Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles

Hitting the minus button also enables you flick to an inventory screen and hot-swap weapons in and out of four slots during the game, meaning you now have the facility to call upon rarely used items (like grenades or a rocket launcher) when the opportunity arises. Reloading requires little more than a flick of the remote, leaving you able to focus almost entirely on unloading your clips into mutant brains.

Fortunately motion-based controls and Quick Time Events are kept to a minimum, excepting the occasional boss-based button combo and rare zombie grappling, where frantically wafting the Wii remote is generally deemed suitable punishment. Once again, you'll find yourself blasting idly at random scenery elements even during lulls, lest they harbour hidden loot such as extra cash or hidden files for you to read later.

As you might recall from last time around, weapon upgrades become more important as the game progresses. This gives you the opportunity to not only improve your mission performance but eventually tackle the game at higher difficulty and gain access to the numerous secret unlockable modes.

To add a modicum of replayability to the five-to-six hour-long game, each level is playable from two character's perspectives. Branching paths in certain stages ensure that you have to play them at least twice to stand a chance of unlocking all the secrets. But with the game positively begging to be played with a friend, chances are you'll want to play it again with someone else anyway. As before, each level is graded, giving you something to aim for in subsequent replays.

But the best result of Capcom's decision to go back and revisit the old classics isn't the dumb fun of on-rails shooting - it's how lovingly they've been brought up to date. Although in our mind's eye the old Resi Evils still look great, firing them up can be a sobering experience when exposed to the harsh mistress that is the modern high-definition telly. If these on-rails affairs serve any purpose at all, it's to let us relive the hammy storylines, whizz around those locations we spent so long poring over and tackle the boss battles in a way that does justice to our treasured memories.

Technically, The Darkside Chronicles stands up alongside the best that the Wii has to offer - beautifully rendered environments are complimented by a procession of superbly recreated enemies. The boss sections are an absolute delight. With vast hordes of foes filling the screen, a quickfire re-imagining of some of gaming's most viciously memorable sequences is offered up for our delectation. Even if you missed out on certain portions of the sprawling Resident Evil timeline, it's hard not to be seduced by what is an undeniably first-class on-rails shooter.

On the downside Capcom still hasn't figured out an online mode, citing lag as the key reason it wasn't included. To be fair, for a game that's tailor-made for living room co-op, that's not such a big deal. What you do get are online leaderboards which - assuming you can be bothered with Friend codes - provide a means of tracking your level performance across the entire game.