Resident Evil Zero Review

The train is the best opening in the classic series, a moving set that hands you a convict and a rookie and lets you split them across carriages. Partner zapping is a genuinely good idea, and the puzzles that require handing a lantern through a hatch or covering a hallway from two angles are the freshest thing the pre-rendered era ever tried. The art is the mansion remake's equal, all wet stone and lamp glow.

Then there is the drop system. Removing item boxes was pitched as realism and lands as bookkeeping, so you spend the back half retracing corridors to the pile of shotgun shells you abandoned near a save room, and the partner AI is not competent enough to carry for you. The story turns on a leech scientist who conducts an opera, which is either the series at its most gloriously unembarrassed or its silliest, depending on the hour. The train survives. The training facility mostly does not.