At the start you get to see a lot of the playable character, Marina Alekseevna, who wakes from a boozy binge sleep to find that the world has succumbed to a virus–a virus that turns everyone into murderous loony-zombies.
Unless you're new to gaming, this scenario will sound quite familiar, and is reminiscent of the survival horror classic Resident Evil.
More Resi-fluence comes in the form of combining potted herbs to make health potions, a safe save room with a storage chest, and even Marina's outfit looks like one of Claire Redfield's castoffs!
So Ebola Village is a survival horror game, primarily developed as a one-man project by Victor Trokhin under the name Indie Games Studio. Apparently it's the fourth main entry in the indie Ebola series, and was ported and published on consoles by Axyos Games.
Okay, so there's a bit of background on the game, now to bring its weaknesses to the foreground. The localisation is minimal, with Russian dialogue and only English subtitles, so you better have them turned on or you won't have a clue what's going on–not that it'll matter much. The movement and animation of the various enemies is poor, they clip into and through the scenery and suffer from “gravity fails” wherever there's a slope or steps.
The movement and aiming sensitivity is jerky and difficult to play with–even after fiddling with the sensitivity. Optimised for the Xbox controller this game is not. The frame rate is variable but mostly ok, the textures aren't bad either, but it all looks so old. You can't really shoot or damage any of the scenery and all of the glass is bullet proof, which really dates the game.
The in-game sounds are actually pretty good, with authentic sounding weapons and some decent atmospheric music. Unfortunately the village also has a crappy map (it doesn't even show the entire floor of a building), ridiculous loading times while you change areas (you get creaky door or stairs just like 1996 Resident Evil), freezes whenever any sort of significant enemy is about to appear and weapons that sometimes just don't fire when you press the trigger–Ugh
The gameplay consists of too-ing and fro-ing around the village combining one thing with another to unlock something and kick off another search for something that might be useful. Controls are standard FPS, (movement on the left stick, look on the right, fire/attack on the R trigger, reload on 'X') and you can easily assign weapons to quick select positions on the D-pad. There's no "jump" button so Marina is always rooted to the ground, and having 'sprint' on the left stick click ('L3') feels clunky and doesn't work well.
Another point I'd like to make is that while I like the uncluttered view (no ammo or health gauges), the fact that your health gauge is only displayed while you're in your inventory screen is daft, and led to many unnecessary deaths for me (your view looks the same whether you're at 100% health or on the verge of death at 10%–at which point any contact from an enemy will kill you.)
Another thing I hate and Ebola Village is horribly guilty of is 'bullet sponge’ enemies, some of which took what was frankly unintentionally amusing amounts of bullets and/or shotgun shells to kill. Frankly, the final ‘boss fight’ is utterly ridiculous, as are some of the enemy creatures–I mean, Werewolves, really?
Unlike the rest of the scenery the zombie-like infected enemies do show bodily damage and things can get quite gory as you blow lumps off them, even arms and legs. I even had one crawl after me because I'd blown both his legs off!
So... If you're a survival horror addict you may want to put yourself through this miserable experience for 6-ish hours, but first-person Resident Evil from Russian Temu didn't cut it for me, even if it's priced at only £16.74.
Thanks to I.G.S. Indie Games Studio, Axyos Games and PressEngine