It’s been a long time since the Resident Evil series could realistically be considered a part of the “survival horror” genre that it helped create. Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D finally sheds all pretense of drama and suspense.

Mercenaries, released on Tuesday for Nintendo 3DS, is based on a game mode that was available in past Resident Evil games. Here, it has been refined and engineered into a new experience that makes great use of the portable nature of the 3DS.

It’s a throwback to arcade-style action: Players enter a closed arena teeming with zombies and take down as many enemies as possible before time expires. The challenge of Mercenaries is not mere survival but skill; you will be playing and replaying the game’s 30 missions over and over to get high scores.

Setting high scores is how you can unlock bonus content like extra characters, fancy new costumes and skills that enhance your abilities.

Fond of melee attacks? Use the Combat skill to give your punches extra power. Worried about zombie bites? Use the Toughness skill to decrease damage. You can equip up to three skills at once and they level up through use, offering bonus powers when they reach max level.

These light role-playing elements, in addition to the new ability to swap weapons between characters, add an extra layer of strategy and customization to a game that might otherwise become quite repetitive.

While the concept was lifted from previous games, Mercenaries 3D is faster and more fun than the console versions. Your characters are finally free to move and shoot at the same time, a restriction that made sense when Resident Evil was about suspense but one that felt needlessly stiff when it became more about fast action.

Inventory management is no longer an issue thanks to the 3DS touchscreen — just press a weapon to equip it. You no longer have a limit to the amount of ammo and supplies you can carry, and characters no longer go through an elaborate animation each time they pick up an item on the battlefield. This means you spend more time using your equipment to blow things away than you do collecting and organizing it.

Despite all its streamlining, Mercenaries starts off slow. The first half of the game is dominated by tutorial missions that teach you everything: how to run, how to aim, how to put more time on the clock. Series veterans may find this lead-in obnoxiously slow, but new players should appreciate the learning curve.

Everything changes after the game’s first boss fight, however. From about level four onward, the enemies get tougher and the missions get longer. Mission 4-5 pits you against 15 waves of enemies that begin as cannon fodder but quickly power up with chainsaws and miniguns. At this point, you may want to phone a friend.

Mercenaries offers local and online cooperative gameplay with friends or random people. Unfortunately, the 3DS offers no meaningful way of contacting players you meet online, and the game lacks voice chat. Given the importance of teamwork and communication, I recommend partnering with a friend in the same room.

Publisher Capcom made an odd decision with the way Mercenaries handles saved data. The cartridge has only one save slot and the data cannot be reset. This means that you cannot start from scratch, cannot share the game with a friend and if you buy a used copy of the game it will likely already have all of the content unlocked.

For me, this isn’t much of a problem. Mercenaries is built on replayability and the pursuit of higher scores. Back in the day, I used to download save files for games on my Sega Dreamcast system so that I could access all of the unlockable content immediately. Sure, it meant having strangers’ names on the high score list, but it didn’t stop me from playing the game on my own. I can understand fans’ frustrations, but it’s entirely possible to enjoy Mercenaries 3D despite this unfortunate situation.

So is Mercenaries, with its borrowed levels and focus on repetition, enough of a game? Granted, the enemies and stages are all taken from Resident Evil 4 and 5. And if you own those games, you’ll no doubt notice the sacrifices made to port the experience to a handheld (fewer enemy types and animation frames, for starters).

However, the enhanced interface and new skill system make this 3DS version more than the sum of its borrowed parts. Given the choice between Mercenaries and Resident Evil 5’s Mercenaries mode, I prefer the handheld version to its high-res but lumbering ancestor.

So far, the Nintendo 3DS lineup is dominated by ports of games from other consoles. Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D certainly does nothing to dispell that perception, and its launch is further complicated by the save-data snafu. However, the addition of touchscreen controls and new customization options allow Mercenaries 3D to stand on its own two feet as a solid, if largely familiar, action game.

WIRED Improves on the Resident Evil action formula, offers high replay value (especially in co-op).

TIRED Too many tutorial missions, save data cannot be reset, little new content.

Rating:

$40, Capcom

Read Game|Life’s game ratings guide.