Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles Review

I played Resident Evil Umbrella Chronicles on Playstation Now a decade ago and I recall not being able to finish it since PS Premium has Darkside Chronicles and it's one of the few PS3 games I haven't played that is on the service, I decided to play it. I also wanted to play it after recently dropping Code Veronica. I did beat the game with a PS5 controller on easy mode, it's beatable but easy mode is really challenging and it certainly isn't as accomadating for analog stick controller players like House of the Dead Overkill is.

The visuals are really good for a former Wii game and seeing Resident Evil 2 environments with a higher poly count is fan service that still manages to impress me even in a post Resident Evil 2 remake gaming industry despite me finding that said remake disappointing.

Code Veronica's portions were "fine" but me not caring for that game lessens the impact of seeing it reimagined. I just wished that game would just a proper remake already. I do tolerate Steve Burnside more here because of his voice acting, direction and dialogue. Alfred Ashford's voice acting isn't as hilariously over the top as it was in the original CV game.

Weapons sound good and killing enemies especially getting headshots on zombies has a very nice satisfying "pop" to them.

I do really like how the game encourages you to switch weapons a lot. You got the infinite ammo pistol as a weapon to kill weaker hordes of zombies with and a good fallback weapon. SMG and shotgun is good for close range and enemies like Hunters, grenade launcher, grenades and magnum for bosses and stronger enemies. It does a good job at keeping in with the "resource mangement" side of Resident Evil within the context in a rail shooter. You can beat something like House of the Dead Overkill primarily using the starting pistol by comparison.

There are some useless weapons like the bow gun, you can empty an entire clip and it still won't kill an enemy.

Speaking of resource management, Darkside Chronicles does what the series usually does a good job with and that is pacing out it's healing items. There will always be a first aid spray or herb after a couple of enemy waves and when you've probably taken a good amount of damage.

A huge positive is that the checkpoints are really well spaced out and there is rarely an overwhelming amount content you have to redo upon death after using all your first aid sprays and herbs.

There is also a good amount of content here for a rail shooter.

Now the negatives are that the upgrade system doesn't really add much since you primarily upgrade the pistol since it's the gun with infinite ammo and it's going to be the gun to always fallback to.

The biggest negative however are the boss fights, this could be me using a PS5 controller, but these boss fights were pretty difficult even on easy.

The RE2 portions were by far the hardest since you don't have the grenade and rocket launchers and magnum and the last few missions mostly just a boss rush. You have to fight William Birkin at the very least 8 times and he was just starting to overstay his welcome and I just wished he went away. At least in RE2, if you choose to play past the Leon A has the last few Birkin fights seperated by a rethread of the game but from Claire's perspective, removing this just makes me wish he would just die already.

Alexia was the second hardest due to how much damage she took with just the regular pistol and forced me to use most of my most powerful weapons early.

It's not only you having to shoot the bosses in time before the blows they throw land on you but you also need to have an extremely fast trigger finger. This could be due to streaming, my finger being slow when it comes to games or me not playing on a lightgun but if I hadn't develop an ability where I used left thumb controlled the reticle through the left stick and right thumb was on the fire button, it being R1, I wouldn't even be able to beat Alexia.

The specific "puzzle" section shooting parts were annoying since if I screwed up these, I could lose health and possibly restart the boss due to misunderstanding during a heated moment.

The story and the way it contextualizes events felt like an afterthought. For example it is primarily about Leon and Krauser going through Operation Javier but Leon isn't in CV so those sections feel pointless. The Veronica virus in series canon never amounted to anything. These portions itself felt like a filler episode of a TV show since I don't even understand why Krauser turned heel by the end of it, Javier dies without revealing anything useful, and Manuela also dies so nothing new is learned and no character insight happens. At least Umbrella Chronicles explained how the company was defeated so that provided more to the overarching RE narrative.

Overall, despite my issues, I do enjoy DC, I failed to beat Umbrella Chronicles so I thought I would dislike DC but instead I had some fun with it even with a contoller.