You can play Resident Evil in this Doom 2 mod, and it’s surprisingly faithful

Resident Evil and Doom have always existed on opposite sides of the horror spectrum, but here's a mod that mixes their DNA together and creates something pretty fantastic. Resident Evil Code Name Hunk—which, funny enough, is my code name too—is a total conversion mod that adopts Resident Evil's slower over the shoulder shooting to create a faithful RE game using Doom 2. Confused? Just watch the trailer above and it'll all make sense.

Created by modder Doomero, Resident Evil Code Name Hunk goes back to the series' origins as you play Hunk, a secret government agent, as he tries to recollect some virus samples responsible for transforming everyone into shambling zombies. Of course, the most immediate thing to fawn over is that Doomero has transformed a first-person shooter famous for quickly strafing around and blasting demons into a third-person shooter famous for its slow tension and atmosphere—and, for the most part, it works. All the little weird nuances of later Resident Evil games, like not being able to fire without first aiming, are lovingly recreated.

What actually blows me away, however, isn't that Code Name Hunk doesn't just recreate the basic shooting of Resident Evil, but everything else that makes a Resident Evil game tick. Right now the mod is essentially a demo, containing only a portion of the final game's missions, but it has every ingredient to a great Resident Evil game. Obtuse puzzles, like memorizing passcodes, multitudes of enemies to kill in claustrophobic spaces, and an entirely secondary campaign that runs parallel to Hunk's story are all included. When you're done infiltrating Umbrella labs secret facilities in Metro City, you can head out into the forests as Krauser, another well-known RE character, for an entirely different kind of campaign. Krauser uses a bow and arrow and his mutated arm for a very different style of play. For a Doom 2 .wad, Code Name Hunk is ambitious as hell.

That isn't to say it's all fun to play, however. The voice acting and cutscenes are pretty awful—using what I imagine are stolen bits of dialogue from other games but mashed together so as to be incoherent most of the time. For a series known for its terrible voice acting, Code Name Hunk sets a new bar. Other than that, some of the enemies are more of a pain to fight than a thrill. That hasn't really dampened my enthusiasm for it, however.

If you want to play, you can download the mod here. You'll need a copy of Doom 2 or you can use Freedom, a free replacement for Doom 2. If you're unfamiliar with how to set up Doom mods you can follow this simple guide—just use the instructions related to 'ZDoom/GZDoom' since that's the framework this one uses. If you're just curious, YouTuber Icarusliv3s has a comprehensive review of the mod you can watch below.

Doomero promises more missions will be arriving shortly, and I hope that as time goes on the rougher patches get smoothed out. Regardless, Resident Evil Code Name Hunk is a fun crossover .wad that shows just how malleable Doom 2 is after all these years.

With over 7 years of experience with in-depth feature reporting, Steven's mission is to chronicle the fascinating ways that games intersect our lives. Whether it's colossal in-game wars in an MMO, or long-haul truckers who turn to games to protect them from the loneliness of the open road, Steven tries to unearth PC gaming's greatest untold stories. His love of PC gaming started extremely early. Without money to spend, he spent an entire day watching the progress bar on a 25mb download of the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo that he then played for at least a hundred hours. It was a good demo.