As a rail shooter, the game simply requires you to aim at the screen and shoot anything and everything that moves. The controls are relatively intuitive during the shooting, however using stuff like the knife and grenades can be clunky with the Wii’s simplistic control scheme. This is avoided to an extent with three different control schemes, two of which are for the Wii Remote alone and the other for use with a gun peripheral and nunchuk. The gun style is nice but at times it is easy to forget all your additional controls on the nunchuk. This was one of the games that came out to exploit the Wii Zapper but really the Nyko Perfect Shot is much better for this and really any shooter game on the Wii.

The graphics aren’t bad during gameplay. There are some resolution issues but with the enemies being zombies it isn’t too bad and might even add to some of the creepiness. The backgrounds are varied but very flat. The saving grace is that the backgrounds are very interactive allowing for lights and windows to be shot, as well as later levels allowing for chandeliers to be shot down onto hordes of zombies. The real graphics that stand out as pure horrible is cut scenes involving the playable characters. The players look oddly waxen and have really dead and soulless eyes. This harsh contrast actually makes them more terrifying than the zombies attacking you.

The rail system is nice since you don’t need to know where you are going yourself but it also has its own problems. The main problem is there are times when the camera just wildly darts around. Yes, you can shoot the enemies but it is unlikely you have time to kill an enemy unless you can always get a critical hit. The critical hits in this game can potentially take the enemies down in one blow, such as the zombies’ heads being a good starting point. During certain parts you have plenty of time to gun down the enemies but other times that is not possible.

Multiplayer mode can definitely make the game easier since you can focus on different enemies upping your chances of survival considerably.  So to balance the power of numbers Capcom decided the players should share certain things that make it harder and not share things that would make it convenient. The most important thing you share is health. This is actually pretty reasonable since it would be hard to differentiate who got hit when the enemies are just swinging at the screen. However, ammo pickups scattered through the level are kept by the character who grabs it first and not distributed. In a regular game, this is standard but in a game that depends on both players staying alive a little sharing by default would be nice. Instead by the end of a level either one person is equipped like a one man army, while your partner is struggling with a pop gun or you are having to take turns and risk missing a weapon because the player whose ‘turn’ it is to grab the weapon can’t get to it fast enough.

The story is very much a streamlined version of the three mentioned games as well as adding background information that wasn’t in the originals.  This is done either with documents you can pick up in each level, but also with an additional story where you can play as some of the antagonists to learn their stories. The documents really shed light on how terrible the always looming Umbrella Corporation really is.

Normally, I am not a fan of the Resident Evil series due to the core mechanics. However, the streamlined non-thinking rail shooter style I do enjoy.  There are still plenty of issues that make the game hard to sit and play for any long amount of time but it is a good game if you just want to play a level on random occasions.

Viewtiful Joe follows Joe, a movie lover that is pulled into the movie world in an attempt to rescue his girl, Sylvia. Nothing too exciting there and for the most part pretty standard, but then Joe is given a watch from his movie hero, who at this point is getting old. This watch allows Joe to transform into a super sentai style character. Through a majority of the first game he attempts to come up with a cool superhero name final deciding on Viewtiful Joe.  In the end, Joe of course saves Sylvia, who then turns and also becomes a hero, Sexy Sylvia.  Within the first game you could replay the games with other characters which altered the cut scenes but mostly played the same.

The second game brought in Sexy Sylvia as a main stay.  Compared to Joe’s hand-to-hand combat style, Sylvia had guns.  These were used as an additional puzzle aspect in the second game.  Besides these basic styles the hero forms allowed Joe and the others to utilize movie powers. This ranged from altering the passage of time to zooming in for a close up. Each game added more such as the second game giving Sylvia replay abilities. These powers could be used in different ways such as fast forward allowing Joe to strike something enough times and fast enough to catch on fire to deal more damage. Further into the games, these powers needed to be used in conjunction to either make the bosses easier or even to get through puzzles.

Graphic wise this was when cel-shading was new and the thing to do. In this case, the cel-shading lends well to the movie themed levels. The atmosphere fits and even the serious levels have a colourful and fun feel. Along with the trips through different movie themes the music also changes accordingly.

The spinoffs, on DS and Gamecube/PSP, are also pretty good.  In the case of Red Hot Rumble on Gamecube and PSP, they basically tried to do a party fighting game in the vein of Smash Bros.  Unfortunately, this game is easily the weakest. While it shares the same look and characters as all the others, it doesn’t seem to capture the series.  Double Trouble, on the DS, however does feel like it could have been the third game that never happened.  The only thing that makes it obviously not the finale is the unconnected storyline. This one adds two more powers called “Scratch” and “Split”.  In these cases you are directly affecting the film.  This mainly was to use the DS’s touch screen and manipulates other onscreen objects.

Overall, I miss this series and wish it could have had the ending it deserved. If you can pick any of these up, in anyway, it should be done. However, if you can only find Red Hot Rumble go ahead and avoid it because that is not a measure of what this series really is.