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X-Files: Resist or Serve

Score: 7.5 / 10

Box Description:

The quiet town of Red Falls erupts in shocking, unexplainable violence… and Mulder and Scully find that their new X-File has a deadly relationship to past cases they barely survived and would rather forget. In this original “lost episode” you will enter a treacherous world filled with authentic X-Files mythology, thrilling challenges and terror. Battle horrific paranormal phenomena and conduct autopsies while in search of the truth.

All of the X-philes amongst us will now be happy for a while. X-Files: Resist or Serve plays out much like an actual episode of the X-Files TV show complete with the opening theme and witty banter between Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. Helping the banter be more realistic is the usage of every actor’s voice – having Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny would be a coup, but you actually get the voices of the Lone Gunmen and the Cigarette Smoking Man!

The story of the game centers around the arrest of two teenage girls that are being accused of witchcraft; they apparently raised the dead and used the man to kill someone. So, enter the FBI who come into the small town of Red Falls, Colorado and try to solve this case.

The game uses a divide and conquer approach: the gamer controls one of the two main characters and goes about solving the case. Each character is out collecting information by themselves and then meets up with the other for points of higher tension. This allows the game to be played twice, once as each character so that the gamer can get more out of the story (it’s worth it just to see what each character says about the same areas – especially the porn section of the video store). With the dead coming to life, the game quickly becomes a “zombie-killing” exercise where you end up shooting down all opponents while trying to gather information. It’s a bit of a departure from the usual premise of the show – violence first then science and investigative work but then again a game about lab work wouldn’t exactly be a top seller.

 

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Game progression occurs once you accomplish all of the required investigating for an area, by completing a specific goal (such as protecting your partner while they accomplish something), or by beating a specific enemy (boss-fight). During the course of the action, you are constantly updated on your current knowledge via your personal notepad. As you “learn” things in the game, their significance is then written down on your notepad for you to read as you go. The problem with this is that if you’re missing a 

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specific piece of information, you have to back-track through the level looking for whatever object you missed. With the re-spawning of some enemies, you will then expend health and valuable ammunition running through the area trying to figure out what you missed. This wouldn’t be so bad, if most of the details weren’t hidden in the most obscure places and can be walked over without the game warning you that you could have interacted with that object.

The game is third person action with the camera always centered on the character. This is both a help and a hindrance with you always being able to see what is happening around you, but then you can’t see in front or behind more than 5-6 feet in front and behind because the camera is locked. Normally, this isn’t too much of a problem but whenever a zombie is running at you, you’re going to get hit a few times before you can arm yourself, target the enemy, and then attack. It doesn’t happen too often, but in areas where enemies infinitely re-spawn you can get into trouble quickly if you don’t deal with them at range before you get overwhelmed by numbers.

Speaking of the action, my biggest beef with the game has to be the lack of ammunition available. For a game that throws armies of zombies at you, it would be nice to not have to run out of ammo every 5^th fight and have to resort to fist fights. (It’s a Colorado mountain town, for cripes’ sake, so finding hunting ammo should have been easy.) After starting out in the mountain town, the game returns home and you start piecing together this incident with previous plot lines involving the syndicate (that’s when the story starts becoming convoluted).

X-Files: Resist or Serve sounds great, both with the excellent job on the voice acting and the understated score which doesn’t distract from the game or become so tedious that you end up turning it down (which you can do, with the music volume control!). The visuals are decent, with some excellent details one moment ruined by grainy/boxy characters the next. The use of the DVD-ROM disc was good with all of the cut-scenes being pre-rendered in high-quality making for some really cool front-end graphics for the game.

All in all, X-Files: Resist or Serve is an above average game that will be loved by all fans of the X-Files series, but those gamers who aren’t fans of the series will find a game that requires you to know a little too much about the back story to appreciate the nuances of every character and meeting.

- Tazman

(May 17, 2004)

“This smoldering portrait of Queen Elizabeth II gives poignant new meaning to the phrase, "Hey check out that flaming queen."”

- Trisha Takinawa (The Family Guy)

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