"Alone...and bored"

I am a big Resident Evil fan, so naturally I want to play as many survival horror games as possible. Not finding any S-H games that I think are even close to being as good as RE, I saw Alone in the Dark and thought that maybe this could be as good.

The game opens up with a pretty FMV intro. But its one of those boring FMV's where you just pay attention to eye candy instead of the story. I had to watch it 3 times just to find out what the game was about. The story didn't seem interesting. I found viruses and zombies a lot cooler in RE. Anyway, the game started, and the graphics really impressed me. The lighting effects were surprisingly realistic. I never knew that pre-rendered cut scenes could have real time lighting. After the first 5 minutes I was enjoying myself, but on to the bad part...

The first thing I noticed was the control. It wasn't as sharp as RE and this really disappointed me. Then the first monster I encountered was pretty cool, but the combat is pretty bad too. Using your gun is really annoying. You have to constantly go to the options screen to reload, cause it takes too long to do it without that method. And then comes the enemies. There are zombies in this game that look very eerily similar to the zombies in RE, only with less detail and a lot less scarier. It kind of reminds me of Silent Hill- the enemies are boring.

Now to the technical crap- It's really annoying that in this game 95% of the doors are locked. Then when you find a key, you don't even know which door it goes to. Secondly, the accessing time when the game switches camera angles is double that of RE, which really gets annoying. And like I said before, the control doesn't make it any better. And now the break down...

Graphics- 2 words- very pretty -- 10/10

Sound- Pretty good. Not much though. The music was pretty bad too. -- 7/10

Gameplay- The combat was annoying and the control isn't very sharp either. -- 6/10

Entertainment- If you can't forgive the control movement, long camera angle access times, and shallow story, than you won't have fun with this game. -- 5/10

Replay- Nothing pretty much sums it up. -- 2/10

Overall/Rent or Buy- I know it's not fair to compare this game to RE, but this game is so much like it, that I feel like I'm playing a really bad RE4. It's this game's fault for me doing that. The makers of this game could have came up with new ideas and we've come so far from the other PSX RE's, so this game should have been better and improved. (*cough* control is bad *cough*)
Every kind of gamer should rent first no matter how much you like survival horror games. -- 6/10

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/20/01, Updated 07/20/01