The horrible thrills of Resident Evil stepped online last year with Resident Evil: Outbreak. It was one of the few games to use the PS2's hard drive and the first attempt at a cooperative online mode in the genre of survivor horror. Outbreak File #2 is the sequel, with more areas that involve the same general gameplay idea.

The residents of Raccoon City are being plagued by the telltale apocalyptic threats familiar to Resident Evil games - mutated, bio-engineered zombies and their ilk. You'll choose your character from among eight mostly average citizens and use their specific talents to battle and explore your way through many different areas varying in size, complexity and difficulty.

You can choose the obvious as your character - the cop who starts with a gun - but there are other, more interesting options, too. There's a security guard (with textbook potbelly), a student (with a handy backpack for stuff), a reporter and a plumber, for example. The various skills are clearly and obviously meant to work with other characters in concert, but with no voice communication support you'll have to depend upon the very limited commands built into the directional pad keys to get things done between players. Things like, "go, help, thank you," and a few other basic phrases are all you'll have to choose from when trying to coordinate four players and get from place to place.

Essentially, you'll choose an area (one you've already been through in single player), then be matched with up to three other players. Then you and your group will start fighting your way through the area to take out all the zombies, zombie dogs or zombie elephants - whatever sorts of zombies happen to be in your way.

In most ways, Outbreak File #2 looks and acts exactly like the first Outbreak and like other RE games. The hit detection between you and enemies with melee weapons is still spotty and unreliable, your characters are still limited in their field of view based on their location in a room, and the collision detection between characters is still nonexistent. But one big improvement is the ability to move while aiming a gun. It's a big step for Resident Evil, and as welcome as it is, it's ironically pretty hard to get used to. But once you do, it's obviously a huge improvement.

The load times, which happen between every room, aren't very long. But there are a lot of them because each area is so small. It gets tiring pretty quickly, but if you have the PS2 hard drive you can load a lot of the game at the beginning and the waiting will not be nearly as bad. For online play, all games are segregated between those who have the hard drive and those who do not.

After playing Resident Evil 4 not many months ago, it's hard to go back to what is now considered old-school Resident Evil. RE4 was so smooth, so immersive that it makes Outbreak feel ancient. Outbreak File #2 never lets you forget you're playing a video game. The menus, the interactions between you and other objects, it all felt clunky before and now it's much worse by comparison.

But there isn't an online game structured like this, and in some ways it's very challenging. Navigating and conquering the various areas within a specific time frame and in an efficient manner, with other live players, is just the right recipe for those of us whose ears perk up every time we hear of the possibility of cooperative play online. The formula isn't too far removed from how we team up with other players in role-playing games and MMO's, and there's a reason those games are popular. But in this case, it's just not executed as well as we've grown to expect. If you're familiar with the first Outbreak, you'll find File #2 to be very much an expansion of that game.