So, for the first time in the series, there is an actual moving camera. The world is 3D and rotates around at predetermined times, a la Dino Crisis. I’m not sure how much this adds to the game. There were a few points where I could not tell that there was actually a passage for me to go through: 1) The back door next to the body bag in the Anatomist’s office, and 2) the adjoining hallway by the giant moth nest. These both looked to be completely blocked off. Perhaps I fooled myself into thinking the dynamic camera would always clearly show where I could go, unlike past games where the view was restricted to a 2D painted background. It’s almost as if they moved to a 3D camera and then used it at points to… simulate 2D painted backgrounds. I guess they liked how static points of view direct the player’s attention to important items or places.

The level of background visual detail suffered with the transition to 3D. Character looks pretty good, but most backgrounds are a bit minimalist. Back then, was it the best the DC could do? I’m not so sure, look at Soul Calibur. An interesting note: It turns out the game wasn’t actually developed by Capcom, but rather by a contracting group called, at the time, NEXTECH, now called Nex Entertainment, who actually has quite a number of other company’s sequels under their belt. Would one of Capcom’s in-house teams done a better job with the look of the game? Did they simply not have the DC expertise to get it done on time, so they gave it to a group that did?

So, the storyline. How can I put this. MAKES NO SENSE. AT ALL. Yeah, that’s about right. The design of the levels in conjunction with the character’s actions left me scratching my head a few times. Claire is attracted to an incredibly annoying teenager, who briefly turn into the Hulk. Wesker is now a robot, or a dinosaur, or a dinobot, I’m not sure. Umbrella is run by Alfred, a man who sometimes speaks and dresses like his sister, who is not dead, but has put herself in suspended animation after they both turned their father into Voldo and locked him in the basement. The facility sports a submarine, kind of like the ones at Disneyland, that can only travel a couple hundred feet and is entirely controlled by a single lever. The submarine takes you to an underwater... airport. Halfway through the game, Alfred takes off in a harrier jet to chase your amphibious aircraft, but doesn’t shoot you down , because the Tyrant, whose mortal enemy is a box of cargo, has stowed aboard. Alfred has the ability to take remote control of your plane and fly it 10,000 miles straight to Antarctica, where security measures include encasing an access card in a crystal globe and putting it inside an antique cannon next to a Castlevania crushing ceiling which, of course, is the only way to break the globe and retrieve the card. Got it.

The game has a curiously uneven design. You play roughly 3/5 as Claire and 2/5 as her brother, Chris. The halfway point occurs when Claire gets to Antarctica on Tyrant airlines. At this point, the game takes a sharp left from Easy Street into Annoying Junction. There are moths that poison you and seem magnetically attracted to your body. You will pass through their nesting area many, many, many times. And they regenerate. Zombies take many more bullets and tend to get up twice after being downed. Oftentimes, you’ll find yourself doing rotten and want to reload to try again. But you can’t. There is no retry; there is no reload. And NEXTECH’s crowning achievement: there is no soft reset. So here are your options in this situation: die, reset. I leave it to you to decide which is least painful. I find them both excruciating, especially in light of the fact that soft reset had been around since at least the previous console generation.