Resident Evil: Outbreak Member Review for the PS2

I only bought this game since I was incredibly bored and felt like shooting some zombies. I'm a fan of the Resident Evil series already, and so approached this game with a fairly open mind.

The characters you can choose to play from, first of all, are all new and have different strengths and weaknesses. I found myself playing as David, the plumber, for all of the levels, but of course you will find a character that suits your style of play and who you take a liking to after experimenting with them all. Other than your main character, you're thrown into each scenario with two other characters. One of them will usually wander off and meet up with you again at random points in the level, but you'll nearly always have at least one person by your side. Let's just say their AI isn't the best for starters. Apart from ignoring your commands of "this way" by saying things like "no thanks", they'll also run head first into a boss and end up getting themselves killed.

So asides from characters, let's talk combat and weapons. The game uses pretty much the same aiming system as other Resident Evil games and there's quite a range of weapons. You can make your own weapons from random objects in the scenarios, or fight with things like pipes and crutches if you really don't want to use a handgun or shotgun. Unfortunately the space you have in your inventory, unless you play as Yoko, who has more space, is usually only enough to hold one or possibly two weapons if you also have key items to carry around and healing items. You can only hold four items, which is a bit of a shame but rather realistic I suppose.

The environments are pretty nice to look at, and the graphics are fine for a Resident Evil game. Nothing spectacular, but there's definitley atmosphere. The range of enemies is also pretty good. Aside from the normal zombies, there's a few crawling zombies, zombie dogs, hunters, lickers, and who knows what else. The boss fights are fun and there's a lot of different ways to complete them. And of course we have to give a mention to Leech Man.

The game is separated into five scenarios, which in my interpretation aren't supposed to be linked, they're simply "what if?" scenarios that could have happened during a zombie outbreak. You move from normal places like a bar, hotel and hospital to less normal places like secret underground labs. Overall, it's a fun game, though my only complaints are the loading time between rooms, they're unforgiveable, and also bad AI on the other characters behalf.

If you're a fan of the Resident Evil games, you may like this, but if you're not, don't expect too much from it.