Shooting, Smashing and Soaring with Capcom at E3

We go hands on with Dark Void, a new Resident Evil and Spyborgs at the Capcom booth.

Looking at Capcom’s release list for E3 and having to select just a handful of titles to see in our limited time there was tough, but we’re fairly confident the titles we ended up seeing were among the finest the company has to offer. Here are our hands-on impressions of what’s brewing behind the scenes at Capcom.

First up, Dark Void looks incredible, and plays about the same. Anyone who has ever seen The Rocketeer and dreamed about strapping on a rocket pack will appreciate the fluid and effortless flight style Capcom has obviously tweaked and tuned to perfection for this game. The lush outdoor environments reminded us a bit of a much more realistic version of Tribes, but more impressively, the transitions to less organic, indoor environments are seamless, and the engine handles them just as well as the great outdoors, which is traditionally tough for developers to accomplish (again, look at Tribes).

Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles feels much like more of the same from the storied franchise – in part because it revisits the events of Resident Evil 2 and Code Veronica. The camera angles have been cranked up to make the action seem more frantic, but to us it just felt like helter-skelter, nausea-inducing amateur home video. Not a good change.

Spyborgs, an action brawler, has been one of the quieter releases from Capcom, but the team working on it has done an excellent job working within the graphical limitations of the Wii to produce a non-cartoon title that doesn’t immediately look dated, as some do. The cooperative action rolled along smoothly, for the most part, but slowed-down cutscenes that allow you to tag-team enemies with finishing moves got to be a bore quickly, even in our relatively brief demo. (This was apparently necessary to compensate for the delay of the Wii controller when used for motion, a developer explained.)