Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles Hands-On Impressions

If there's one area that the Wii has totally cornered the market on, it's zombie rail shooters of all shapes and sizes. House of the Dead: Overkill came out earlier this year and infused some B-movie humor into the genre, while Dead Space: Extraction recently added a sci-fi flair to the act of using a Wii Remote to blast transformed humans in the face. Soon enough, Capcom will release the sequel to one of the originators on the console, called Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles. Like 2007's The Umbrella Chronicles before it, The Darkside Chronicles mixes up new locales with familiar haunts from older games in the series that have been reimagined in a new first-person perspective.

We've had a look at The Darkside Chronicles as recently as last month's Tokyo Game Show, where we played a demo that featured a brand-new South American level uniting Leon Kennedy and Jack Krauser as co-op partners. But this past week, we got to see a pair of new levels taken from Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil: Code Veronica. Let's start with Resident Evil 2. Here we got to see Leon and Claire Redfield fight their way through the lower levels of the Raccoon City police station, beginning in the parking garage as zombie Dobermans and shambling uniformed cops lunged after them. Things quickly moved into the holding cells, where Leon and Claire ran into none other than Ada Wong, the mysterious woman who continues to pop up in Resident Evil games in a short red dress that's woefully inappropriate for the zombie apocalypse.

But Ada managed to disappear just as quickly and mysteriously as she entered, leaving Claire and Leon to continue on to their next goal of making it through the sewers all on their own. Along the way were enemies as run-of-the-mill as zombie humans, but we also encountered a number of others, such as the infamous licker and giant tarantulas trailed by dozens of angry baby spiders. We dispatched all these enemies using a combination of a handgun, a submachine gun, a shotgun, and grenades. Ammo isn't terribly scarce for most weapons (especially not for the infinite-ammo handgun), so the challenge wasn't so much intelligently preserving ammo as it was using quick reflexes sure to kill the five or six onscreen zombies as quickly as possible before they took off too much health. Capcom told us that headshots are a lot easier to pull off this time, and there's even an option for less advanced players to hold A to lock the reticle onto the zombie's torso.

This chapter from Resident Evil 2 ended on a gruesome note as we encountered a boss fight against a former G-Virus researcher (William Birkin, for those who played the original RE2) whose work had turned him into a mutated mess. More specifically, though, a mutated mess that had grown into a hulking monster with a gigantic eyeball protruding from its even more gigantic right arm. The boss fight was very cinematic, as the game used a scripted camera to move us all over the sewer facility, including having us dangle from a tall ledge taking potshots at the giant eyeball while this monster tried to knock us down with a metal pipe.

Next, we moved to a chapter from Resident Evil: Code Veronica that brought together Claire Redfield and loud-mouthed Rockfort Island prisoner Steve Burnside. Like Claire and Leon, this pair is capable of being played in co-op fashion by two players, which is as easy as having a second player hit a button on the remote to immediately drop into the game. Claire and Steve make their way through a somewhat drab, nondescript building on Rockfort fighting hunters and zombie military officers before finding themselves the victim of Alfred Ashford's demented scheming. He has set up a plywood maze called the Kill House, which Claire and Steve must safely pass through to make it to their goal. Befitting of its name, the Kill House is filled with zombies, booby traps, and creepy writing scrawled in what appears to be blood.

After the Kill House failed to live up to its name, we moved outside the building and ran into a boss fight against what Alfred creepily described as his "cute little pet." That cute little pet turned out to be a giant worm with a gaping mouth and the ability to pick up explosive barrels and hurl them at you. We focused on shooting it in the mouth with a well-placed shotgun blast any time he made the mistake of opening it near us, while our co-op partner took to decorating the worm's entire face with arrows courtesy of his crossbow. Despite being outmatched in size, strength, and the ability to swim through dirt, we achieved victory over this intimidating boss.

It looks like The Darkside Chronicles should turn out to be a solid addition to the Wii's stable of on-rails zombie shoot-outs. Its story is one that will mainly appeal to diehard Resident Evil veterans since it's told in a series of somewhat disjointed flashbacks rather than a continuous, easily tracked plot thread, but it looks like there should also be enough action for players who don't know Albert Wesker from Albert Pujols. Either way, you can expect to see the game released on November 17.