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Recently I played a game I didn’t like. You know the one. To be entirely fair, Resident Evil Zero is the sister game to the magnificent Resident Evil Remake, so my hopes were high. But I soon found the only thing shared by these games to be their release year. In every other department, they're worlds apart.

Remake’s horror comes from being alone in a dangerous, maze-like mansion. But the danger is special, because the game’s design asks you to avoid fights with enemies. A no-kill approach is heavily encouraged. The first time I played Zero, it became clear in the very first level that this was no longer the case: You’re in a train car packed with three zombies. It's tight. You can’t run around them. No, Zero expects you to kill every last one. And that ethos is carried throughout the game. This choice probably sat with me the worst.

But the game kills tension in other ways, too. The map is no longer the huge, highly connected mansion, but like five smaller levels. Each one has the patented Resident Evil interconnections, but their separation makes the game feel more like a journey across Arklay County than a nightmare in a mansion.

To account for this new map is a new inventory system. Ugh. You can now drop items on the ground-- The first time I played Remake, I was confused as to why this wasn’t already a mechanic. I no longer am. It takes all the stress out of item management, as well as removing the fun. It’s very tedious having to backtrack and pick up some random key item you left back in level two just because the game remembered it existed.

I sorta lied when I said you’re alone in RE Remake. You actually do have buddies whom you can occasionally run into. In comparison, Zero’s full-time follower was an inspired choice. In theory, I kinda fuck with it. But in practice, the A.I. is terrible, and I could rarely get it to work properly. In fact, it’s this terrible programming which really kicked off my hatred for the game.

So many times, something like this’d happen: I was playing Rebecca, crossing a room, when an enemy jumpscared me out of nowhere and got me with an unavoidable grab. My buddy Billy, holding the strongest gun in the game, easily strong enough to save me, would bug out and watch me die. The partner AI was noticeably at its worst with the late-game frog enemies and some of the final bosses.

Wow, I hadn’t realized how much I had to criticize this game for, and I’m still leaving out lots: From the goofy story, to the poor boss design, to the revamped Hunters, to the… actually, I won’t mention the torture dungeon monkeys. That criticism is a bit overplayed.

What’s the moral of the story? Hm… Hm… Well, I know that bad games are bad, but I also know one bad game doesn’t sour the bunch. Zero seems to be considered one of the worst in the Resident Evil series. If I knew that going in, I might’ve reconsidered, but it’s important to try things and make your own opinion. Sometimes you find diamonds in the rough. Resident Evil Zero is mostly rough.