Zero Tolerance Collection Review

The Zero Tolerance series was first released way back when in 1994 for SEGA’s Genesis/Mega Drive. The game was developed by Technopop, the first independent American development studio to work on SEGA’s 16-bit machine. The game was published by Accolade. QuByte and Piko have resurrected the series for the 21st century. Does game mechanics from the 1990s hold up today? Let’s find out.

Zero Tolerance is set in the future where mankind managed to colonize the Solar System. It tells the story (and I use that term loosely) of a team of five marines who enter Europa-1, the flagship of the Planet Defense Corps facility, in order to exterminate alien species and human soldiers that have been infected by the alien intruders.

Zero Tolerance Collection is a trilogy of three first-person old-school arena shooters where you walk around areas and kill everything in your path with a mildly decent arsenal of weaponry that can be collected. If you run out of bullets, you can rely on your mighty fists to try and take down alien scum.

The collection includes Zero Tolerance, Zero Tolerance Underground, and an unreleased demo called Zero Tolerance Beyond. The first two games are available from the get-go whereas the demo needs to be unlocked when you complete the previous two games.

After you’ve selected your game, you can choose from five members of an elite squad. Each member has a unique set of skills and weapons which offers a bit of replay value if you’re tempted to try the different characters. Although nope that once a character dies, he becomes unavailable meaning each soldier acts a bit as a life.

Oh boy. So the game does have major issues by today’s standards. It’s a first-person shooter that uses only the left joystick to move around and control your character. While back in the day, it could cut it, by today’s standards, this makes it near unplayable. Trying to move around, find enemies and aim is incredibly frustrating. Additionally, the HUB is cluttered with garbage. Even with bigger screens, given that a lot of gamers don’t play one foot away from a monitor/tv, it makes seeing enemies and items pick up hard to see. And on top of that, the wobbly movement makes it dizzying.

The game looks fine for what it is. The HUD is so cluttered and the soldier’s POV is so incredibly small, you can’t see things unless you’re next to them. Even on a 43″ TV, I had to squint to *try* and see enemies to try and kill them before they pummeled me to death. The movement is always a bit too fast for the limited view. On the audio side of things is a decent 16-bit Genesis-y chiptune score that does a surprisingly decent job of creating a creepy ambiance.

While this might have been a worthwhile experience on the SEGA Genesis/Mega Drive in the 1990s, this is a headache to play by today’s standards, given how far we’ve come from since then. Wolfenstein 3D plays better than this and you can actually see what you’re doing/your enemies. This is just a cluttered mess thanks to archaic controls and polluted HUD. It’s also another example of a franchise that should’ve stayed in the past. PIKO and QuByte are doing questionable decisions because none of their re-releases are worth your time and money unless you played them originally in the 1990s. Stay far away from this.