Well, this is embarrassing. I told myself I wasn’t going to buy another Call Of Duty after they switched back to doing their oh-so-tedious contemporary settings, but with the werewolves and the giant castle this newest one at least looked a bit diff – wait, what? This is a Resident Evil game?

I am being deliberately facetious here, but less so than you might think. I skipped Resident Evil 7 because I was dubious about the series being able to effectively make the switch to first-person perspective, and also because I found its Texas Chainsaw Massacre-derived premise to be considerably less interesting than zombie horror. I took a chance on Resident Evil 8 because there were werewolves on the box and those are a much more effective hook for me, not to mention the game also shipping with Mercenaries mode for the first time in forever. (Also I was extremely bored.) Still, I went into it with a certain degree of trepidation, unsure of quite what I was getting myself into; after two decades of third-person horror¹ how well would Resident Evil manage to incorporate first-person mechanics?

The answer is: pretty damn well, as it turns out. Rather too well, in fact, to the point where I think it’s backfired considerably.

Resident Evil Village is a direct sequel to Resident Evil 7 with the same protagonist and supporting cast and plot threads, which makes certain elements of the story a somewhat confusing experience when you didn’t actually play Resident Evil 7. What I picked up from the intro was this: Ethan Winters and his wife Mia have moved to a generic eastern European town to recover from their traumatic experience of being menaced by the super-hillbillies in Louisiana, and to raise their newborn baby daughter Rose. This doesn’t quite stick, as within the first five minutes of the game Mia is riddled with bullets and Rose is abducted by none other than the Resident Evil series’ noted rock-puncher and steroid enthusiast, Chris Redfield.  Ethan reacts to all of this with about the same level of emotion as somebody watching their freshly-buttered piece of toast fall face-down on the floor, and as Chris is clearly suspicious that he’s been replaced with a robot he decides to abduct Ethan along with Rose. This doesn’t exactly go to plan, though, as the kidnapping van is attacked en route to wherever it’s going and Ethan’s guards are murdered, leaving Ethan himself to stumble through the snowy woods until he comes upon the titular (yet unnamed) Village.

This opening segment is, to be honest, pretty awful. Initially I was very impressed with the absurd graphical fidelity of the RE:Engine — Rose is certainly one of the highest-definition babies I’ve ever seen, including most real-life babies — but the first half hour of the game is an entirely linear sequence where you blunder through various buildings, find a pistol that might as well be a popgun for all the use it has against the incredibly dull zombie knockoffs that are pursuing you (certainly you have nowhere near enough ammo at this point for it to be effective) and then have to just evade enemies until an invisible timer ticks down, at which point they all get bored and go away. The game is trying to tutorialise things during this segment which is why it’s so constrained, except it’s not doing a very good job beyond the standard FPS controls — it seemed to think the shelf-barricading mechanic was a very important thing to teach me, but it’s used perhaps twice outside of the tutorial. I got awfully frustrated here because despite the linearity it wasn’t all that clear what my overall objective was and the game wouldn’t tell me, it just stuck me in a small, closed-off portion of the village and waited while I ran around in circles looking for a scripted trigger that would end the monster attack.

It was also here, while I was frantically dodging monsters trying to figure out what the hell I should do, that I ran into the first weird side-effect of the first-person perspective. Resident Evil Village feels and plays almost exactly like a regular first-person shooter. Aiming feels the same, shooting feels the same, and while Ethan is just a tad slower than the typical FPS protagonist, when he’s sprinting the movement feels the same. I was expecting a few more concessions to the survival horror side of things, like slower reloading, but as things stand it’s just a normal FPS 90% of the time, except with some added Resident Evil-flavour inventory management. And this is a problem for Village, because it lulls your brain into thinking everything is the same and that you can pull the usual FPS movement tricks. For example, in a normal FPS if you saw an enemy winding up for a melee attack you’d just nimbly skip backwards or sideways, the enemy would go through their attack animation and hit the spot where you just were, and you’d carry on blasting rounds into their exposed backside, and to start with I was expecting Resident Evil Village to behave the same way.

However, despite the appearances and the good work that has gone into getting the first-person gameplay of Village to feel as natural as possible, there are times when it feels the need to revert to third-person Resident Evil rules instead, where dodging isn’t really a thing (you’ll only manage it if you’re sprinting forwards at the time and can actively path around the attack radius of each enemy) and if an enemy starts an attack animation you’re usually getting hit unless you can kill them before it completes. This makes a certain amount of sense in third-person where your movement is slower and the enemies don’t have to do too much bullshit auto-tracking in order to hit you, but since Ethan is far more agile than the typical Resident Evil protagonist it’s incredibly jarring to see an enemy just starting their attack animation as you move past them to get to a better position, continue on for several metres — long past the point where they should be able to hit you — and then get rudely turned around by a canned “oh no I’m being stabbed” animation as they instantly teleport through the intervening space to connect with their attack.

This made playing through the monster attack event particularly annoying, as my brain was screaming at me that this was an FPS and that I should be playing it in a certain way, but Village wasn’t having any of it and kept punishing me with unwanted close-ups of the bland monster designs as they repeatedly sunk their teeth into Ethan’s neck. I actually died during the tutorial because of this, which is not the best first impression a game can make. Now, as it happens this was possibly the one thing the tutorial did manage to teach me: don’t bother with any dodging, just methodically punt bullets into the enemies while walking backwards until they fall over, and thanks to this harsh lesson I didn’t die once in the entire rest of the game.

Still, I’ve mentioned a couple of times before that the silver lining behind a game having an absolutely terrible opening is that it can only really improve from there. Village’s on-rails intro sequence is obnoxious, but it’s at least over relatively quickly and gets you through to some more familiar Resident Evil-looking gameplay that’s more focused around exploration and puzzle-solving. The story structure turns out to be a barely-disguised videogame classic: Ethan needs to collect four Macguffin items before he can get to the end of the game, and to do this he needs to venture into a series of monster theme parks — the Castle Zone, the Haunted House Zone, the… Being Chased By A Giant Fish Zone, and so on — with one of the Macguffins at the end of each one. After completing each zone he returns to the village, which functions as a hub area for the game that gradually opens up as Ethan picks up the necessary items on his travels; here he does a bit of more freeform exploration and secret-hunting before heading off to the next area, and I’d say that the design of the village is one of the few unambiguous successes that Resident Evil Village can point to. It’s not particularly interesting visually, being mostly a collection of wrecked houses stuffed with corpses, and if you look past the careful camouflaging you can see that Ethan’s route through it is actually pretty linear, with each completed zone opening up exactly one locked door and one new sub-area inside that village that leads to the next one. However, the camouflaging is pretty good to the point where you won’t really notice this unless you’re looking for it, and there’s enough secrets and small side areas squirreled away that it feels like exploration is actually worthwhile. I was always happy to return to the village to see what new things I could discover, and ended up digging up the vast majority of the optional items and treasure there — there weren’t all that many of them so it didn’t take that long, but it was the most interesting ongoing activity Resident Evil Village had to offer me.

The thing is, though, despite headlining the game the village isn’t really the primary focus of Resident Evil Village. If you have paid any attention at all to the pre-release marketing you’ll have noticed that the village was barely mentioned, in fact, with all of the publicity being focused around the game’s first dedicated theme park experience: being chased around a spooky castle by the tall vampire lady. This is actually a pretty good idea for a Resident Evil game (the castle part, anyway, I’m not quite as enthusiastic about the tall vampire lady as the rest of the internet seems to be); castles have lots of scope for exactly the sort of needlessly elaborate puzzles and secret mechanisms revealing hidden rooms that have been the series’ hallmark, and at first it looks like Village is going to realise the concept pretty well. Barging through the front door for the first time reminded me pleasantly of entering the mansion in the very first Resident Evil; it’s a seemingly innocuous environment that has that same feeling of eerie wrongness. The castle is fairly well put-together as an environment, with multiple floors that interconnect in different ways, and it’s probably the least linear part of the game with lots of backtracking and secrets to find. And as it’s still the start of the game the castle doesn’t go too overboard with the monsters, either, and gives you plenty of time to consider your next move, as well as soak in the atmosphere.

Really, the castle is almost a perfect little Resident Evil game in miniature — but therein lies the rub: I had thought, given the publicity that it had received, that the castle segment would be a much larger portion of the game. Unfortunately after I’d been round it once and found all of the bits to open the big locked door you encounter shortly after entering the castle, I was thrown into an extremely tedious bossfight with the tall vampire lady — who up until this point had existed as a sort of off-brand Mr X who slowly chases you from room to room, because every Resident Evil game apparently has to have one of them now — and then when I’d killed her I was rudely booted out of the back door to head back to the village. That was it, the castle was over, and it had taken well under two hours from start to finish. I could have gone back, but there was absolutely no need to because each of the game’s theme park zones is entirely self-contained; you can open 100% of the doors and pick up 100% of the loot there on your first time through, and so I did.

Because they’re so short, and because you never go back to the locations when you’re done with them, and also because with the exception of the castle they’re all pretty linear, every zone branching off from the village hub is nothing more than a normal FPS level that’s got a few Resident Evil things in it like a merchant you can buy guns and equipment from. You’ve got a haunted house where your guns are all taken away and you’re locked into an extremely sub-par escape room, and while I might have enjoyed the obvious care and attention that had gone into making all of Ethan’s interactions with the items in the room extremely tactile and physical, taking all of my guns away is a sure sign that I’m about to have to put up with thirty minutes of on-rails horseshit, and so it proved. Then there’s a cave/lake bit where you’re being chased by a giant fish; this is also entirely linear, incorporates exciting gameplay ideas like “pushing coloured switches”, and culminates in another tedious bossfight where the fish grows legs and an extremely obvious weak spot and starts chasing you on land instead. And then finally there’s a factory manufacturing robot zombies which is straight out of Wolfenstein; I have fewer complaints about this bit, except to wonder what on earth it’s doing in Resident Evil Village since tonally it’s completely at odds with the rest of the game.

(And then you have the game’s ending sequence, which I normally wouldn’t talk about because of the potential for spoilers but which I kind of have to mention because it includes a couple of things that tie into the overall thesis for this review: it gives you night vision goggles and a machine gun with practically unlimited ammo and makes you run down a linear path blasting hordes of enemies, and then when you get to the end of the path you point a laser targeter at a giant thing so that it can be hit with an airstrike. If this all sounds very familiar, it’s because it could have been pasted in from literally any Call Of Duty game released in the last fifteen years.)

“Tonally incoherent” is a good way to describe Resident Evil Village in general, in fact. There’s not really any through line connecting its various areas together, it’s more a collection of disparate level concepts that have all been thrown into a single game. Why are there zombies and vampires and werewolves² and giant fish and a robot man all in the same town? There is an explanation given towards the end, but it’s as nonsense as any of the other explanations behind the many bioweapons populating the rest of the Resident Evil games — worse, in fact, since those could at least use “oh yeah it’s Umbrella again” as a catch-all evil-corporation-up-to-no-good excuse. It can’t decide whether it wants to go for standard Resident Evil spooky, Silent Hill-style psychological horror or a more goofy, actiony romp like the Call Of Duty zombie mode, and so it does all of them at once and none of them particularly well. One of the reasons I quite like the village hub area is that it’s at least (mostly) consistent from start to finish where the rest of the game is awkward and disjointed, like it can’t quite muster up the attention span to pursue a single idea for much more than an hour. The variety at least means there’s probably something in here that’ll strike a chord with you — for me it was the castle, but other people might just as equally enjoy the straitjacketed escape room bit or the Wolfenstein factory — but that enjoyment always has a very limited shelf life as you know it won’t be long until Village gets bored of whatever it currently has you doing and moves you on to the next thing.

Anyway, that’s enough about the level design; I found it extremely disappointing since I’ve always thought the level design was the most interesting part of Resident Evil, but it’s by no means the only one and I also have a lot to say about the combat system, monster design, and a particularly baffling narrative decision that’s been carried forward from Resident Evil 7. As already stated, Village’s combat is practically indistinguishable from a regular FPS save for a few (incredibly annoying) edge cases.  Because this is a Resident Evil game there’s less weapon variety than you might expect from an FPS; while there are eleven or twelve distinct guns in the game most of them are straight upgrades from previous models, so you’ll pick up a new shotgun that has bigger numbers attached to it and immediately sell the old one because it’s now obsolete. The basic weapon archetypes boil down to pistol, shotgun, sniper rifle and grenade launcher — Village is even freer with the explosives than the Resident Evil 3 remake was, with Ethan getting access to mines and pipe bombs very early on — with the magnum existing off to the side as something you use on very special occasions because the ammo for it is incredibly scarce in comparison to the vast quantities of pistol bullets, shotgun shells and sniper rounds the game vomits at you.

Yes, I’m sorry to say that Village sticks closely to the Resident Evil 3 model of the player being expected to kill every single enemy they come across (on Standard difficulty, anyway), and being handed more than enough ammunition to accomplish this task several times over³.  I almost never felt the pinch of running out of ammo, never felt like avoiding enemies was a better idea than gunning them down, and this is a particularly acute problem in a first-person Resident Evil game because gunning everything down happens to be the exact same thing I do in every other FPS that’s not a Deus Ex or a SWAT. Not only that, but Village is the second Resident Evil game to walk back the detailed damage model shown off in the Resident Evil 2 remake, where you could stagger zombies to run past them or saw off a limb to slow them down; here most enemies just take 8 rounds to the chest or 6 to the head and then they fall over. It’s a much less interesting way of handling things; there’s no higher level tactical thinking going on, no clever use of the smaller weapons on trash enemies to save your big ammo for tough encounters, you just fire off whatever you’ve got at the time just like you would in Halo or Doom, happy in the knowledge that more will be along shortly.

(There was a single moment in Village where I did feel ammo-constrained. I’d found an item that unlocked a crypt hiding some treasure in an area of the village that I’d already been through, and I went back to dig it up. What I didn’t know was that doing this would spawn a late-game miniboss that I wasn’t equipped to deal with at this point. I took it down using every single mine, pipe bomb, shotgun shell and sniper round that I had, leaving me with just eleven bullets for the pistol. I then sold the treasure and bought up the merchant’s entire stock of ammo which meant I wasn’t totally screwed, but it still meant I had to be extra frugal for the next twenty minutes or so until I’d built my ammo reserves back up again. I wish more of Village had been like this instead of the arcade blastathon it actually is.)

To be completely fair to Village, I at least accept its being this gun-happy as a legitimate design decision in a first-person game — more so than I did in the Resident Evil 3 remake, anyway. Yes, it doesn’t feel much like a Resident Evil game at all (well, except for maybe Resident Evil 4), but it’s not like it does the mechanical business of shooting everything in sight badly. There’s even some pretty okay monster design once you get past the halfway point of the game and it starts mixing in harder monsters with its bog-standard zombie knockoffs: armoured enemies that require use of explosives to remove the armour before you can kill them (this is why Village is more generous with things that go boom than any Resident Evil game before it), who are then upgraded to robots with glowing weak spots that they cover with their hands and which you need to wait for a window of opportunity in order to strike. None of this is anything I haven’t seen a thousand times before, of course, but it does the job of injecting some much-needed thoughtfulness back into the combat; it was much more interesting to fight one robot than it was to have five zombies crawl out of the ground, because the robot required intelligent movement and precision aiming while the zombies just demanded I pay a bullet tax before I could move on to the next room. I will also concede that it was perhaps a mistake for me to play this on Standard difficulty; the harder settings reduce ammo drops and also spawn more of the tougher, more interesting enemies in place of the zombies, which definitely feels like it would bring things closer to what I expect and want from a Resident Evil game.

No matter what difficulty setting I’d picked, though, I’d still have to contend with the last and most baffling design decision Resident Evil Village makes, which is to give its protagonist Ethan Winters full-on Wolverine-style instant regeneration powers. Resident Evil protagonists have always been implausibly resilient, of course, nonchalantly shrugging off being clawed, bitten, stabbed and poisoned with the aid of the omnipresent Green/Red/Blue Herbs, but Ethan takes it to another level. I raised my eyebrow when a baddie telekinetically impaled him through the stomach with a piece of rebar during a cutscene and he just walked it off afterwards, but that’s not hugely out of the ordinary for the series. Said eyebrow was winched further skywards during another cutscene when Ethan has hooked chains shoved through the palms of his hands and is left to dangle from the ceiling; he frees himself by pulling downwards and causing the hooks to slice all the way through to the outside of his hands, which is certainly one way of doing it but which I thought would rather interfere with any subsequent attempts to e.g. use guns, or open doors, or do anything in the game now that he’s cut through all of the major muscle groups in his hands, but it turned out that after pouring a bit of healing chemical over the wound he was perfectly fine.

Still, while all of this was putting ever more strain on the thin thread suspending my disbelief, I wasn’t expecting Resident Evil Village to consciously and enthusiastically go out of its way to snap it entirely. The moment that caused my eyebrow to achieve escape velocity came towards the end of the castle, when Ethan reaches his hand forwards to pull a switch (there’s a lot of hand abuse in this game, as it’s the only part of Ethan’s body the player can consistently see) only to have it instantly sheared off by something very sharp. We’re no longer talking about something that can be glossed over with Video Game Logic here; his hand remains firmly attached to the switch lever while he pulls the bloodied stump back and screams. That hand was definitively and irreversibly gone — or at least, I thought it was because what’s he going to do, stick it back on? Alas, this turned out to be quite literally what happens; Ethan manages to eventually pull the switch with his other hand, collects the severed one on his way through the opened door, and then re-attaches it during a short elevator ride afterwards.

Again, to be completely fair to Village it’s at least somewhat aware that this is very, very stupid and the hand-severing incident is partially played for laughs, with Ethan’s shredded coat sleeve also miraculously knitting both halves together — does the coat have regeneration powers too? I did a bit of reading later and it turns out that there was some stuff that happened to him in Resident Evil 7 to justify it narratively, but the effect it has on this game is to kill any sense of tension Village might otherwise have had stone cold dead. If you can’t hurt the protagonist, then what on earth are the stakes? Sure, Ethan will die if his health reaches zero, but that’s more of a necessary mechanical detail than anything else, just like the screen getting more and more covered in red jam in Call Of Duty; I watched him get used as a chew toy by werewolves and gutted by robot zombie drills and felt absolutely nothing because narratively it didn’t matter and mechanically the only health point that matters is the last one. Maybe if he had a bit more of a personality I’d be willing to roll with the absurdity of it all, but Ethan is incredibly unlikeable, spending most of his time screaming at people to tell him what’s going on, and then when they tell him what’s going on he continues to scream at them to tell him what’s going on while they very slowly shut a big door cutting him off from the previous bit of the level, presumably because they can’t stand talking to him any more. And when I hate the person I’m playing, and when he’s literally demonstrated to be nigh-on unkillable, why would I give the tiniest iota of a shit what happens to him in the game?

And so by a somewhat circuitous route we come back to the not-really-a-joke I made at the start of the review. We have established the following points:

• Resident Evil Village looks and feels indistinguishable from a normal FPS.
• Resident Evil Village is extremely free with ammo and expects you to kill every enemy you come across by shooting them until they die.
• Resident Evil Village has long scripted chase/attack sequences, as well as first-person cutscenes where control is taken away from you and you have to watch Ethan doing something irredeemably stupid⁴.
• Resident Evil Village is pretty linear, all things considered, with almost no compulsory backtracking aside from wandering back through the village every now and then to get to the next area..
• Resident Evil Village isn’t scary. At all. It’s not even unsettling. It is, at best, mildly tedious.

So while it is a bit facetious to call this a Call Of Duty game with some light Resident Evil branding, it’s also a description that’s not a million miles wide of the mark. It strikes me as having a lot of the same problems the latter two iterations of the Metro series had, where they abandoned the interesting environmental elements that characterised the first game in favour of making it first into an actual CoD-derivative shooter in Last Light, and then an extremely shallow open world game in Exodus; both games still had a few bits that felt like Metro, and those were good, but the rest of it felt like a low-budget knockoff of something that had been executed on better elsewhere. Village never gets quite that bad, thankfully — I’d say that as much as 40% of the game still feels like Resident Evil, and the parts that don’t are at least competently done — but it’s still compromised far too much on the core series USP of tense, measured exploration in favour of a more mass-market approach where you blast your way through shooting galleries full of zombies⁵. Sadly it’s looking like this might be yet another Principal Skinner moment on my part, as most people seem to love Village — or at least they like it more than I do — and it’s sold extremely well. I personally can’t help but be disappointed, though, especially since Village has just enough good bits to make me rue the missed opportunity that the bulk of it represents.

The post Thoughts: Resident Evil Village appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Okay, look. I liked Resident Evil 3 as much as anyone did at the time. It’s a game that’s almost totally missing the creepy character and atmosphere of the earlier Resident Evil titles, and whose truncated development process ensured that it had a tremendous overreliance on both generic outdoor environments and recycled locations from Resident Evil 2, but the idea of the Nemesis was a good one back in 1999 and after two games of painstakingly conserving bullets and shotgun shells it was fun to unload on zombies with the assault rifle the game hands you from the start¹. Despite that, and despite loving last year’s remake of Resident Evil 2, I found myself quickly becoming skeptical over the announcement that they were going to release a similar treatment of 3 just over a year later. That’s nowhere near enough time to develop a modern videogame even if it was in preproduction before the Resident Evil 2 remake released, and so my expectations for the Resident Evil 3 remake were correspondingly low.

Given that, it’s actually a little surprising that Resident Evil 3 still managed to comprehensively disappoint me.

Resident Evil 3’s timeline is a little weird. It starts several months after Resident Evil 1, but before Resident Evil 2; STARS supercop Jill Valentine has been placed on administrative leave and is under surveillance by Umbrella, who are quite ticked off after she blew up their zombie-infested mansion in the first game. She has apparently overslept by quite a bit when the game starts as she has failed to notice the complete breakdown of society and mass slaughter/zombification of city inhabitants that’s happening just outside her apartment window, but Umbrella send her a helpful alarm call in the form of Nemesis, a hulking mutant monstrosity that bursts through her wall, forces her out into the street and spends the rest of the game chasing her through increasingly convoluted scripted encounters. Shortly after this she runs into Carlos Oliviera, Resident Evil 3’s secondary character; Carlos is a member of Umbrella special forces who has been sent into the city to “rescue civilians”, and who is seemingly unaware that Umbrella are the ones responsible for the zombie outbreak in the first place. The two end up working together to try and escape the city, a goal which becomes increasingly urgent after an off-screen time skip (that contains the entirety of Resident Evil 2) accompanied by the news that Raccoon City is being targeted by a nuclear weapon to eradicate the infection and/or destroy all the evidence.

So far, so Resident Evil 3. As with the Resident Evil 2 remake the game hits most of the same notes as the original, but substantially remixed. I was less than impressed with the opening segment in Jill’s apartment, which involves a bunch of generic nightmares and first-person perspective for no good reason and which lacks the badass immediacy of the original’s “Jill combat rolls out of an exploding building and starts mowing down zombies with the assault rifle that she sensibly brought with her to the zombie apocalypse” opening, but once the initial Nemesis chase sequence is out of the way and you’re into the city proper it all starts to feel pleasingly Resident Evil; you do the stereotypical Resident Evil things of collecting bullets and herbs and bolt cutters and lockpicks and using them to bypass various obstacles the game uses to gate you off from your next objective. The zombies are scattered around as more of an environmental hazard than anything else — walking landmines that you can defuse with a gun, if you so wish. However, the big difference in attitude between the Resident Evil 3 remake and its predecessor is carried over from the original game: despite using the same engine with its excellent sound and lighting effects, Resident Evil 3 is a more action-oriented title. Where Resident Evil 2 made ammo scarce and enemies numerous, Resident Evil 3 gives you more than enough ammo to kill every single enemy in the game twice over. It expects you to kill everything you come across. And while that was a refreshing power switch-up back in 1999 after two games of dealing with frustrating tank controls, it’s far less welcome in 2020 because it short-circuits the most interesting updates the Resident Evil 2 remake made to the Resident Evil formula.

The most basic example is resource management, which has always been a key part of Resident Evil but which Resident Evil 2 dialled up to eleven: completing it wasn’t just a matter of spending your resources efficiently, it also demanded that you ask yourself whether you needed to spend them at all. When you looked at a zombie in Resident Evil 2 you weren’t just thinking about the best way to kill it, you were also considering whether you could just leave it alone entirely, or if it’d be better to stagger it with a couple of kneecap shots and then run past instead of wasting 10-12 bullets putting it down for good. You had the escape items such as knives and flash grenades which allowed you to take risks without taking damage if you screwed up, and keeping a storage chest full of unused healing items was also something of a waste if you were really short on ammo; the zombies could have a little nibble on your neck, as a treat, and after your character knocked them back with a mighty shove you could safely run past and heal up. These are all really interesting decisions that defined the Resident Evil 2 remake for me, since they meshed very well with both the zombie damage system and Mr X, who wasn’t much of a threat on his own but whose mere presence made any zombies you’d left standing far more dangerous to be around.

The Resident Evil 3 remake chucks nearly all of that high-level decision making out of the window. At first I tried to play it like 2, going for evasion as my primary strategy and only firing my gun if I absolutely had no other choice. Unfortunately there’s a couple of changes that have been made that make this an unwise course of action, first and foremost of which is that the zombie damage model has been inexplicably toned down. They no longer stagger and fall from single leg shots and the only way to disable without killing is to spend 6-7 handgun rounds to saw through their kneecap completely. When it’s only a few more rounds required to kill them outright, why would you go to the trouble? Grenades are still present in the game but they’re no longer escape items, which both makes evasion far more risky and encourages you to use them to just blow zombies up instead because that’s now the only thing they’re good for. And if you do fuck up a dodge your character no longer performs a mighty space-clearing shove after they get bitten by a zombie; it’s more of a love tap that sends only the biting zombie backwards, allowing any others that are in close proximity to chain-chomp you.

The message quickly becomes clear: these are zombies, you have a gun, and you will shoot them because that’s pretty much the only thing you can do. It’s true that at the start of the game you haven’t yet had the opportunity to scour several maps clean of all items and so you are critically low on ammo to start with, but it’s not a coincidence that this is also the part of the game where the environment is rather conveniently filled with explosive gasoline barrels that will take out three zombies with one shot. Past that point it’s perfectly viable to use your shotgun as your primary weapon as you’re given more than enough gunpowder and shells for it, and once you get the grenade launcher all enemies are nothing more than an ugly-looking joke — as long as you don’t waste rounds on single zombies you’ll have enough to blow everything else into disgusting chunks, while having plenty left over to take out the occasional group. It’s not fully braindead and the game does still do the immediate business of target selection/weapon switching/reloading quite well — there were a couple of high-tension moments where the shotgun reload interval almost got me killed — but Resident Evil 3 is definitely a far less cerebral game than its predecessor.

That goes for its environments as well. Resident Evil 2’s interlocking maps based around and underneath the police station were very smartly put together, with locked doors and secret passages connecting late game areas with early ones. This let the level designers structure things in a quite intricate way, with a key picked up in hour four of your playthrough unlocking a door that you’d come across in hour one, which gave you the final piece of a puzzle that rewarded you with a weapon upgrade or inventory expansion — and so on. The police station was designed for long-term exploration, and for the actual act of exploration to be rewarding, and this contrasts extremely poorly with Resident Evil 3, which is chopped up into a collection of bite-size maps that cannot be revisited once you’ve moved the plot forward. There’s far fewer secrets and optional content to find, and while the level designers do their best with some basic backtracking it quickly becomes obvious that each map only has two or three key locations and you’re just running the same linear route between them. They’re each pretty anonymous – a city district, a secret lab, a (sigh) sewer — and even though you end up visiting RE 2’s police station again this too ends up feeling rather hollow and truncated as your exploration efforts are limited to one wing and a staircase.

The sole highlight of Resident Evil 3 is the hospital level. Perhaps it’s just the current state of world affairs, but walking through darkened corridors piled high with furniture, medical gurneys and corpses was the only time the game even came close to unnerving me. The hospital is just as linear as the rest of the game but it was the only level that felt like it had any character of its own; the Nemesis wasn’t present at the start or end of it (we’ll get to him in just a second, trust me) and for most of your stay there you’re controlling Carlos rather than Jill. The point-of-view character switches twice like this during the game; inventories aren’t shared and Carlos’s offensive options are restricted to a pistol, a disappointingly weedy assault rifle and whatever grenades he can scrounge up, meaning I actually felt the resource pinch when I was playing as him. Strangely enough it’s much more intimidating to open the door to the next room knowing you’ve only got three bullets for your pistol and thirty for your assault rifle (this will kill two zombies at most) than it is to open that same door carrying twenty-six shotgun shells and nine flame grenades. Later you get to visit the same hospital as Jill and all of the corpses he left behind are still present, along with bloody bootprints indicating his passage, and I really wish Resident Evil 3 had played with having two protagonists a little more like this. As it is Carlos is barely given more screentime than he is in the original game and disappears for large portions of it, presumably because most of his gameplay segments got cut for time.

Honestly though, it’s the meta-structure of the game that annoys me more than the layout of individual areas. They’re too small and linear but that’s a constraint imposed by having the game put together the way it is, where you achieve whatever the overarching objective for the current map is which immediately causes the Nemesis to appear and chase you back to the other end of it, which then triggers a forced transition to the next area via a cutscene. Carlos’s bits of the game avoid this because the Nemesis isn’t after him, but Jill’s implement this formula to the point of parody. When you push the big objective button and then turn around and open the door behind you and all of the zombie corpses have disappeared and the street now has a big empty area in the middle of it that just so happens to allow ample room for a trenchcoated monster to burst through a wall or jump down from a rooftop, then, well, it’s hardly surprising to me when that does indeed end up happening because a) I’ve played videogames before and b) even if I hadn’t it’s what happened the last three times I did this in Resident Evil 3. Nemesis starts out as a crap version of Mr X from Resident Evil 2, if Mr X was way more scripted and had a bullshit leap move that let him catch up to you if you were getting too far ahead; he’ll appear and run after you and try to punch you, and this was always the least interesting thing about Mr X, who was far more effective at ramping up the threat level of nearby monsters than he was as a threat himself. The game does spawn zombies on your escape route (it has to because you’ve already killed the ones that were previously there) to try and spice things up a bit, but if the encounter designers wanted that to be a problem they probably shouldn’t have given me all of these bullets.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) this Mr X ripoff phase only lasts for a couple of chase sequences; perhaps aware that he’s nothing more than a pale shadow of his predecessor, Nemesis quickly graduates to being a repeating boss battle interspersed with the odd quicktime event. The boss battles were one of the worst parts of Resident Evil 2, and Nemesis is no better. Worse, in fact, because these boss battles don’t really seem to take into consideration the fact that the series has switched to a modern over-the-shoulder viewpoint that enables boss battles more complicated than “just shoot it a whole lot until it falls over”. In the first proper boss battle he comes at you with a flamethrower, but the flamethrower is on his right side and it’s trivial to keep the large pile of flame-blocking wood between you and it while pouring rounds into his still-very-visible giant head. In the second he runs around you in circles while occasionally coming in for a big melee swipe, and I’m still not sure what the challenge here was supposed to be. Shooting at a moving target, maybe? Fighting him is mostly just a matter of healing at the right moments — some hits will reduce your health from CAUTION to DEAD without you ever seeing DANGER status — and bringing enough bullets to eventually make him keel over. But again, that’s absolutely not a problem in Resident Evil 3; you’re limited far more by the total amount of bullets you can carry in your inventory than any other factor in these bossfights, and even if that were somehow an issue there’s plenty more scattered around the boss arena if you get low.

By reducing Nemesis to a repeating bossfight, Resident Evil 3 somehow makes him less effective than he was in his previous outing 21 years ago. There, he’d come at you in the environment you’d just spent the last hour exploring. He seemed like a much more organic part of the game, especially since you usually had the option of running or fighting, and fighting him would yield useful items in exchange for actually taking the risk. Here, though, even in his first Mr X-like appearances you’ll find that the area around you has mysteriously changed to allow only one route forward, with goofy scripted events popping up along the way to obstruct your path; it’s an entirely linear escape sequence of the sort that Resident Evil 4 popularised many years ago, with no further exploration possible once Nemesis appears. You can stun him with a grenade to get him to cough up weapon upgrades, just as in the original, but you can’t put him down for the count; only making it to the level transition will do that. The key thing is that he has no presence outside of these 100% scripted segments; you figure out very quickly what the rules are governing his appearances and that he’s absolutely not a threat outside of them, and that goes double once he starts appearing exclusively in bossfights.

The original Resident Evil 3 carried the subtitle of Nemesis; he was the game’s signature feature and did enough to feel like he successfully defined it. By contrast I’m not surprised they’ve dropped the Nemesis subtitle for the remake given how unimaginative and ineffectual he is, but the problem is there’s nothing else taking up the slack and Resident Evil 3 feels exactly like what it is: a collection of short unconnected levels that are over too soon and which are given no space to breathe. If anything it has even less content than the infamously rushed original, with the entire clock tower sequence being cut from the game and other signs of “oh shit the deadline’s coming up let’s just bolt together what we’ve got and ship it” metaphorically plastered everywhere. There’s been no time for polish, and no time to add the extra features that gave the Resident Evil 2 remake so much replayability; no alternate scenarios and no bonus modes a la Hunk — I found this especially disappointing given how much I enjoyed the Mercenaries bonus mode in the original. There’s not even any time for Resident Evil 3 to appreciate its own heritage; the Resi 2 remake had some very cool features like the original PS1 models for Leon and Claire and a piece of DLC that replaced the game’s soundtrack with the original music, which was still wonderfully creepy two decades later. Resident Evil 3 doesn’t even have the man shouting “RESIDENT EVIL!” whenever you start the game, which seems like it would have been the quickest and easiest win ever. Instead all we get is a barebones 5-hour zombie blasting romp, which is fine enough on a technical level but which isn’t remotely a good remake and which compares unfavourably to games released eight years ago², let alone its own immediate predecessor.

The post Thoughts: Resident Evil 3 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

In which Capcom try to repeat Resident Evil 2’s success by resurrecting another console classic from ages past. Except this time, it doesn’t go anywhere nearly as well.

There’s at least an understandable reason as to why, though. Thanks to the DMC series’ recent history the development of Devil May Cry 5 has been driven by an entirely different motivation to that of Resident Evil. I’ve not played a Devil May Cry game before but I’m very much aware of what happened to the last DMC title to be released: it was Ninja Theory’s reboot of the series back in 2013, and it got absolutely savaged by Devil May Cry fans because it had the temerity to mess with the DMC formula in an attempt to make it more palatable to a mainstream audience. Again, I didn’t play it so I don’t know how accurate or fair that criticism is (in fact all I know of the DmC reboot is this astounding cutscene), but accuracy and fairness aren’t what matter here; all that matters is that the people who buy Devil May Cry games thought that it was true, and that explains how Devil May Cry 5 has come to exist because it’s an hugely disproportionate overcorrection back in the other direction. It’s Capcom saying “Oh, you didn’t like that DmC game because it wasn’t like the old Devil May Cry games you played on the PS2? Fine, have this Devil May Cry game that is exactly like a Devil May Cry game from the PS2 era, warts and all.”

This is why Devil May Cry 5 has ended up as a game that’s in serious danger of being utterly incomprehensible to anyone who didn’t play DMCs 1 through 4, not to mention anyone who wasn’t around for console gaming circa 2005. It is a totally unashamed throwback to the brawler genre as it was a decade and a half ago, and while it’s been made with just as much care, talent and attention to detail as the Resident Evil 2 remake was, that effort has been focused in a rather different direction: making something that’s targeted solely at Devil May Cry fans and nobody else. It’s not remotely interested in trying to appeal to anyone outside of that narrow target audience, to the point where even somebody who enjoys the odd brawler (i.e. me) is struggling to get into it.

Devil May Cry 5 is, in theory, driven by a plot. It must be, since it takes frequent breaks for extremely lengthy cutscenes to the point where it’s arguably a ten-hour cutscene that’s sometimes punctuated by five-minute interactive segments where you get to punch monsters. I couldn’t begin to tell you what the game is actually about, though; apparently demons are invading the Earth, which seems to happen every other Tuesday in the DMC universe so you’d think humanity would be better prepared for it this time around. They’re not, though, so their last line of defense against the infernal hordes consists of the following:

• Dante, a man with grey-white hair, some guns, and a sword that is also a motorcycle.
• Nero, a man with white hair a, a bionic arm, and a sword with a motorcycle engine on it.
• V, a man with black hair that turns white when he summons his demons, who do all the fighting for him.

These are the three playable characters of Devil May Cry 5, and it’s here that we come to DMC5’s first problem: it’s a game with extremely fiddly controls and a high skill ceiling and a lot of moves to remember for one character. Three characters quickly results in information overload, especially since you’re only rarely given the choice of which character you want to play in a given mission and are otherwise forced to jump from one to another from mission to mission; as soon as you start to get used to Nero you then spend the next four missions playing as Dante and V and have lost your groove by the time you get to play Nero again. I’m all for a wide range of characters that support different playstyles and skill levels, but not when I’m forced to play all of them at once, and not when the simplest of them (Nero) still has a fair few things to keep track of thanks to the vast number of powers his various Devil Breaker arms possess. Of course if you’ve already spent, say, twenty years playing and replaying Devil May Cry games this is probably not going to be a problem for you since the learning curve is much shallower, but for the rest of us there’s a formidable barrier to entry just in terms of the amount of information you’re expected to absorb and retain before you can even start to play the game effectively.

Speaking of, the parts of Devil May Cry 5 that you can actually play consist of the following: you run down a linear path through a dull, grey, post-apocalyptic city, or alternatively the interior of a red-brown demonic toilet, until you get to a big room. When you go into the big room, all of the entrances are locked and enemies start to spawn in. You hit them. They die. More enemies spawn in. You hit them. They die. Eventually you run out of enemies and the doors unlock and you can resume your trek through this entirely dull rendition of the apocalypse, until you hit the next combat room. Once you’ve done enough combat rooms a boss will turn up, and you fight that, and then the mission ends and you get to watch another ten minutes of cutscenes. This repetitive, formulaic structure is exactly what I’d expect from a game released in 2001, which is why I’m somewhat surprised to see it in a game released in 2019 — and not even artfully camouflaged as the Doom reboot did with its combat encounters. This is how Devil May Cry did it, though, and dammit, Capcom are going to give the fans what they think they want, even if that means boring the rest of us to death.

In terms of the actual nitty-gritty of combat DMC 5 is, at least, not too bad; it has a dizzyingly high skill curve that I can’t even see the top of but it’s fun enough to punch the monsters with a series of pleasingly over-the-top attacks. Each character gets ranged and melee attacks along with a selection of special attacks that vary based on who you’re playing. Nero is probably the simplest of the three, with a single gun and a sword that can be used to execute a variety of combos, along with a grappling hook that can be used to pull enemies towards him and a Devil Breaker arm with an attack that varies based on the type of arm you have equipped; the Devil Breakers are consumable and can be expended for an extra-powerful attack, so Nero walks around with a selection of arms stuck to his belt so that he can jam another one on when the first blows up. I’d say that V is the most unusual of the three protagonists, except he’s really not; he’s got a panther demon that does melee attacks and a bird demon that does ranged attacks, each of which has their own combos just like Nero’s sword, so the only thing that’s really different for him is that his attacks are being delivered via these NPC characters while he stands off at a distance — oh, and his gigantic demon golem Nightmare that he can drop into combat with the force of a small nuclear weapon. Nightmare fights autonomously, and although V can ride Nightmare and direct his actions this is curiously less effective compared to just letting him do his thing.

The first half of the game has you switching between Nero and V, and I wasn’t too down on DMC 5 during this period because the combat is decently good in spite of the game’s antiquated design. Nero is fine as a brawler character; he has the fewest special mechanics for the player to remember, he’s nicely mobile thanks to his grapple, and so you can focus almost exclusively on positioning, combo execution and not being hit; the point of the DMC series isn’t to win fights, but instead to win them as stylishly as possible by mixing up your attacks while avoiding your enemies’, and it’ll even track how well you’re doing as the fight goes on by announcing your steadily-increasing combat grade. Because Nero has the fewest tools he’s consequently the hardest character to get a high combat grade on as he doesn’t have as wide a range of moves to generate the needed variation in a fight, but it still feels like the game has the right amount of space to breathe when playing as him. V is more complicated, but because you’re standing off while your demon friends do the work you don’t have to worry about positioning so much and can concentrate on landing those combos. It’s still annoying to be constantly flipping back and forth from one to the other, but that’s precisely what it is at that point: an annoyance that can be lived with, and nothing more.

Unfortunately things nosedive once original series protagonist Dante is reintroduced into the game. Dante is the most complicated of the characters by far, because he starts with four different weapons, each of which have their own attack combos and one of which can switch between Punch Mode and Kick Mode (not that DMC will ever tell you how you do this despite it being key to some abilities and combos; I’ve done it accidentally several times but never intentionally). He also has four different styles, each of which determines his special ability with the given weapon, and he picks up more weapons with every mission he does, which pile on yet more combos and attacks. This creates a nightmare where I struggle to just switch between weapons effectively during a fight, let alone actually remember how to execute high-scoring combos with them. The reason Dante is like this is, I suspect, because this is his skill and weapon loadout from the first three DMC games and bringing those across 100% intact is yet more fanservice — except in those games he’s the only playable character and you have a full game to get used to his abilities. Here he’s one of three, and I already had my hands full keeping track of Nero and V without adding a whole other game protagonist into the mix. It’s kind of like if I were playing the Spiderman game on PS4 and it suddenly asked me to play as Batman from Arkham Knight with his complete, bloated skillset that had been built up across three games; that would never happen for a number of very good reasons, but it’s the broad equivalent of what Devil May Cry 5 is doing here. Twice.

The thing is, you don’t need to really understand any of the combat stuff in much depth to win fights and finish the game. You can’t quite get by on button mashing but you can certainly win by repeating the same two moves over and over — but that’s not fun, and this is a rare point on which both Devil May Cry 5 and myself agree. The joy of brawlers, and of Devil May Cry, is found in mastery; of being able to string together multiple different flashy moves and totally demolish the opposition without ever receiving so much as a scratch in return. That’s why DMC rates you not on how many enemies you kill or how quickly, but on how stylishly you do it. It’s also why I’m totally and utterly baffled as to how many totally artificial handicaps it threw at me on the way to achieving mastery, in a way that’s quite unlike anything I’ve seen in the genre before. Despite my avowed dislike of how Dark Souls handles certain things like player death I have a lot of respect for its core fighting loop because it’s almost never actively working against you during combat, it’s just really really hard and expects you to get good enough to match that difficulty, and importantly it never pulls the rug out from under the player by handing them a completely different set of abilities while they’re on that journey of improvement. By contrast Devil May Cry isn’t just indifferent to the player, it’s actively contemptuous of anyone who is struggling with these entirely artificial roadblocks to enjoyment, relentlessly piling on mechanic after mechanic until the player is stretched to breaking point, at which point they have two options: stop trying to play the game properly and just soldier through for the sake of the story (which, as covered, is so nonlinear and nonsensical it might as well be non-existent), or just stop playing the game period.

God, I haven’t even talked about the camera yet. Devil May Cry 5 has the worst camera I’ve seen since Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, except SoT had the excuse of actually being released 16 years ago. Any time you get into a fight — which, let us remember, is 90% of what you do in Devil May Cry that’s not watching a cutscene — you’ll not only have to remember which button presses do what for which weapon with whatever character you’re currently playing, but you’ll have to do it while struggling with a camera that desperately, desperately wants to be staring at the floor, or a wall, or the ceiling — just about anywhere except where the action is. Modern action games (which in this case means anything released after the original Devil May Cry in 2001, and several games prior to it) get around this by implementing a lock-on mechanic that keeps the camera pointed at the currently-targeted enemy, but that would be too easy for Devil May Cry, which instead chooses to make lock-on an integral part of certain combos and abilities, and which makes most others impossible if you’re locked-on to an enemy. If you want to use the vast majority of your moveset you’ll have to forgo lock-on and instead manually reposition the camera. Not only is the camera positioning yet another thing that the player has to keep track of during a fight, but it really cements Devil May Cry’s feeling of having been thawed out from a previous century of game development.

And that’s the thing that really gets my goat about Devil May Cry 5: usually when I spend a couple of thousand words laying into a game like this, it’s because of failures in the development process — design, programming, project management, something has gone wrong and injected flaws into what otherwise could have been a quite enjoyable experience. That’s not the case with Devil May Cry 5, though; the team behind it is clearly very talented and know their stuff when it comes to making video games, and so Devil May Cry 5 is possibly the first bad game I’ve played that’s a direct result of everything going horribly right with development. Capcom set out to make another Devil May Cry game for the Devil May Cry fans out there, and they damn well delivered on that design goal, even if it meant shutting out the rest of us.

The thing is, though, much as Devil May Cry 5 would like to pretend otherwise, it’s not 2001 any more, and it can’t just ignore the intervening eighteen years of progress in videogame design. Given that it’s so intentionally, bullishly antiquated in every aspect save the visual, what’s the selling point of Devil May Cry in 2019 to anyone who didn’t already love Devil May Cry? It’s not that it’s an excellent brawler, because a) it’s merely adequate at best, and b) Platinum have been making much better brawlers for at least a decade now. Is it the ridiculous over-the-top-ness of the DMC setting, where entire cities are slaughtered by demons and the heroes shrug and quip before fighting a two-storey-tall boss? Well, no, for two reasons; one is that this means your game has zero stakes because nothing matters (not to mention making every single one of your protagonists an unlikeable asshole) and the other is that Platinum also have Devil May Cry beaten here too. If I’m going to watch a ridiculous bossfight accompanied by trashy buttrock and chopped up by lengthy cutscenes and absurd dialogue, I’d really much rather it be the one at the start of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, thanks very much¹. This is the problem with making your game a throwback: it only works if the genre hasn’t evolved since the time period you’re throwing back to (as with Shadow Tactics: Blade Of The Shogun). DMC 5’s approach of targeting core fans only may have paid off this time, since there are apparently enough DMC fans (and Capcom marketing budget) for the game to shift two million copies in just a few weeks, but it’s also an approach that leads to stagnation, atrophy and eventual death, so it’s really not a sustainable way to continue a franchise. Above all, I’m disappointed that Devil May Cry 5 is so short-sighted when Resident Evil 2 — also from Capcom, for crying out loud — was an almost pitch-perfect example of how to bring a moribund series back to life. Ironically, of the two games it’s Resident Evil 2 that feels fresh and newly vital, while Devil May Cry 5 comes off as nothing more than a shuffling, moaning zombie of a game by comparison.

The post Thoughts: Devil May Cry 5 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

It looks like there’s something up with the brightness on my primary monitor as the screenshots I took for this review are all far darker than they appeared when I was actually playing the game. Resident Evil 2 is certainly dark, but it is not this dark — I will try to tweak my brightness settings and capture some more representative shots tonight.

I don’t believe I’ve ever talked about Resident Evil on here, and for good reason: unlike what appears to be the entire rest of the world I hated Resident Evil 4 and have singularly disagreed with the direction the series has gone in since then, with the prioritisation of anime knife fights and suplexing zombies over slow-paced B-movie survival horror. (Not that suplexing zombies isn’t awesome, but it’s really not what I want out of a Resident Evil game.) Still, I wouldn’t have had a problem with that tonal shift if I hadn’t liked what the series was doing up until that point;  I really enjoyed the first three Resident Evil games  – especially the first one, with the legendarily terrible voice acting and the tremendously cheap live-action cutscenes — and so my reaction to the announcement that Capcom were remaking Resident Evil 2 in the Resident Evil 7 engine¹ was rather mixed. The preview footage looked interesting, sure, but it didn’t look all that much like what I recognised as being Resident Evil 2, and while Dark Souls has demonstrated an appetite for the slower, more thoughtful style of the old Resident Evils I was a little sceptical that Capcom could resist the urge to (for example) put in a quicktime event where the main character punches a boulder to death.

Turns out that, with a couple of very minor exceptions, they mostly managed it. Resident Evil 2 is, when you account for the fact that it has to update a twenty-one year old game into something tolerable for today’s audiences, one of the most faithful remakes I’ve ever played, being as true as it can be to the spirit and the content of the original whilst dragging the ossifying gameplay kicking and screaming into the modern age. Leon, Claire, the police station, the absurd puzzle locks, Lickers, Sherry and Ada, the Kendo gunshop, the sewers, the lab, bossfights with G-Birkin, obsessive inventory and resource management, and a sudden creeping dread at what that noise you just heard in the next room might be — it’s all here, modernised and a little remixed, and while there are a few bits and pieces that disappointed it’s only because they’ve contrasted poorly with a remake that, in general, has an absolutely stellar level of quality.

For those who haven’t played the original Resident Evil games (you really missed out): Resident Evil 2 is set shortly after the 1997 zombie mansion incident from Resident Evil². The zombies have spread from there into nearby Raccoon City, and the whole city is now infested with the living dead. You play either Leon S. Kennedy, a rookie cop showing up to the Raccoon City Police Department for his first day of work, or Claire Redfield, a “college student”³ who is looking for her brother Chris (who was a protagonist of the original game). Each character gets their own unique weapons loadout, cutscenes and special gameplay segments, but the majority of the game will otherwise be the same for both: they make it through the city into the RCPD, discover that the police station is just as screwed as the rest of the city, and start looking for a way to escape Raccoon City alive. Because this is a Resident Evil game the area beneath the police station is full of secret tunnels and mad scientist laboratories, and so you don’t spend much time in Raccoon City itself: some classic locations like the gun shop do make a return, but Resident Evil 2 takes place almost entirely in and under the police station, which is stuffed full of shambling zombies, vicious mutants and other, worse monstrosities. You start with a handgun and a single clip of ammo. Good luck!

Well, it’s not quite as bad as all that. The first few Resident Evil games were always heavily focused on resource management, as you decided where to spend the precious bullets and shells you’d picked up from the surrounding environment to get past an obstacle — but the supplies are there to be picked up, and as long as you don’t waste it profligately you’ll accumulate more than enough to see you through to the final bossfight. There are relatively few weapons available but each of them can be improved with attachments (bigger magazines, bigger barrels, laser sights etc.). to keep them relevant and useful through the entire game. You also find healing items in moderately-plentiful quantities; Resident Evil’s gimmick here is to give you different types of herbs that can be combined to produce different effects, from healing to poison-curing to a damage reduction buff, and — again — as long as you’re moderately smart about the way you approach the enemies you’ll never feel all that pressured when it comes to your HP bar either. The trick with both ammo and health is to learn when to conserve it, when to use it, and how to use it, and it’s here that the Resident Evil 2 remake starts to get a little bit interesting.

The original Resident Evil games are infamous for their tank controls, fixed-perspective pre-rendered environments and finicky aiming that make them very difficult to go back and play today; it had to give you quite a lot of ammo because you’d end up shooting a fair chunk of it into the scenery through no fault of your own. The remake very wisely jettisons all of that, opting instead for a modern over-the-shoulder third-person perspective with right-click-to-aim left-click-to-fire shooting mechanics. This makes it much easier to land shots on target than in the original game, so the amount of overall ammo in the game has been reduced and the zombies have been made tougher. Not much tougher, as I recall them eating 5-7 bullets each in the original Resident Evil 2, but headshots with the regular pistol appear to be ineffective against this new breed — the Magnum and Shotgun will still pop zombie heads just fine, but magnum rounds and shotgun shells are rare enough that you don’t want to waste them on bog-standard zombies. This means that the zombies are now tough enough that spending between eight and ten rounds of ammunition to kill them outright feels like an expensive, borderline-unsustainable move that could quickly run you out of ammunition entirely if you keep it up. And of course if you’re busy punting rounds into one zombie any friends that he might have will be closing the distance on you, and if they get close you’re going to have a really bad time.

It’s therefore quite important to get a feel for when you absolutely have to kill a zombie versus shooting them in the head once or twice to stagger them, or maybe going for a leg shot that’ll bring them down temporarily so that you can slip past. Resident Evil’s zombies are the slow breed of zombie and they’re not particularly cut out for a high-speed pursuit, so once you’re past them they cease to be a threat — at least until you have to come back to that location. You can save a lot of ammo by either stunning them like this or by dodging around them completely in the more open areas, and so you pretty quickly develop a Zombie Threat Matrix. Zombies in corridors almost always require at least distracting before you can get past, but that guy chowing down on the corpse in the library? He’s perfectly happy where he is and won’t come after you unless you interrupt his meal; don’t waste the ammo. On the other hand if there’s a zombie in an area you know you’re going to be coming back to a lot, like outside a safe room, it’s probably worth spending the bullets to put it down permanently so that you’re not having to constantly dodge it every time you want to save your game.

A similar calculation exists for health items, along with the realisation that health equals ammo and vice versa. Unless you’re playing on Hardcore a zombie attack will take off at most a third of your health, and after you get attacked you throw the zombie back and create some space to get by; you can therefore knowingly take the hit if you’re willing to spend herbs instead of bullets. This remake also (re)introduces⁴  subweapons such as knives and grenades that double as defence items; if a zombie starts an attack animation you can activate a defence item to e.g. cram a flashbang down the zombie’s throat instead, negating the attack. Subweapons are in short supply and are much more effective when used as actual weapons (there’s couple of spots in the game where you really need a grenade that you haven’t fed to a zombie), so they’re yet another kind of resource that you have to decide when and where to expend. The Resident Evil 2 remake keeps the limited inventory space of the original (albeit with some expansions given as rewards for completing optional puzzles) so you can’t carry all of your ammo and health and weapons and defence items around with you at once; safe rooms have storage chests that hold your excess stuff and function as base camps where you outfit yourself for the next leg of your journey through the game, and figuring out what you’re going to need versus what you can probably get away with leaving behind this time is always an interesting decision to have to make.

You might notice that despite going into how the monsters and combat and inventory interact with each other  in great detail I haven’t really mentioned anything about Resident Evil 2 being scary yet. Sure, the resource management and routing through the police station/other environs is a fascinating intellectual exercise, fighting or evading the monsters is great fun, the gore system is satisfyingly meaty and the environments look wonderfully atmospheric — but this is a survival horror game, and one of the reasons we play those is to be scared, right? Well, it does succeed, but not quite in the way you might expect. I don’t find zombies inherently scary, and I’m not one to be intimidated by a dark room, either. (Which is good because a large portion of the first half of the game is almost pitch black.) I did find the lickers to be effective in the sections where it was possible to creep by them without triggering an attack — they locate you by sound, so if you walk very slowly they won’t be able to find you, although it’s extremely unnerving watching them swivel this way and that as they try to find you. Most of Resident Evil 2’s other monsters fall into the “weird and unsettling” category rather than being outright terrifying, with just one exception that you’ve probably heard of by now: Mr X.

Mr X is a gigantic man in a leather trenchcoat and fedora who shows up about a third of the way into the game to implacably pursue the player throughout the rest of it. He’s very unhurried and — unlike most of the enemies in the game — is polite enough to use the doorknob, which makes for some decent entertainment as he squeezes his nine-foot bulk through a door and then unfolds again, but also means there’s very few places in the game that are safe from his constant search for the player character. You can’t kill Mr X, as he’ll shrug off everything from shotgun blasts to flame grenades (in fact the flame grenades just make things worse as he’ll now be punching you while on fire). You can stagger him down onto one knee by unloading heavy-calibre ammunition into his face — the only vulnerable part of his body — which gives you a few seconds to escape, but eventually he’ll get back up and come after you again. This means the best strategy for dealing with Mr X (as with most of the monsters in the game) is simply to avoid him, but while he’s just slightly slower than the player character and you can quite easily dodge him if you’re not in a confined space and are in a position to give 100% of your attention to him, he adds a tremendous sense of time pressure to any actual task you need to accomplish to progress the game — especially since you can hear the extremely loud clomp-clomp-clomp of his footsteps as he patrols up and down nearby corridors and gradually homes in on your position.

Now, this all all sounds a lot like another famous survival horror baddie that I actually didn’t like all that much: the Alien from Alien: Isolation. Like the Alien, Mr X is a big unkillable-yet-noisy monster that shows up at set points to make your life difficult. The Alien wasn’t a particularly smart enemy and could be easily evaded, and Mr X is, if anything, even simpler. I thought the Alien was a paper tiger whose sense of threat totally evaporated once you realised just how stupid it was, which for me took about fifteen minutes as I like to probe the boundaries of AI behaviour to see what it’ll let me get away with. I did similar testing with Mr X and pretty quickly established his patterns: he spawns at set story points and despawns at others, he can follow you almost anywhere in the station except for safe rooms and certain dead-ends, and if he doesn’t have a good fix on your location (because he’s just gotten up from being staggered and you’re now on the other side of the police station, say) the game will give him a hand and direct him to search in your vicinity. If you’re in a part of the story where he’s supposed to be around, then he’ll always be around, but his attacks aren’t all that damaging on their own and even if you screw up a dodge you’ll survive as long as your health isn’t on Danger status. If anything, Mr X is less threatening than the Alien, because while he’ll always be able to find you (eventually) he won’t be able to do more than wound you before you get away.

But here’s the reason Mr X works where I think the Alien doesn’t, really: unlike Alien: Isolation, it is quite tricky to kill every single enemy in Resident Evil 2, especially since new zombies will spawn in certain locations once you hit particular points in the story. Mr X on his own is fairly tame and you can lead him in laps around the police station until you have enough distance between you to get to your objective, but that’s only possible if your chosen escape route is clear of other enemies. If there’s zombies there you’ll run the risk of getting delayed by one of these walking landmines and possibly taking damage, and then Mr X will catch up to you and punch you and kill you. That’s the element that the Alien was missing; this giant hulking monster isn’t really supposed to be dangerous on his own, but he massively amps up the threat level of everything else in the police station, which is in stark contrast to the Alien who’ll actually murder the other enemies if it catches sight of them. If Mr X is behind you and there are zombies in front of you then you have to do some extremely quick thinking and/or shooting to dodge, cripple or stagger the zombies so that you can get past them before Mr X catches up — killing them is out of the question because you don’t have the time, and you are far more likely to screw it up when you can hear the clomp-clomp-CLOMP-CLOMP of his footsteps getting louder and louder.

Importantly, up until Mr X appeared Resident Evil 2 had been more of an intellectual exercise than a survival horror experience. I was enjoying managing my resources and choosing where to expend them to take out enemies, but as long as I had ammo the zombies and the lickers were known problems with a known solution that I could take my time over, just like any other third-person shooter. I wasn’t scared until Mr X showed up and started pressuring me into having to make rushed, panicky decisions where I inevitably made mistakes. I started missing shots and punting valuable ammo into the walls and floor. I started wasting defence items to try and get away from the zombies that Mr X had flushed me into. When the defence items ran out I started taking unnecessary damage. In short, I was far, far less comfortable with what I was doing when Mr X was around; he never actually managed to kill me himself, but he did cause two deaths and a reload because I’d blown too much ammo and didn’t think I could make it to the next objective with five handgun bullets.

Really, in terms of combat, exploration and the resource management puzzle that defined old Resident Evil I don’t have enough good words to say about Resident Evil 2. It’s a fantastic update that feels incredibly tightly designed; the environments are all seamlessly connected (no more loading screen doors!) and the behind-the-scenes scripting the game is doing to manage the enemy encounters is almost invisible. More than that, it’s been made with a clear reverence for the original as it’s very recognisably the same game; the police station in particular is pretty much a direct update with some space made for the modernised mechanics. This unfortunately backfires in the bossfights, which are very standard “shoot the glowing weak spots for massive damage” affairs but which feel rather flaily and awkward because you’re nowhere near as mobile as the typical videogame protagonist and can’t dodge out of the way of the boss attacks as quickly as the game seems to demand. Still, it wouldn’t be Resident Evil 2 without them, and so I’m willing to put up with them, clumsy as they are.

I’m less sanguine about some of the actually bad content in the game. Fortunately there’s not all that much and it’s almost entirely concentrated in Leon’s playthrough, but it’s also fairly telling that these bad sequences are the ones where the developers have tried to do something genuinely new and tripped over their own good intentions. First, there’s a truly awful scripted event where you have to run away from an mutated alligator; you can run left, right or down the middle of the sewer tunnel, and the alligator instakills you if you’re running in the wrong place. Unfortunately you’re given no indication of where the wrong place actually is and so you have to figure it out by trial and error alone, which is always a terrible gameplay outcome. Then there’s the sequences where you don’t play as Leon or Claire; each of them has a short 20-30 minute interlude where the action switches to focus on another character they’ve met in the course of their exploration. Claire gets Sherry Birkin, a ten year-old girl who has inexplicably survived the zombie outbreak and… yeah, I guess Sherry’s sequence wasn’t too bad. It was a bit too modern horror game for my tastes, but it was undeniably creepy and provided some decent backstory.

Sadly the same can’t be said of Ada Wong, the spy that Leon spends most of his storyline mooning over. Ada’s gameplay sequence involves running past half a dozen zombies through a pitch-black room with no flashlight, no healing items and nine bullets, and then having to do it again backwards. It was so dark and maze-like in there that I had to resort to orienteering using the map and finding the zombie locations by letting them eat me. Again, this required a lot of trial-and-error to complete, except this time the checkpoint is absolutely horribly placed, requiring you to replay two minutes of running through a vent shaft every time you die. Then there’s an incinerator puzzle where you have to use a magic doohickey to overload electrical junction boxes through walls before you get burned alive, and figuring out the right sequence involves — you guessed it — trial-and-error. Having the alligator and Ada’s sequence back-to-back as the kickoff for the sewers and the associated chess piece puzzle (which requires a lot of back-and-forthing the first time you do it because you don’t know what you’re doing) really soured me on the game for a while because my feelings about sewer levels are only slightly less vehement than my feelings about swamp levels.

That being said, I did eventually come around on this particular set of sewers thanks to Resident Evil 2’s conceit that you should play through it at least once with each character to get the full story. Completing the game as one character unlocks the B scenario for the other character; this has been something of a missed opportunity in the remake as the only major differences between each character’s A and B scenarios are a different opening and ending, with the rest of it being more-or-less identical save for some slightly remixed item locations, but Claire’s playthrough is different enough from Leon’s that it’s still worth doing them both. When playing through the game a second time as Claire there were two things that jumped out at me. First was that Claire has much more personality than Leon in this version of Resident Evil 2. Leon’s a bit too much of a generically earnest do-gooder, whereas Claire actually has some depth and motivation to her character in addition to a lot of pent-up anger; listening to her swearing at the bosses as she unloads grenades into them is very entertaining⁵. Second was that I was absolutely ripping through the game now that I knew how everything worked; Leon’s A scenario took me just over eight hours to complete, but Claire’s B scenario took barely three. It’s a real strength of the game that even now it’s got me thinking about ways to further optimise my route and shave an additional hour off of that time; speedrunning isn’t something that’s previously interested me beyond watching it on Twitch, but I’m seriously tempted to try my hand at Resident Evil 2 speedrunning because it’s a natural extension of how you play the game anyway.

(That speedrunning aspect is really brought to the fore in the 4th Survivor bonus mode, where you start out with a full inventory but have to run through almost the entire game from the sewers up to the police station entrance as fast as possible, while dodging a much higher density of enemies than you’d find in the regular game. It’s a bit spoilery for monsters and level layouts, but it’s still maybe worth watching a video of a runthrough because it demonstrates pretty much everything I’ve talked about in this review.)

Hopefully I’ve been effusive enough in my praise for Resident Evil 2 to convince you that it’s something special: an extremely well-designed single-player survival horror experience that doesn’t outstay its welcome — I do not need all my games to be fifty-hour open world experiences, thanks very much — but which is supremely replayable if you want to sink more time into it after you’re finished (and you probably will). It is an almost pitch-perfect update of a classic game that seldom puts a foot wrong, and even when it does it only stumbles a little before righting itself. Unusually for a Japanese developer the PC port is excellent, too, and unusually for any AAA game in this day and age it doesn’t have a single bug in it that I could see. No, Resident Evil 2 is that rarest of things in the videogame space: an all-around high-quality product that more than justifies its £45 RRP, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of new releases that I can say that about in any given year.

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