It’s no surprise to anyone that the Resident Evil games have been influential and it wasn’t just once that the franchise has injected new life if you will to videogaming as a whole. The original release, though, opened up the floodgates to a whole genre of games that has been going strong to this day. Ground Zero is the latest of these to hit the scene, or at least Steam Next Fest, as its demo is currently available to play there, with no solid release date for the full thing as of yet.
Developed by Malformation Games and released through Kawlee Games, Ground Zero takes place in near future South Korea, which has been razed by a meteor that brought about more than it initially seems. As part of a two-person infiltration team tasked with finding out just what really happened, the game moves swiftly in cuing you into just how bad of a mess you were dropped in: weird plants litter the place and to make it all worse, it has the power to reanimate the dead. That’s right, we’ve got a zombie problem on our hands once again.
It’s crystal clear that the inspiration here was Resident evil, but thankfully not all of its quirks were inherited, much differently than say, Post Trauma, which even went as far as including cumbersome tank controls to make its proceedings a little more complicated. While certainly not bad, it proved to be an extra layer of challenge atop an already tense experience, which Ground Zero avoids by having you handle it via more modern controls.
Everything else, though, makes the game feel like a PlayStation 1 title: characters are simple models that don’t even have animated lips as they talk, and environments look pre-rendered, much like Capcom’s horror classics of old. If you’re played any of those lately, you’ll feel right at home here, as it’s replete with every other hallmark of Resident Evil, down to the annoyingly hard to kill dogs, which are the very first enemy type you’ll run into.
The demo has you play the initial bits of Ground Zero, and it’s an impressive chunk that displays what the developers are going for with this. I particularly liked having the choice to pick where to start off playing, with the lead characters going through the pros and cons, hence me facing off against the mutts as I chose to explore the beach and leave the other location for my better armed partner. Quickly though, the open environments of the harbor are left for the exploration of the much tighter confines of a beached ship, which all signs point to being positively spooky and definitely worth combing, of course.
Sadly, there’s no release date for the game as of yet, but given this extremely promising demo that’s available to play via Steam currently, if you’re a fan of Resident Evil and its many, many “likes”, you should most definitely give this a go. And I’ll be sure to pop by with a full review once the final version shambles around, promise!
