Gameplay, Continued
Once you’re actually in the game, you’ll find that Outbreak plays like all the others in the series. For those of you that haven’t played any of them, you have to solve various puzzles whilst defending yourself from zombies and monsters. You run around a variety of locations picking up the odd clue here and there as to what to do next, then try and get it done before you either run out of ammo, lose too much health or submit to infection and turn zombie yourself.
To help you do this you can use bug sprays to ward off attackers, eat different herbs to heal yourself and find a variety of weapons to keep the dead, er, dead. On top of this you’ll find plenty of items scattered around each location, helpfully highlighted by a little sparkly thing to show you that you can interact with it. Some of the puzzles become clear as you collect items, others are fairly obvious and logical and there are a few that require a large amount of lateral thinking. You can find yourself running around and just trying out everything with everything else to see what works. This can be a frustrating experience, especially as the zombies don’t stop coming and you only have a limited amount of ammo to deal with them.
Now, all this sounds like standard Resident Evil fare, and it is, but there are some subtle differences, which make a fair bit of difference how you play. The first is that there is no difference in the game play whether you are playing a single player or multiplayer game. Normally, the multiplayer part of a game is separate from the main single player bit, but not here. You’ll play the same game with or without others, and as such it runs in real time, all the time. What I mean here is that the game doesn’t pause when you access your inventory, so zombies keep on coming while you’re trying to eat some herbs or use a couple of items with each other.
Given the fiddly nature of the inventory system, it becomes a necessity to find somewhere safe to stand before sorting yourself out. This wouldn’t be a problem if everything else stopped while you were doing this, but still being open to attacks and not being able to do anything about it if you are attacked becomes a pain. I can see how pausing the game during multiplayer is impractical and would ruin the game for all playing it, but surely it wouldn’t matter in the single player mode?
On the upside, the movement controls have had an overhaul so that you no longer have to rotate your character before setting off in a certain direction. All you do is push the way you want to go and off you trot. This makes makes moving around and targeting zombies a lot easier and gives a much more fluid game to play.