These are the two games that took you to new areas of Raccoon City and played so much like the first four games (RE1, RE2, Nemesis, and Code Veronica)…except with some new game play mechanics that negated much of the straightforward fun of the original games, making this a sometimes tedious Resident Evil experience in single play mode. Let’s get into them.
RESIDENT EVIL OUTBREAK
Outbreak was released as a sort of launch title to take advantage of the PS2 moving into online game play and hard drive territory. Supposedly having a hard drive installed on your system drastically cut down on load times, and I would hope so, because the load times between screens are abysmal without it, which is a weird contrast to the chaotic, fast-paced way this game unfolds.
If you weren’t connected to the internet in these early stages of online console play, as I wasn’t, you could play the game in single play mode, which left you running around with a bunch of fairly useless AI characters, most of which would die off pretty quickly, leaving you basically back in a regular RE game by yourself. In fact, your best bet is to just let them die, because you’re supposed to communicate with them, share your resources with them, and make sure they stay healthy. Way too much effort in the adrenaline-fueled “scenarios” this game offers. This isn’t one long game you play through. You go through individual, short scenarios with definitive beginnings and endings. This also isn’t the classic slow burn, tension-building exploration gameplay the series was known for. You are seriously thrown into frantic situations through which you basically just have to run constantly simply to find what you need to find to move forward to get through the scenario and complete it as fast as possible. Not fun.
There are items to pick up, including health, weapons, ammo, keys, special items, and files, but you only have four damn item slots in your inventory, and every time you think you’re picking up an item, you’re actually swapping it out for an item in your inventory unless you opt not to. Basically, you need to carry one each of a weapon, extra ammo, health, and any crucial key item you find, which gets discarded as soon as you use it to make room for the next key item you need. There are also melee weapons, but they are the type that break after enough uses, leaving you defenseless in the middle of a zombie fight.
There are maps, but you won’t have the luxury of checking them, because you’re always running away from zombies trying to get to the next area. There are a few key items you need to do things like set oil on fire or blow up a street full of zombies, but good luck finding those items and knowing to grab them if you don’t use a walkthrough. As always, the files you find offer some narrative, but reading them doesn’t pause the game! In other words, don’t expect to have many chances to actually read any files.
One catch with this game is the numerous health issues. For starters, you begin the game infected! There’s a virus gauge at the bottom right of the screen, and the goal is to finish a scenario before the virus completely overtakes you. Ugh. You also have the usual health meter, and a bleeding meter, and the threat of being poisoned. The only upside is that each of these can be patched with the usual health items—first aid or herbs of various colors—and you don’t need to mix herbs to take them. For instance, if you are poisoned, you can just pop a blue herb without having to mix it with a green one first.
Finally, before I get into each scenario, there’s the save system, if you could call it that. Yeah, there are typewriters, but you don’t need ribbons to use them. Sounds like a yay, but it’s not. If you don’t accidentally miss the few typewriters completely (you can easily bypass a room with a typewriter entirely since you don’t have time to explore), when you do find one and save, it’s called a “temporary save”. It’s a one-time deal that also kicks you out of the game, forcing you to load the save if you want to continue playing right then, thereby erasing the temporary save, defeating the purpose of saving completely. Sigh. The only purpose it serves is allowing you to continue where you left off if you need to take a break for a while.
On the bright side, the control system uses familiar RE schematics…as long as you ignore the whole communicating with the AI characters aspect. The downside? The game is in real-time and doesn’t pause when you use the map or inventory. Argh!
Anyway, onto the scenarios.
Scenario 1: Outbreak
This is a great introduction to the new gameplay, because it brings you right into Raccoon City to see new sights…as they pass you by while you run for your life.
You begin in a bar. A zombie comes in, chaos breaks out, and you hurriedly have to find any items you can, including a key out of the bar, before more zombies break in. And that happens damn fast.
Once you start going from room to room, there is no rest. The zombies just come right in after you! WTF? So much for breathing, and you have to really fight them sparingly since you don’t have room for lots of ammo. Your main focus simply becomes escaping zombies and trying to figure out how to get out of one location after another. Really not enjoyable. There are a couple of unique aspects to the game that hadn’t been seen in RE games up to then, including jumping off ledges and swimming through some shallow water, but generally the game play is typical of the series. In the end you actually have two options for finishing the scenario, which you wouldn’t know without using a walkthrough. You can either retreat from a zombie outbreak on the street ahead of you or take the harder option…go down to the street, find pieces of a detonator around the ground while avoiding the horde of zombies, and then igniting it to blow them all sky high.
Scenario 2: Below Freezing Point
This is really familiar territory. You’re trapped in the lab and have to run around collecting passcodes and items that allow you to operate devices to get to the end of this multi-floor underground location. Unlike the first scenario, this isn’t a high-pressure situation, and I actually had two AI characters survive with me almost all the way to the end. I was even able to give each of them a handgun, because I found several along the way! It sure is a pain in the ass getting them to stand still long enough to “present” them with an item, but I succeeded both times.
On harder modes you have some encounters with lickers and hunters, plus there’s a giant moth you may encounter depending on the path you take and the character you play. In fact, the character you play can also affect the trajectory of your game. Some characters already have items you need, and therefore you won’t have to explore all the same areas to collect everything you need to complete the scenario, which provides various branching experiences. And since time isn’t an issue (other than your virus load), you can also explore areas you don’t even need to if you want to find more items like health and ammo (not that you can carry them). Of course, this also opens you up to encountering more enemies, which could lead you to using more health and ammo.
You eventually have to fight a classic mutated boss on the tram turntable. Pretty straightforward…as long as you have enough ammo and health to make it out alive. If you’re lucky, you found the shotgun along the way. Odd thing is, when you get to the turntable, you literally get a three-minute timer that means nothing other than leaving you open to the arrival of some new enemies…which you can just avoid and not have to waste precious ammo on if you step up onto the platform at the back of the tram. In other words, you can just stand around for three minutes taunting enemies until the cut scene introducing the boss is triggered. Kind of ridiculous.
Scenario 3: The Hive
If being chased relentlessly by Tyrant and Nemesis in RE2 and RE3 stressed you out, wait until you are terrorized by Leech Man throughout this scenario. Another invincible enemy, he drops out of ceiling vents minutes after you enter a room, usually not even giving you enough time to gather crucial items you need. Definitely use a walkthrough and the pause button (a lot) if you don’t want to be stuck backtracking endlessly.
Leech Man is attracted to your blood, so whenever you get hurt, he’s more likely to follow you. Plus, he drops little leeches that also latch onto you and suck your blood. Taking certain healing items will patch you up, but this is one of the more irritating levels when it comes to only having four inventory slots.
Other than Leech Man, as if he isn’t enough already, you will have to contend with the usual zombies, including a surprise zombie that jump scares you through a window…and grabs you for an instant kill! If you don’t read a walkthrough to know when and where to avoid him, you’ll have to start the whole level over again.
When you finally get to fight Leech Man in a morphed form at the end, it’s in a long, narrow sewer passage. You can either shoot him to death or lure him under overhead sprinklers and shoot the valves to spray him. I honestly didn’t see the valves because I was panicking, so I just unloaded bullets on him.
Scenario 4: Hellfire
This is a very straightforward scenario…aside from the fact that there are varying paths you can take, which demands you use a walkthrough so you don’t go too far off course due to that damn virus counter that will kill you if you don’t finish the scenario in time. As always, there are optional rooms to explore, but they just eat up time, you don’t have inventory space to pick up many of the items you’ll come across in them, and sometimes they will just use up resources thanks to more enemy encounters.
The enemies are really basic here—zombies and lickers. That’s it. The setting is also basic. A building. Just corridors, stairways, and rooms. The only catch is that the building is on fire, so you do have to avoid flame patches or you’ll get hurt. You mostly just have to find a few keys, find a gem to put in a statue to open a secret passage (classic Resident Evil), and eventually fight a fairly simple boss. She’s this pervy thing that hangs from the ceiling (maybe a former pole dancer?) blocking your way out of the building. First, you can just stay away from her since she’s stuck in place in order to kill a couple of lickers that come with this battle, then once they’re done, simply blast at her from afar with your shotgun while avoiding her long tongue attack and she’s dead before you know it.
Scenario 5: Decisions, Decisions
Well, they saved the worst for last. This one seems to be going along fine for quite a while, with you doing the usual Resident Evil scavenger hunt in a university building. However, using a walkthrough, you learn there’s a split path at one point, and you can take either one…or so I thought.
I don’t remember if I’d done each different path in previous plays years ago, but this time I opted for the one without sharks. Fuck that.
Unfortunately, when the paths finally merge again, your AI teammates in offline mode are supposed to meet you with a portion of a chemical you need to mix in a machine, which in turn also unlocks a door that leads to the final part of the game. Guess what…no team members met up with me. This is a problem, because the walkthrough at this point suggests that if you don’t meet them, you need to now go complete the other path you were able to bypass earlier to get that last ingredient. Fuck me. Fuck me more. My viral load was already up to 75%, so I didn’t have much time left. On top of that, this is the path that has you running across a dock…where the sharks simply leap over the dock and snatch you off it. Instant death. My whole fricking game down the drain, no way to start from where I left off.
By getting Jawsed, I mostly just missed the final boss, but I’m still pissed. And just note that there’s a section near the end of the game (before the sharks ate me) that has you being relentlessly chased by an invincible Tyrant/Nemesis type dude. You’d never know without a walkthrough, but the goal is to lead him to hanging electric wires you saw earlier and hit a nearby button to temporarily electrocute him so you can get a blood sample off him…one of the other ingredients you need to put in that mix machine to unlock that final door. Oh well. All I really missed by not finishing (I read the rest of the walkthrough) was a series of countdowns (ugh) and the final fight with the no-longer-invincible dude.
RESIDENT EVIL OUTBREAK FILE 2
There are a few new aspects to gameplay in the second game, most notably that you can beat down doors that have “fragile locks” (either shoot them, melee them, or just kick them), and you can also move while shooting. Plus, you get to choose two partners to join you on your journey in single player mode, and I found they really did stick with me the whole time, didn’t die, and actually helped me fight back against bosses. I also found the ability to swap items with AI partners works a lot better in this game, plus you actually have an option when in other characters’ inventories to tell them to use a particular item, saving you the trouble of swapping items with them to then use it yourself, such as when they need to be healed. Heal thyselves, bitches!
Scenario 1: Wild Things
I love this scenario, which has you cutting through a zoo of escaped zombie animals to reach a train station to get away. Along with the usual puzzle solving and monster fighting, there’s a bigger problem…an awesome zombie elephant that repeatedly barges in on you if you don’t kill it immediately. However, it takes dozens of bullets to kill it, so unless you’ve unlocked “infinity” mode or have a Codebreaker, you might just have to deal with his unexpected returns, much like the T-rex in Dino Crisis. There’s even a segment in which he will drag you out of windows with his trunk, killing you instantly, so you’ll want to use a walkthrough to know where or you’re going to be pissed when you have to start the scenario all over.
Meanwhile, you also fight zombie hyenas, dive-bombing birds, poisonous bugs, and female lions. Here is the other catch. If you read a walkthrough, you’ll also learn you can actually choose your final boss, dependent on your actions—the zombie elephant or a zombie male lion. Since you can fight the elephant any time during the scenario, it might me best to rid yourself of him once you have bigger guns and more ammo so that you can experience the male lion in the end.
Scenario 2: Underbelly
This is a straightforward scenario…although not so straightforward if you don’t use a walkthrough, because you’ll be going through maze-like areas of a subway system. This is mostly a fetching mission with a few puzzles, and the zombies are plentiful and even break through doors when you’re in a room too long.
The major enemy here is these big nasty bugs that leap on you and suck blood out of you, which really takes a toll on your health. One way to avoid these enemies is to grab the blood packs you see around and place them on the floor when the bugs appear. They go to suck on the blood bags, allowing you to quickly do whatever you need to in a location without being bothered. The other—and better—option is to just shoot the fuckers dead.
However, brace yourself. The final boss is a giant version of these bugs on the subway tracks, and he has a bunch of smaller bugs helping him out. Ugh. The good news is that your two AI buddies are along for the ride and help you kill the bugger fucker.
Scenario 3: Flashback
This is a fun but challenging scenario. It starts in a cabin in the woods. You can immediately grab a shotgun, but make sure to do so before one of your AI buddies gets it!
Interestingly, there are two routes you can take, and each one presents unique enemies. To take the shorter route, you actually have to wait in the woods outside the cabin for about fifteen minutes and not cross the bridge. After you kill all that time, there’s a cutscene of the bridge collapsing, and then the new route is open to you.
This time, I simply crossed the bridge and got right to…an abandoned hospital. Eek! And don’t you know that the second you enter it, you get attacked by an invincible axe man. Whenever he appears, you can either run from him or shoot him enough and he’ll just leave the room. There are also hiding places you can slip into, like in lockers and under beds, to wait him out until he leaves.
Much of this scenario involves avoiding getting poisoned. Ugh. The zombies have been infected by a plant and they spit out a poisonous gas you should try to avoid. There are also plants that shoot poison at you. And giant bees that poison you. Argh! Make sure to grab all the blue herbs you see in order to heal yourself. You’ll also need syringes to inject into plants that block your path to new areas, so grab those whenever you see them.
Eventually there’s a big final boss plant and its minion plants to fight, and the battle takes place in a very tight space. However, if you play your cards right, you’ll get a grenade launcher that takes him out quick.
The most annoying part of this scenario is the timed escape ending. It doesn’t tell you it’s timed and there’s no timer, but you do have to get to a specific door to escape in a specific amount of time, and you would have no idea which door or how to get to it fast without a walkthrough. On top of that, you encounter the axe man one more time! You can either avoid him or take the time to kill him, which affects the ending you get.
Scenario 4: Desperate Times
This is fun. It’s an entire scenario that takes us back to the Raccoon City Police Station. Yep, it’s rooms and hallways you’ve explored many times before, and all you have to do is find five pieces to insert in that big statue in the front lobby.
Here’s the catch. Hallways and rooms will randomly be filled with gas that raises your virus rate super-fast! You find neutralizing canisters all over the place, so always be sure to have at least two on hand. When you enter a room full of gas, place the canister down and it will temporarily clear the air.
The only enemies here are zombies and some crows when you use the outside stairs. The only other real challenge is that your damn AI partners can fricking pick up the puzzle pieces before you get to them, and wouldn’t you know in this scenario they tend to split up rather than sticking with you, so you may have to hunt them down a few times to get the pieces from them. It happened to me twice this playthrough.
Finally, the big battle at the end is simply a horde of zombies that busts through the outside gates in front of the police station. You need to shoot a certain amount of them with your partners to end the scenario. Pretty straightforward as long as you have plenty of supplies. You also get an opportunity to grab supplies for the battle all around the police station before triggering the event, but you won’t know where to find them and how to access them unless you read a walkthrough. Plus, you have to consider how much time you have left on your viral meter.
Scenario 5: End of the Road
Argh! This is a very frustrating scenario, and the longest one of Outbreak File 2, with numerous branching paths for different endings in the last part of the game…once you’ve escaped the underground lab you’re in for the majority of the scenario and come back up into Raccoon City, right where you were in the first scenario from the first Outbreak game.
Chances are you may not make it to the end of this scenario before your viral load reaches the maximum and you die. The good news is there are numerous typewriter saves in this scenario, and I discovered that there’s nothing weird about the save system here like there was in the first game. When you save, you stay in the game rather than immediately loading the save again, so you can even play this game over a few sessions…when you come back to the game, the save is there waiting to be loaded if you simply pick “continue” in the menu.
The underground lab takes us back to the old days, with lots of running around collecting items to move forward, giant spiders, zombies, hunters, and—brace yourself—Tyrant! Eek! However, the first time he shows up, he is actually programmed to help you defeat hunters for a while. Eventually, he goes berserk and turns on you. This is an early moment when what you chose to do can change your ending. If you’ve collected some better guns, you can defeat him and it prevents him from pursuing you for a while. When you eventually do meet up with him again, if you defeat him a second time he’s done. That is it. You never see him again.
Unfortunately, once you come back up into Raccoon City for the final part of the game, it’s chaos. There are mines on the ground that can take out you and your partners. There’s a sniper. There are numerous paths to take to get different endings. There’s an option to save a wounded character, which requires shouldering her and carrying her around while enemies attack. There’s a hard final boss. There’s even an option to bail on all of that by going right to the helicopter to end the scenario.
Like an idiot, I didn’t take the easy way out this time. I wanted to battle that last boss. I was almost there. That wounded bitch dragged me down as we were climbing stairs to a rooftop. I got attacked by a zombie and didn’t have time to let the bitch go and whip out my gun. I died. Argh!
