Resident Evil 7: 9 Times Capcom Abused The Fanbase

8. Resident Evil: Survivor

In the late 90s, lightgun games were massive business and Capcom tried to get in on the craze with Resident Evil Survivor released to what can only be gently described as a critical mauling.

In Survivor you play as Ark, who wakes up on a strange island sometime after the Racoon City incident with no memory of who he is or why he's there. The main selling point the game had was its take on the lightgun genre, but whereas big names like Time Crisis were on rails, Survivor allowed you to have complete control of your character and move around in first-person. This entailed a rather clunky system of aiming off screen and pressing the trigger to move forward and using the two buttons on either side of the controller to turn left and right, before aiming at the screen to shoot enemies.

Bearing in mind that it was released just after the seminal RE2, Survivor was anything but scary. For a start, the careful inventory management that you were forced to use in the main games was gone as some of your weapons had infinite ammo from the start. It was a format that simply did not work within the Resident Evil universe. What is most shocking is that Capcom okayed two sequels, both released on the PS2 in the years that followed.