Burton's Bytes

Format: PS2

Publisher: Capcom

Price: £39.99

Family friendly? Hey, we're talking about reanimated corpses that eat people here.

THIS year is a great time to be a zombie. After the unexpected success of 28 Days Later and the smash hit Dawn of the Dead remake, Hollywood just can't get enough of the living dead.

We've already had a slew of cheap straight-to-video zombie flicks but the one every self-respecting horror buff is waiting for, Land of the Dead directed by George Romero (whose movie Night of the Living Dead started it all back in 1968), arrives in the UK later this month.

Night of the Living Dead may have kicked off the whole "walking corpses hungry for flesh" thing but it was Resident Evil that made horror such a big seller for games producers.

Unashamedly based on Romero's apocalyptic vision (he directed a TV commercial for the game that was shown in Japan), Resident Evil was an instant classic because, unlike every game that had gone before, it was genuinely scary.

It spawned a multi-million dollar gaming franchise that spawned some terrific sequels (including the awesome Resi 4 that is criminally still only available on the slow selling Nintendo Game Cube) and gave rise to a whole new genre known as survival horror.

Capcom has made two attempts to take the Resident Evil games in a new direction.

The first - the shoot 'em up Resident Evil: Survivor - was awful and the second - Resident Evil: Outbreak - was crippled by the lack of online play that was inexplicably removed for the European release.

Now the undead are back for a sequel and (hurrah) this time around, Capcom has left the online element intact for British zombie hunters.

At its core, Resident Evil Outbreak File # 2 plays like its predecessors, complete with static camera-work, beautifully detailed scenery, fiendish puzzles and dozens of reanimated cadavers.

The gripping storylines that made the earlier games so addictive have been watered down here. Instead of a lengthy narrative, Outbreak presents gamers with four scenarios: exploring a zoo, fighting around Racoon City police department (familiar to anyone who has played Resi 2), battling the living dead through a deserted hospital or chasing through an underground subway.

Each scenario is, by necessity, shorter than any of the previous Resident Evil games but the diversity of the locales (and the monsters) keeps things interesting. It's like having four games instead of one. My fearsome favourite was the zoo where mutated beasts lurk in every dark corner. The moment when a giant zombified elephant appears is one of the all time great frights of any Resident Evil game and ranks up there with the 'rotted rottweiler through the window' moment from the original.

Added to this is an incentive to keep going back and playing through on harder difficulty settings for extra "goodies" and you'll see Outbreak 2 has a surprising amount of game play.

If you played through Outbreak 1, you'll know what to expect of the cast - eight ordinary Joes each with a special ability. The student can hold extra items in her backpack, the subway conductor is so non-threatening that some zombies ignore him, the plumber can use his adhesive tape to fashion useful tools and the reporter can pick locks.

If you choose to play off-line the game asks you to choose two characters at the outset who will join you on a quest for survival. They may not quite be headless chickens, but their computer controlled intelligence sometimes makes the average zombie look like Albert Einstein. They seem to run around behind you a lot bumping into the scenery in a quite unconvincing manner.

This isn't quite the disaster it sounds. The general ineptitude of incidental characters is a staple of zombie movies the world over so it kind of adds to the atmosphere here.

On-line co-operative play is where it's really at, though, and here Outbreak # 2 enthrals and infuriates in equal measure.

Battling through Racoon City alongside real humans is a new experience (for British gamers at least) but the communication method is strangely crippled.

Instead of real-time communication, the game uses game pad "hot keys" to transmit key phrases like "Thanks" or "Come on!" to your fellow humans.

Capcom reckons this helps build atmosphere because players can't tell their mates exactly what's happening (Does a cry for help mean "I'm under attack by a hoard of hungry zombies" or just "Bring those herbs in here I need to mix a potion"?) That's true, but it can be frustrating when you need to communicate with fellow players and can only do so in staccato sentences.

Resident Evil: Outbreak # 2 is probably the last of the old-style Resi games. Future versions of this series will default to the highly successful template laid down by Resi 4.

As a last hurrah for the original formula, it marks an interesting transition. Just like those Italian and American zombie movies fans will love Outbreak 2 for all its foibles - gamers coming late to the franchise will probably wonder what the fuss is all about.

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