Ground Zero is one of the more faithful and true to form Indy Survival Horror games I've gotten around to playing. I've played and seen a decent deal of Indy Horrors at this point and without fail they always end up missing something crucial to the experience. They either feel too short, or they don't flesh out the story enough to be satisfying, or the characters feel a little too hit-and-run to be meaningful, or the mechanics and movement just don't feel right, it's always something. Capturing the spirit of these kinds of games requires more than a simple copy and paste of trends of the time, it also requires understanding and applying the philosophy and attitudes that were going around, which was an attempt to push the boundaries of what was possible as hard as possible using limited tech, and that is what Ground Zero manages to do. This game feels like a classic survival horror experience that wouldn't be out of place on something like the Dreamcast. Not quite the PS1, the game has a few too many QOL features and the character models are a little too high resolution and crisp for the PS1, but many of the things on display here are Dreamcast all the way. It has just that right amount of competency and mad ambition that was normal for the time. This can even be seen right down to the voice acting, as it inhabits that spot where you can tell that they're amateurs, but they're doing their absolute best and not phoning it in.
The actual act of playing is very enjoyable and an interesting twist on this style of game. Resident Evil gave the player hitscan guns cone-like hitboxes that made hitting the enemies easy with the tank controls, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare allowed the player to lock onto enemies, this game gives you an RE4 style laser sight with optional lock-on, but you also have the ability to essentially force critical hits through the critical shot mechanic, which helps tremendously with ammo conservation assuming you're able to make enough space between you and the alien monstrosity trying to eat your face. In the event where Kwalee Carpenter's The Thing does get in your face, you have both a dodge button and a block button that are very reliable to use and very useful, and even a parry-counter system for you Darksouls freaks out there. All these mechanics gel well together but also have enough clunkiness to them to remind you that this isn't Doom; your positioning needs to be smart and your actions must be deliberate, you cannot just turn your brain off and expect to glide through.
The environments are gorgeous, memorable, and absolutely in line with the era. I haven't done much research into the credits but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the staff either worked with or studied under former Capcom developers, and if they haven't then they've demonstrated a superb understanding of how level aesthetics worked back then. All the backgrounds are prerendered and have this glossy late 90's, early 2000's feel to them. This also has the added affect of making enemies and items very easy to identify, as well as making it easy to tell where you need to go. No yellow paint here, kids!
I think the only thing about this game that could be improved is the weapon balancing. There doesn't seem to be much performance difference between the 9mm pistols and the magnum pistols, but that could be due to me playing on normal and doing new game+ on hard. The game's money system is very heavily reliant of which guns you're using to kill enemies, which does help incentivize cleaver play but has the consequence of making you not want to use the more powerful and funner guns as doing so would dramatically cut into your paycheck. The end game avoids this by turning off the money system entirely so there's no reason not to enter M16/M202 Nirvana, but I would like a mode that does away with the store completely and forces the player to rely entirely on scavenging supplies. Let's see how sharp your survival horror skills are now! That most likely isn't going to happen anytime soon, but it can be something to consider for the sequel if we happen to get one. There's also the issue of health items. The game uses medical syringes that you can combine similarly to RE's herb system and for my first playthrough I did just that; making a RGB syringe seems to have a similar effect to doing so in Resident Evil, but if you combine three of a kind, you create a syringe that gives you a permanent stat upgrade. I really like this in theory, but in practice the health items are far too abundant for the mechanic to mean much, unless you're bad at these games. It's possible that these items might be far rarer on higher difficulties, I haven't gotten around to it yet, but in both of my playthroughs I am flush with healing items, and you can't just stockpile full heals like in RE, once you make a syringe, you're committed to it until it's used. There was an attempt to balance this out by making it possible for all the enemies to poison you while making the blue antidotes rarer than the other two, but they still weren't rare enough to matter and with enough, it feels like you can negate the mechanic entirely. Again, this might change on higher difficulties, but if that is the case than easier difficulties aren't doing enough to prepare players for the tougher experiences. It almost feels like easy, normal, and hard are just an extended tutorial.
If you're a fan of classic survival horror, this game does it far better than its contemporaries. It's certainly leagues better than Hollow Body, which feels more concerned with aping Silent Hill than it does with actually being a decent game. QOL stuff like the auto-saving and the shop system might turn off RE purists, and the balancing could use some work, but overall the game is fantastic and I highly recommend it. I want to see what else this team can do.
