Resident Evil Outbreak

The controls and gameplay are similar to the Resident Evil remake, which was exclusive to the GameCube, with quite a few adjustments. The player chooses a scenario, difficulty level, and character selection screen. The difficulty level is tied to what enemies and items the player encounters while progressing through the scenario. The game has five scenarios, each of which has an event checklist consisting of special actions that the player must perform to reach 100% completion.

Upon doing so the player will unlock "Infinity Mode", in which all the player's weapons never break or run out of ammunition. Completing the game on Hard difficulty unlocks "Lone Wolf Mode", where the player begins the game offline without AI partners.

The beginning of Outbreak is set a couple days after the initial outbreak of the T-virus in Raccoon City, moments before the crisis further escalates into complete chaos. The game starts with the eight characters in Jack's Bar, who are unaware of what is happening until a lone zombie wanders into the bar and attacks one of the employees named Will. Soon after, the characters must escape the bar and make it through the city to safety. S.

government launches a missile strike to eliminate the threat posed by the T-virus. The player controls one of eight characters with gameplay events transpiring across various regions of Raccoon City and span over a period of several days.

According to an interview with producer Noritaka Funamizu, the first concept of Biohazard Outbreak, as it was known originally, was known before the release of Resident Evil 2 in 1998. With growing interest in the concept of network gaming over consoles, Shinji Mikami, the director of the first Resident Evil, suggested to Funamizu that he should have a try. Early on in the design, Funamizu made a small multi-player mini-game in which the player must survive the longest time possible; the team decided to remove it due to its failure to encourage teamwork—players would instinctively run away from the horde and be slaughtered rather than help one another to ensure their own survival. They decided that what made Resident Evil scary was its lack of multiplayer, forcing gamers to play "on their own".

The team then chose that the game would follow its own story like the other games in the series, but keep the option for multi-player. The game development was later put on hold.

Outbreak received mostly mixed reviews. On review aggregator website Metacritic, the game received a total score of 71/100, and a score of 70% on GameRankings. 1UP.com awarded the game a "C+" in their review, describing it as "another typical entry in the RE canon", and a "competent game" with "controls [that] are actually functional and somewhat intuitive". However, they cited numerous problems with the game, notably Capcom's choice to not include voice chat in favor of the ad-lib system. They also found the game's five scenarios to be short, and AI partners to be "chock-full of repetitive and annoying sound bytes".

Eurogamer was disappointed with Capcom's failure to establish online support for the European market at a time when the PlayStation 2's online community was threatened with the expected rise in the Xbox's popularity with the upcoming release of Halo 2, stating that Resident Evil Outbreak was "designed from the ground up to be a co-operative multiplayer game for four players" and questioning if a network-less game would be of interest to players. Another problem was with the real-time "START" menu, which meant that file-reading and item-trading would make the player vulnerable to a random zombie attack, making the game "[feel] light in the story department" as a consequence of not becoming immersed in the environment. Long load times for the PAL version was also noted in the review.