Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles

While at the Capcom booth viewing demos, I was pleasantly surprised when they put in the Darkside Chronicles CD and handed me a Wii remote. I immediately jumped to my feet, and prepared for five of my favorite minutes of Gamescom.

Of course, it was noted that the build I was playing was still the E3 build, and thus there was no new material for us to see, but I hadn’t played the E3 build anyway, so I had an enjoyable experience nonetheless.

Basically, the game feels like a much more polished version of its predecessor, Umbrella Chronicles. The character interaction is much deeper in Darkside Chronicles, and there are even moments where your partner is being held by an enemy and you must save them. Walking through the level between actions feels like a cutscene, as one character walks in front of and leads the other around the environment.

There’s no more health bar along the top of the screen; as the player takes damage, there will be a throbbing red blood stain along their half of the screen which grows more and more intense as the player gets nearer to dying. This also means that players have separate health from one another.

Another nice little polished feature is reloading; in Darkside Chronicles, there is now an animation where the gun is shown on screen and the character reloads it. It’s a small change, but it makes the game feel that much more believable and complete.

For a game on the Wii, the game looks surprisingly good; especially with the use of the rain effects and water shaders. According to CAPCOM, Darkside Chronicles makes use of new shader technology not typically seen on the Wii. The graphics of the game actually somewhat resemble the prerendered backgrounds from REmake and RE0.

Also, CAPCOM has stated that they will be packaging Darkside Chronicles with the official Wii Zapper upon release.

Being someone who’s familiar with the series, and someone who has nearly gotten as much out of Umbrella Chronicles as humanly possible, I was still impressed and intrigued by Darkside Chronicles, and buying it is definitely gonna be the easiest decision I make in 2009.

DISCOVER YOUR DARK SIDE ON NOVEMBER 27TH.