know) approximately every thirteen seconds, and dogs are painfully awkward to shoot. Oh yes, and the canny ‘auto aim’ boasted by the game only starts working when the enemy is right on top of you, which is really amazingly useful. Also, deaths are just crap. There’s an explosion of red which does not visibly damage them at all and they just drop to the ground before fading away. In most screen-shooters there is a sense of achievement; zombies explode beautifully in the House of the Deads, and in Time Crisis the physics is just insane, enemies flying off balconies and the like. Yet in Gun Survivor we drag our really fucking slow moving arses through each area, picking up ammo bonuses and extra health. Ammunition is one of the best contradictions of Gun Survivor; they put microscopic amounts of shotgun shells, bazooka ammo and other special types scarcely around the level, but because this is Gun Survivor and not any of the other games, the designers give you unlimited Beretta bullets to make the contradiction complete. The game also tries to do a full length Resi story, which I suppose is laudable, but you can’t do a story that long or complex in a game that gives you one life and which also happens to be a lightgun game, games in which it is somewhat easier to be constantly attacked in. A glowing review I read of it said it forces you to adapt to your surroundings, which is a ‘clever trick’. It certainly is a clever trick. Such a device forces you to work out where the enemies are going to be in ten minutes time, so you can start turning around in preparation for their arrival.
This guy enjoyed this game as much as I did, apparently
Yet, in the words of General C. H Melchett, the crowning turd in the waterpipe is not the insipid characters, the boring combat or the tedious controls. It is the non-existent save system which the manual enigmatically claims is ‘in the options screen’ but blatantly fucking isn’t. So yes, if you die later on in the game, you have to start the whole sodding game again – and you can’t skip the cut-scenes. So as well as being badly plotted the game is just not worth playing. There’s only one mode, and no co-op. Probably a good thing actually, since the poor bastard who would get lumbered with trying to play this game with the PSone controller would probably kill you for it.
Gun Survivor is bad, bad, bad. It is not surprising that in the lovely glossy Resident Evil ‘Umbrella Archives’ book, this particular Resident Evil adventure does not exist despite its supposed story contributions to the canon, ignored for inclusion just like Gaiden. The game remains what it is, an embarrassing failure for Capcom, and no amount of time passing has improved it any. Avoid.
Gun Survivor is bad, bad, bad. It is not surprising that in the lovely glossy Resident Evil ‘Umbrella Archives’ book, this particular Resident Evil adventure does not exist despite its supposed story contributions to the canon, ignored for inclusion just like Gaiden. The game remains what it is, an embarrassing failure for Capcom, and no amount of time passing has improved it any. Avoid.
