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Back when the new retro survival horror title from Malformation Games called Ground Zero was announced last Summer, all of us here got pretty excited. The gameplay footage showed a strong inspiration and love for the early classics of the genre like the first four Resident Evil games and several others.
Now, six months later, we’ve gotten the chance to play through a good portion of the game on a playable build, and we’ve got some great news for those of you looking for that classic survival horror feel: Ground Zero is delivering the goods.
Right out of the gate, the game throws you into its story, where a meteor has crashed into Busan, South Korea, and has been causing mutations of all living things, mass chaos, and destruction.
You play as Seo-Yeon, a Korean soldier, who’s sent into the disaster zone alongside her Canadian partner operative to find the source and how far the destruction has spread.
The writing and dialogue are surprisingly well-written and performed by the voice actors. Instead of trying to pay homage to the corny voice acting that most retro survival horror titles go for, Ground Zero actually takes its story pretty seriously, and this works well for immersion.
The cutscenes are also very cinematic and add to the immersion in the story, which is a nice touch compared to what most of this sub-genre typically provides.
Before you even start playing, you’re presented with a host of options to tailor the experience to your liking. This includes choosing tank controls or more modern 3D controls, and also some visual options, including the option to downscale the game to look more authentic to a PS1-era game, or keep the resolution higher to have some added sharpness and clarity. Even in full resolution, Ground Zero is still built to look like a PS2-era game, but being able to tweak these options is a nice touch, even though it’s a pretty common option for this sub-genre nowadays.
Once you get control of Seo-Yeon and start playing, it’s quite impressive how good the game feels, as it maintains all the hallmarks of the classic survival horror gameplay with fixed camera angles. It has a handful of quality-of-life improvements throughout for just a little bit more accessibility and smoothness in the experience and you can choose between several difficulty levels, including a separate difficulty level for the puzzles.
Ground Zero feels like a perfect distillation of the 90s and early 2000s survival horror gameplay. The majority of its game mechanics feel as though they’re pulled right out of one of the classic games and mashed together, giving a lot of power to the player, but not so much that it feels broken or too easy.
For instance, you can fine-tune your aim with an analog stick in all directions after drawing your weapon, similar to something like Carrier or Cold Fear, and there’s also a dodge mechanic that’s straight out of Resident Evil 3. Besides these mechanics, there’s also a critical hit system where headshots and weak point shots do more damage, and even a “critical shot” mechanic. This is where timing your shot just right can get you higher damage, or even break locks or obstacles that stand in your way, similar to Resident Evil 2 Remake‘s lesser-known critical shot system.
The game gives you a knife and a magnum pistol to start, and while it’s a far cry from the insanely powerful magnums of Resident Evil fame, the magnum is still a great weapon with stopping power and damage that feels just right for the amount of ammo you’ll find for it. There’s tons of other guns like shotguns, rifles, and other kinds of pistols, all with quite limited ammo, making you scavenge for supplies and learn the combat mechanics to save every bullet, and also learn to run past enemies to conserve your resources.
In the portion of the game Rely got to play, you’ll be taken through areas like an amusement park, hospital, police station, and many more, all reminiscent of classic survival horror locations, and there’s also points where you’ll have to choose one path or another, greatly altering the game and which areas you’ll see (similar to Resident Evil 3, again.) Every area feels unique and yet familiar, and even though they’re all technically rendered in low-poly 3D and have the occasional sweeping camera shot ala Silent Hill or Resident Evil: CODE Veronica, they all nail the feel the 2D backgrounds of old.
The puzzles and progression felt very satisfying and compelling, and I couldn’t put the game down for hours after starting. We don’t yet have a clear picture of how much more of the game is left after the point where the build cuts off, but I already had around 5 hours worth of gameplay and it doesn’t seem like I was even halfway through the game, so it’ll likely be pretty lengthy by the time the full game releases. Ground Zero also boasts plenty of unlockable modes, weapons, costumes, and modifiers, creating more replay value.
While we don’t have a release date quite yet, but we’re hoping Ground Zero aims to launch sometime in 2026. Judging by what we got to play, this is going to be one of our most anticipated retro survival horror games on the horizon.
You can currently wishlist the game on Steam, (there’s a short demo there as well) and stay tuned to Rely for more news and updates as they come. We’ll have a full review for you once it’s out.
