Obscure II

Others have hacking, lock picking or decrypting abilities, so many of your tasks in the game are completely reliant on selecting the right personnel for the job. To begin with, the pairings are mandatory, but as you finally meet up with other survivors you can select a duo of your own choosing. That said, it becomes evident fairly quickly who you'll need to perform your next puzzle, and the game becomes a succession of rather simple tasks when compared to your typical survival horror yarn. Switching between characters is, once again, a simple, on-the-fly process of pressing R2 to flick between them, and with a shared inventory, there's never any of the fiddly nonsense that you had with, say, Resident Evil Zero, where one character had the ammo clips. By hitting select, it's a piece of cake to swap items around, and as such, the game's set up to be slick and enjoyable.

As with the 2004 original, your warped, fleshy foes don't like the light, but the emphasis on using it as a weapon has been completely scaled back. This time, your main focus is more typical action adventure-style combat, so, there's plenty of baseball bat and hockey stick wielding, mixed with gun play and electricity-based weapons like the stun gun and the chainsaw. And although the camera is a bit bonkers at times, the auto lock-on makes it relatively straightforward to loose off a few rounds without getting tied up in knots.

Extended play

That said, the game's rather hurried, linear approach doesn't help it build up a particularly threatening atmosphere. There's little point dwelling in any particular place for long. It's always abundantly clear what you're supposed to be doing, with a succession of simplistic tasks and obstacles in sparse locations that provide little interest value. The biggest challenge is having to do largish sections and survive some hairy combat-related moments - as unlike the original, you have strictly limited save points, rather than a stock of CDs to save wherever you fancied. As such, this annoying backward step makes the game needlessly frustrating at times, forcing you to repeat tasks you've cleared without any problem.

And to further depreciate its charms, the combat feels clunky, with the co-op mechanic routinely resulting in both characters hitting lumps out of one another while trying to swat enemies away. Stupidly, if one of the two character becomes incapacitated, it's Game Over - whereas last time out you could carry on if you so chose. Now, obviously last time you had a different save system, so it was simple to pick up from a recent save point, but now it's so all-or-nothing it makes the game far less enjoyable.

Technically, the game's fairly weak at this point, too. To be frank, the game engine would have struggled to impress back in 2004, but now it just looks a bit cheap. The character models might be reasonably detailed, but the rudimentary animation ruins the effect to the extent that it's instantly off-putting. Throw the cheesy music and annoying disaffected yank teen voice-overs into the mix, and the appeal starts to wane a little.