There’s nothing more enjoyable than shooting zombies full of holes. It’s even more enjoyable when said zombies manage to scare the piss out of you. Take both of those elements, slap together a storyline that everyone is familiar with and you’ve got yourself Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles for the Wii. The lightgun-like on-rails shooter is a smorgasbord of storylines from Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil: Code Veronica with a prelude to Resident Evil 4 that ties everything together.
Capcom and cavia have made improvements from The Umbrella Chronicles, which players will notice immediately. Minor as they might be, they’ve been made with our interests in mind. For example, the ammo meter has been shifted from the reticule to the corner of the screen. Weapon selection has been modified making it much easier to select weapons by assigning each to the D-pad.
You no longer have to worry about panning the camera around either, although, it’s easy to miss something as the camera will shift rather quickly. There’s a slight chance that you could get motion sickness. It’s actually quite frustrating when you’ve made it to a boss level and rather than focusing on shooting whatever it is that awaits you, you end up fighting the impulse to vomit. Shooters of this variety are hard enough to play on the Wii as is and headshots are nearly impossible.
Each chapter is rather extensive, which is surprising and starts off with “Operation Javier”, a prelude to Resident Evil 4 followed by slightly modified storylines to RE2 and Veronica. Without giving away too much, Capcom did a commendable job with the storyline. I can’t say that I’m a fan of on-rail shooters like this, but I was never a huge of fan of Resident Evil to begin with.
I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the replay value of this game, but shooting just about everything yields some sort of goodie that leads to other goodies. Completing games from head-to-toe has never been my thing due to self diagnosed ADD. More importantly, will fans of the Resident Evil franchise enjoy The Dark Chronicles? If they have a Wii then I’m sure they will.