Ebola Village Review

Ebola Village tells the story of Maria who is casually watching her favorite TV show that ends being interrupted by a disturbing live news report revealing that a biological threat had began spreading nearby. Upon hearing this, she grabs her things and leaves for a remote village to look for her mother and ex-husband.

Ebola Village is a first person survival horror shooter where players will need to explore every nook and cranny to find resources, but also survive the horrors caused by the outbreak in the remote village. You’ll also need to find keys to unlock doors and other useful things like bolt cutters or grease to access new areas.

And yes, our heroine will come across a few tools to defend herself. You’ll get a knife, pistol, shotgun… and that’s it. You’ll find plenty of ammo for both firearms which means you’ll barely, if ever, resort to using the knife unless you’re challenging yourself… for some reason. You’ll also be able to yourself with what else: plants.

You’ll start off the game with extremely limited inventory space meaning it becomes a headache early on what to pick up and also requires players a few trips to the save room in order to store items for later. As you explore and progress, you’ll thankfully find pouches for extra storage.

The game looks passable; could easily be mistaken for an early PS2 game. Or even alpha version of a game. The environments are dark and drab to reflect the game’s premise. The loading time between room movement is unexplicably long; sometimes you might think the game crashed. Also it hilariously loads the textures in front of your eyes after the long loading sequences. Also for the some reason, during “cutscenes”, the game cuts to black for half a second. Incredibly annoying. On the audio side of things, the voiceovers are hilariously bad and overacted. The ambiant noise and sound bytes are fairly decent.

Oh lord. Where do we begin with the problems. The inventory management is a pain in the ass; reminiscent of the first Resident Evil game on PS1 when playing as Chris. Expect a lot of back and forth to the storage box. Even if sometimes you find pouch for extra slots, the more you progress, the more items you find meaning it doesn’t really solve the item management nuisance. The shooting is incredibly flimsy.

The puzzles are also incredibly obtuse with no clear hints. The game’s progress is also questionable. As you explore early on, you’ll come across items that the game says you can interact with/pick up, but you cannot pick up because you haven’t reached the required checkpoint in the game where the item is required. Which can cause frustration and completely unnecessary backtracking. Also when you get hit once, not even in Danger Status (yes the same health meter as in Resident Evil), 70% of the screen becomes transparent red for a few seconds and it’s annoying because it hinders your vision.

Ebola Village is an incredibly sloppy, unpolished clone of Resident Evil. It looks and plays like a PS2 game, the shooting is flimsy, the visuals are incredibly outdated, the voice over is hilarious, there’s also so much unnecessary backtracking. That being said there is a nugget of a good game here; that could’ve benefited from two years of QA and polish. I know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but not sure this is flattering for Capcom’s flagship series. Unless you’ve 100% all Resident Evil games and cannot get enough of that formula, Ebola Village might tickle your fancy. Otherwise, stick to Capcom’s juggernant.