Are you used to blasting your way through Resident Evil games? You’d better learn to save your ammo.

Although it looks a lot like modern Resident Evil games, in my experience Resident Evil: Revelations for Nintendo 3DS feels more like the games that kicked off Capcom’s survival-horror series.

I played the game’s E3 Expo demo at a preview event last month, and quickly found out that simply blasting away at zombies without any regard for my depleting stock of bullets was a bad idea. I soon ended up with more zombies than ammo, and ended up as delicious food for the undead.

Displaying the zombie-shooting action on the top 3-D screen, Revelations uses the lower touchscreen as a controller. You can tap your array of weapons to swap between them, and slide on a certain area to look around the room. As with other games in the series, you can’t shoot while you’re walking; you have to hold the right shoulder button to aim your weapon at your shuffling, reanimated foes.

Things kick off with a typically Resident Evil-style, which is to say nonsensical, puzzle: You’re trapped in a room with a locked door, and you encounter a full tub in the bathroom. Draining the tub reveals … a screwdriver. How did it get in there? Who takes a bath with their trusty screwdriver? And where are they now?

The answers to none of these questions are revealed, but you use the conveniently (if inappropriately) placed tool to open a panel and short-circuit the door. Revelations will pack touchscreen puzzles, and this is the demo’s first: You tap the screws on the panel, then drag power nodes around a grid until they’re aligned correctly.

Revelations benefits from impressive graphics, and wandering through the mansion and blowing away (or narrowly escaping) zombies is quite a sight to behold. However, it wasn’t too long before all these visually stunning enemies caused me to deplete my precious ammo supply.

To the rescue: Revelations‘ new gimmick, the supply scanner. Equip this awesome X-ray device, hold the Y button and swing it around the room to find otherwise unobtainable items stashed away in vases, boxes and other such hiding spots. It feels sort of like Metroid Prime, except instead of walls of text you find usable items.

Resident Evil: Revelations will not deign to grace the 3DS with its presence until 2012, although a playable demo will be included with Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D later this month.

Image courtesy Capcom