Capcom is prepared to acknowledge that Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City will have a polarising effect on fans of the series. It's about to cast off the shackles of the genre it helped to popularise and instead fully embrace the third-person shooting it has trended towards in recent years.

Far from an irrevocable change of course however, Capcom suggests that SOCOM developer Slant 6’s output should be considered in isolation. Resident Evil: Revelations for 3DS is available now, and Capcom has just announced Resident Evil 6. Due in November, it’s to be a traditional instalment that the publisher is reported to be investing in more heavily than any other product on its busy slate.

The Resident Evil series is also in some ways a victim of its own success. As demand for games in the series has remained steady, the requirement to expand the literature and find new stories has resulted in a convoluted fiction. A fast paced cooperative shooter, Operation Raccoon City takes players back to the heady heydays of Resident Evils 2 and 3, and offers a new perspective on those events by recounting the actions of a villainous Umbrella Security Services squad tasked with covering up the corporation’s involvement in the outbreak of the T-Virus.

 

It’s hard to know exactly who the intended audience of doublesix’s latest twin-stick light-RPG shooter All Zombies Must Die! is supposed to be.

On one hand, a decent amount of admittedly cartoonish blood and an M rating suggest teenagers ought to be the ones wielding the controller. However, cutesy animation, simple, repetitive play and the weakest attempt at dialogue and story this side of a Barney episode should see most teenagers re-gifting this one to younger siblings faster than they can say “Super-dee-duper!”

Not that Zombies is really terrible enough to warrant being mentioned in the same paragraph as that annoying purple twit. There are plenty of zombies to re-kill – enough that staying put for too long will see them construct a deadly wall of groaning, grabby flesh around the player – and the dispatching of said zombies is fleetingly satisfying. Unfortunately, everything the game does adequately has been done elsewhere, and Zombies suffers terribly by comparison.