Near the end of the level, you’ll also encounter the big boss enemy, with its own patterns and strategies required to beat as you progress through the fight. There are also several different types of weapons and power-ups as you go, giving some different strategies to approach each battle or section.
You’ll also encounter branching paths, which adds to the replay value after you’ve finished the game. You’ll soon start encountering birds and other types of zombies like throwing or spitting zombies, which adds variety and keeps the action going. The satisfaction from headshots is exactly what makes this kind of game great and BioCrisis 2 hits all the right beats. The shooting and enemy reactions feel great as you mow your way through hordes of the undead. Headshots are deadly accurate, just like in House of the Dead, and zombies can easily overwhelm you if you don’t take them out quickly. The action starts right off the bat as you start fighting several zombies at once as you move through the courtyard. This time, instead of keeping the 16-bit visual style, BioCrisis 2 dives head-first into the 32-bit 3D style, much like the original House of the Dead, Time Crisis, or Virtua Cop. Soon after your escape, you find out the city will be nuked by the government to “contain the outbreak,” similar to Resident Evil 3, so the countdown begins to escape the city before the bomb is dropped. The camera turns around to show you’re outside in the courtyard of the lab and there are plenty more threats headed your way. If you manage to complete a successful run in the first BioCrisis, it ends with a cutscene of you escaping the lab by jumping out the front door just as it closes.īioCrisis 2 cleverly picks up right where the first one left off, with you jumping out of those doors as they close. I recently got a chance to play an early preview build of the game and talk with Jim about the project, and I’m loving how it’s shaping up so far.īioCrisis 2: Return to the Lab is a sequel to Jim’s 2020 title, BioCrisis, which played more like a 2D light gun shooter from the 16-bit era, with some arcade-style mechanics and a pretty simple but fun scoring system, and was set during a zombie outbreak at a scientific research lab. That’s how we’ve ended up at BioCrisis 2: Return to the Lab, a new retro-inspired horror light gun game currently in development by an indie French developer simply known as Jim. Thankfully, every once in a while, a great new light gun title will hit the scene. Good ones are few and far between amongst hundreds of boring and uninspired VR horde shooters. Games like Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, Drop Dead, and Zombieland: Headshot Fever did a good job of nailing the feeling of a light gun game in VR, but the hardware required can similarly be a barrier of entry for those who want to enjoy these games. While there’s been a valiant effort to realize the type of rollercoaster-ride feeling of light gun games in the VR space, their success has been limited, even if there are some fun titles out there. On top of that, Sega completely closed its arcade division and all arcades they owned in Japan last year, as well as the Western arcade chain, GameWorks, closing all of their locations. Hell, even the arcade light gun releases have been nearly dead for the last few years thanks to the global pandemic.
Outside of a few random Switch and PC titles (mostly shovelware), the light gun genre hasn’t gotten much love lately, which is understandable, since the technology required to play the games properly is fairly expensive or hard to obtain in 2022.Īfter the PlayStation 3’s PS Move compatibility spawned a glut of new home light gun titles in the late 2000s and early 2010s, that trend quickly died a fiery death when the PS4 launched in 2013. I’ve been a fan of the light gun games since the 1990s, and even though the classics still keep me entertained all these years later, I still try to keep up with any new releases, even though that can be disheartening at times.
With all the recent excitement from news of The House of the Dead: Remake dropping soon, it’s got me pulling out my light gun setups and firing up the classics of the genre again (though, admittedly, I do this all the time anyway).
0 kommentar(er)
