I think this might be the most authentic Resident Evil clone I’ve played, with a deep understanding of the vibe and aesthetic of the classics. It’s got the pitch-perfect environments, the puzzles, the combat, the goofy story, the weird outfits.

And beyond that, it’s also loaded with unlockables, new difficulties, tons of weapons and costumes for all the characters.

You can feel the love poured into this game and I think it goes without saying that I absolutely recommend this to any survival horror head whose pining to experience a time and place we can generally only fondly revisit in the classics.

I am aware this is still based on early playtime, but the problems I ran into are not late-game balance quibbles. They are foundational issues with controls, animation, camera work, combat feel, audio direction, and technical performance that show up almost immediately.

Excellent taste in inspiration, terrible timing on release.

Ground Zero caught my attention because it wears its inspirations openly. The fixed-camera survival horror setup, the Resident Evil and Dino Crisis DNA, the old-school pacing, the unlockables, the extra costumes, and the apparent extra characters all point toward exactly the kind of project I want to support. Unfortunately, it released before it finished building a game worthy of those influences.

I went in wanting to like it. I played the demo before launch and still bought the full game because the concept is strong. After playing the release version, my conclusion is simple: this needed more time for polish, optimization, animation work, camera refinement, and input fixes.

The biggest problem is that Ground Zero wants to be a technical survival horror game before it has nailed its fundamentals. It asks the player for precision aiming, timing-based mechanics, blocking, parries, counterattacks, and “critical shot” execution, but the game’s own foundation is too rough to support that level of demand.

The “critical shot” system is one of the clearest examples. Instead of being satisfying, it feels fussy. You get a left-right timing slider with a target box, and if you miss the timing, you waste ammo. That is already questionable in combat, but the game also applies similar timing frustration to interactions like opening locks. In a survival horror game where bullets are supposed to matter, wasting them because of a clumsy timing gimmick is not tension. It is irritation.

Combat has the same problem. Between aiming, timing, blocking, parrying, and counterattacking, the game constantly asks for technical execution, but the camera, controls, and overall polish do not feel trustworthy enough to justify that. This is not the kind of difficulty that makes you think, “I got outplayed.” It is the kind that makes you think, “the game is asking too much while still feeling unfinished.”

The camera is another major weakness. Since this game clearly wants to evoke classic fixed-camera horror, that part needed to be exceptional. It is not. Some angles feel awkward, and the cutscene direction looks amateurish. Strong camera work is everything in a game like this. Fixed-camera horror lives or dies on composition, staging, and clarity. Here, too often it just feels rough. The cutscenes especially do not feel authored with confidence. They feel like a lower-budget imitation of a cinematic style rather than a game with its own visual command.

Voice work also feels uneven. Some line delivery and pronunciation sound strange, and at times the main character even comes across as if she has two different voice directions or performances stitched together. In a game that leans this hard on atmosphere and cutscenes, that inconsistency hurts immersion more than it should.

Animation quality also needed far more work. The cuts are abrupt, there is no real lip sync, and the stairs are bad enough to break immersion by themselves. The main character does not climb them with believable foot placement — she glides up them. In a fixed-camera game, details like stairs, transitions, turns, and movement weight matter a lot because they are always being framed. When those details are cheap, the whole illusion suffers.

Keyboard and mouse support also feels broken. On my end, vertical aiming worked with controller but not properly on KBM, which is unacceptable in a PC release. That is not a minor nitpick. That is a core control issue.

Then there is the optimization. I am playing on a high-end system: RTX 4090, i9-13900K, 32 GB RAM, dual Samsung 990 Pro NVMe drives. A game with this level of production should not be pushing my system this hard for what is actually on screen. I initially let it run higher and the fan ramp was absurd. Even after capping it to 60 FPS, the game still felt far heavier than it had any right to be. When a budget fixed-camera horror game is making top-end hardware work this hard while also showing hard-cut animations, stair gliding, broken KBM aiming, and weak cutscene direction, something is wrong technically.

The visual polish does not help either. Effects like lens flare are distracting rather than atmospheric. Instead of enhancing mood, they draw attention to themselves. That sums up a lot of Ground Zero: many of its ideas are understandable in theory, but the execution keeps getting in the way.

The audio direction also feels uneven. Ambient details like rain and environmental noise are present, but the music itself has done very little to build tension so far. In a genre where soundtrack and sound design are crucial to dread, that matters. Instead of heightening unease, the score often feels too weak or too disconnected to leave much impact.

The most frustrating part is that there is a real game in here. I can see the passion. I can see the old-school horror love. I can see why people like the premise. But that does not change the fact that this feels undercooked. It has the right genre instincts, but not the release quality needed to support them.

What hurts the most is that this is not a case of “indie jank, but the core is strong.” Several of the problems live in the core itself. The systems, camera, controls, and technical state all need more work. And when your game includes six difficulty levels, the fact that even the lower-middle portion of that curve already feels annoying instead of well-tuned is another warning sign.

Ground Zero did not fail because it aimed at classic survival horror. It failed because it tried to be mechanically demanding, cinematic, and stylish before it had finished the basics.

This is not a hate review. I wanted this to be good, which is exactly why I am being this hard on it.

Ground Zero has strong survival-horror DNA, but it shipped too early.
Come back after serious fixes to polish, camera work, animation, input, audio direction, and optimization.

There are severe optimization issues preventing me from continuing with the game. At the very least, the system requirements on the store page are disingenuous because I meet and exceed recommended by several GPU generations yet cannot maintain a playable framerate.

GPU utilization is pinned at 100% irrespective of what's on screen, memory clocks redline and high power usage despite the game having graphics that shouldn't soak my GPU like that. Downscaling ingame to lowest possible (25%) gives me a pixelated mess and GPU utilization hovers around 80%, still unreasonably high. Even changing resolution to its lowest possible still drives the GPU to near maximum when I would expect a significant GPU offload.

This is NOT an uncapped framerate issue, as there are ingame settings for v-sync and I set a global cap anyways. I'm not even hitting that ceiling. For a game of this fidelity, I shouldn't have to deal with the hottest temps and loudest fans I've ever had on my GPU. Compare to a recent bleeding-edge AAA game, like RE9, where even at very high settings, seem to maintain a lower GPU util and a higher framerate.

I'm disappointed since this was my most anticipated game of the year. A real let-down. I don't advise purchasing until a few patches have rolled out and even then, these issues were evident in the demo and they still weren't addressed. There's something under the hood causing these issues, something with the engine or programming and not something an end user can resolve.