"Resident Evil....Final Fight Style!"

Zombie Revenge is a spin-off game of the House of the Dead series that features quite a few different aspects of games such as Streets of Rage into it. With some intense difficulty and beautiful, abet dark visuals, intense violence and cheesy story attached to it, you have a game that isn’t quite as neat in the story department like Final Fight. However, with the amount of moves that are at your disposal and the weapons, combinations and otherwise that you see here, it’s a darker form of Die Hard Arcade more than anything else!

The Game Play

With the amount of fighting style moves, you’ll find that Zombie Revenge has all the qualities of Resident Evil and Streets of Rage with the side scrolling fighting and the very idea of zombies and monsters coming out of the woodwork to attack you. Once you've got the extras that the game has to offer, it's all over. You won't play it much, except with friends, and if you're looking to just get back to old school SoR action, the street brawling, then you'll replay this a couple of times to fill in the gap!

The control interface is where it starts to go down hill. Aiming at a different enemy targets with the gun, takes practice, and your targets move out of the way, so if you charge up for a shot, you're wasting bullets. The close in grab moves are difficult to pull off, making a jagged combo system that chops up. If your target is too far off, you waste more bullets, not even hitting them. Although it runs off the SoR game engine, it leaves much to be desired.

Grabbing your intended target takes a little more than just practice with several different combinations that are possible. This may seem easy enough, but you have to turn and keep up on them to keep them down and out of the fight! A couple of the character moves are done in such a way, that you really have to have a better understanding of how the characters move and just what you can do with them.

The Visuals

They're good. They flow nicely, and the backgrounds are incredible. I only found some problems with the close in shots where the story kicks into play. The faces look semi-real, but they lip-sync worse than Milli Vanilli does, and they're polygon fleshed out. A complete and total bummer when you break it down to what kind of game it is and what is supposed to represent.

The exploding zombies are nice, and add some realism, watching the parts fall, and the blood splatter the ground, but, like with most action games, the enemies disappear, blinking out of existence. Not great ways to show off the power of the Dreamcast by having the enemies merely blink out. The bosses on the other hand rock, and you'll see what I mean in the fourth act of the game, very nice!

The Audio

Tinny fighting game sounds has never really made an impact on me before and they won’t do it now. And the voice-overs are horrible. You want to get involved with the story, but after listening to it for a while, you'll just skip through it. The music repeats for most of the game, until you get into the later stages, and, if you've played House of the Dead, it's all the same stuff.

The gunshots don't differ, between the various guns you collect, and the sound of the pipe swinging makes the gunshots sound cheap! It really isn’t an audio intensive game and with some points of the story when there are speaking parts, you’ll find that it is strangely similar to the first Resident Evil and about as corny as listening to Barry talk over and over again.

The Verdict

Zombie Revenge is a great way to kick off the start of an arcade adventure. With different fighting moves like you would find in Streets of Rage, ties to survival horror like Resident Evil and a spin-off of House of the dead, where could you go wrong? Well, you could start with the fact that this game has a difficulty level that just doesn’t seem to quit. If you’re playing through by yourself, then you need to have plenty of credits in order to play. Aside from that, you’ll see that there is plenty here for the usual ass-kicking gamer to waste some money on!

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 05/21/02, Updated 05/21/02