Resident Evil

Games Directory

Personal Intro

• Resident Evil 0
• Resident Evil 1 (Remake)
• Resident Evil 2 (Remake)
• Resident Evil 3 (Remake)
• Resident Evil 4
• Resident Evil 5

• Resident Evil: Code Veronica X
• Resident Evil 6
• Resident Evil 7
• Resident Evil 8

• Resident Evil: Revelations
• Resident Evil: Revelations 2
• Resident Evil 4 (Remake)

Personal Intro

Because this is my post, and I can do what I want, I’m going to start with a little intro to what drew me into the re franchise to begin with, and then talk about all the games I’ve played so far and what I’ve thought of them as a new player, both to the series and genre of gaming.

I’m sure I had heard Resident Evil mentioned in gaming spaces as being a bunch of really iconic games, but I never really had my interest piqued until I saw the demos and trailers for RE7.

Horror? On VR? Holy shit thats awesome!

I think it’s important to note that when people started dropping videos of them playing the demos, I had no way to play or even access the game really.
Not only did I not have a console to play it on, but there was no way I’d even be allowed to bring that kind of game into the house. Also coming from a weirdly (and often contradictorily) conservative... well, shall I say prudent, Christian upbringing, I was simply told I would not like horror as a genre because it is icky and disgusting and created by very disturbed people, and that I will become disturbed and tainted if I watch.
Even as a kid, I called bs, but I didn’t have a way of refuting that and didn’t have much opportunity to be exposed to the horror genre at all. I just compartmentalised whatever vague interest I had in horror related things because I knew it’d make me sad that I couldn’t pursue that interest, and it’s only been this year while living on my own and with roommates that I’ve decided to pursue the interest. Best fucking decision ever.

Even in the very sheltered and anti-yucky household I grew up in, RE7 still caught my eye because it was the first I had heard of a legitimate game being made for VR (as opposed to the tech demo and shovelware types I'd seen up till that point).
It looked like a real innovation on how video games were going to progress, which it was; and as I briefly looked over the Resident Evil series, I saw that it had continually been innovating gaming throughout it’s history, and THAT is what solidified my interest.

Waiting a few years and putting a few dollars aside for the eventual day I can play them for myself, the RE2R trailers dropped and I was so excited by them that I decided I had to play that one first.
So I did, and I fell in love almost instantly.

Although I played the first few games in a weird order, the thoughts and reviews of each game I’ll put in numerical order just for sake of ease.
In case anyone cares to know the order I played in, it was RE2R, RE1R, RE3R, RE0, RE4, RE5; all remakes or remasters/ports to PS4, unless otherwise stated.
From 5 onward, along with the Revelations games afterwards - reviews are generally in the order I played.

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2020

This year, I finally indulged in the interest I had in the Resident Evil series. I didn’t know it’d end up getting to special interest levels, but hey, after a bunch of time working hard and saving up, I bought a PS4 and... A good majority of the series.
Now I am simply trying to find all the spin-off type games and see if I’ll ever be able to find the PS1 trilogy at a decent price...
My thoughts/reviews are a bit spoilery, but I tried not to go too in depth; however you have been warned.

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Resident Evil 0, PS4

This game was... interesting. There was a lot going on and it was a bit of a mess, but I honestly really liked it.

It took a moment to truly grab me, but I liked Rebecca, and Billy was pretty interesting while he was being introduced, so I had the pleasure of falling in love with both of them during the game.
I liked exploring the train and the training facility, they felt like a good ‘unique area’ and ‘classic area’ for a Resi game.

But I gotta say, the enemies felt weird.

I know that’s not a real original thing to point out, but I feel that they kinda shot themselves in the foot by setting it before RE1; they can’t really have enemies that are supposed to be ‘the first time we’ve ever seen such a horror!’ and they can’t really get too unique with the enemies and outshine what we see in RE1.
Rest in peace, I understand that it is a quite difficult position to be in considering there have been so many crazy enemies and it’s what we come to expect from Resi games, but... giant animals? Feral animals?
I don’t know if I had just become accustomed to the horrors of Resi and began to enjoy them more than I feared them at this point, but I found it very hard to feel frightened while playing. Also those little monkey bitches suck! I feel it would’ve worked better to have enemies that move around as much as they do in an over-the-shoulder game, not fixed camera. I died quite a few times in ways that felt unfair, but overall I felt pretty good as I played through and felt like I had an idea of what to do.

I also liked that you can switch between Billy and Rebecca, the way that this was handled was pretty good in my opinion. Although, I wasn’t a fan of the multiple occasions where you are forced to have one half of the pair during boss fights and the like, I understand that its just a mix of drama for the plot and because an AI partner in a boss fight may reveal the way to fight without letting you figure it out on your own. Not the most perfect, but pretty damn good for what it is.
I’d also like to point out that as much as I liked having Billy and Rebecca together, it did lessen the scare factor. Even though it’s just a video game protagonist, it did feel less scary knowing I wasn’t alone as I explored these grotesque places.

While playing, I didn’t really feel like I’d take these events as canon, due to how ridiculous they were. But honestly? I’m willing to pick and choose to make my own version of what feels right to me personally.
Anyone that cares about the lore and storyline should probably do that too, as there were some genuinely interesting aspects of the lore added and introduced; you get to see how much of a shithead James Marcus is, and it was quite interesting reading about Albert Wesker and William Birkin in their training days within the facility.
I really liked the way Billy and Rebecca got to grow closer through these traumatic experiences, and the final cutscene was a nice note to end on, all things considered.

Overall, this isn’t as offensive of an entry as you may think.
Yeah the enemies are pretty lame and annoying, and it has its own unfortunate limitations due to being a prequel to an already established world, but it has a lot to stand for on it’s own two feet.
When playing this, I was still not confident in my abilities to play, so I was playing on easy; if the game is too stupidly frustrating to play on standard, just play easy and have a relaxed time with it. I plan on replaying again soon, once I finish my first plays for the rest of the games!
RE0 seems to have a few fun looking extra game modes too, and I unlocked a Wesker mode? I can’t tell you how much I laughed but was also excited to see that?
I will be giving it a few more plays in my lifetime, it’s sad to not see Billy in any other games, and it seems unlikely he’ll return in future, but he was a lot of fun and had a good chemistry with Rebecca.

Parting thoughts: some of the risks they took paid off, others didn’t.
The lack of item boxes sucked ass, but controlling two characters was really fun. Some areas felt so at home amongst others in the Resi series, and some shit was so laughably weird that I will simply laugh at it and not take it as seriously as it wants to be taken (looking at you, reborn(?) young hot Marcus that sings opera to control leeches)

Definitely give it a shot if you’re really into Resident Evil, but go into it expecting it to be a pretty goofy game.

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Resident Evil 1 (Remake)

God, what an incredible game.

There’s almost nothing else that so perfectly encompasses ‘frightful and delightful.’
I love this game so much, I already have such a strong nostalgia for it and it’s only been a few months since I’ve played. I can’t wait to go through and try to unlock all the endings, and try to get better at the game in order to beat the hardest of challenges.

The fixed cameras took a bit for me to get used to, as I’ve never played anything like this. However, right from the start, the film student in me was nerding out over how cool some of the shots were composed. Sometimes I’d simply stop and stare at the screen, enjoying how spooky yet pretty it was.
I loved the awkward voice acting, and to hear that the originals are even worse just makes me so happy lmao. I don’t know what gets me with it, but it’s such an iconic part of this game that I wouldn’t have it any other way.
(the amount of times I’ve just copied and said ‘BaRry!1!!’ like Jill or the weird “yeAh” that Chris does… endless fun)

The plot of this game was really interesting, and I can see why it’s beloved by many.
Reading the lore files as you explore and figure out puzzles really set the tone and invited me as the player to experience this world at the same time as the protags.
Lisa Trevor and the story of the Trevor family was devastating, Wesker’s involvement with the plot, reading about the people who were exposed to the virus slowly losing their minds; it’s very, very interesting. T
he ambient soundtrack is also incredible, along with having really good songs in general.

I don’t really know how to keep myself concise and to the point here; I’m overflowing with love for this game.
After researching a bit and trying to figure out how it differs from the first game, I feel pretty confident in saying this is one of, if not the best, example of a near perfect remake.
I genuinely look forward to the next time I replay, and can’t wait to explore every in and out of this mansion incident.

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Resident Evil 2 (Remake), PS4

Ahh, RE2.
I really love this game. It’s been so fun playing it, I must’ve played about 6 times when I first started, I was obsessed. The plot was interesting, the characters were so likeable, the exploration and puzzles were fun, and it was thrilling to try fight or evade enemies.

I’ve heard that for this remake, or shall I say reimagining, they tried to go for a more movie-like method of storytelling, while still keeping the protagonists fairly grounded and reacting realistically. I can definitely feel that direction, with the cinematic vibe of the cutscenes being quite fun to watch, and the exclamations from your character as you play.
(Leon’s ‘what the!?’ and Claire screaming “WHAT THE FUCK!!??”)

I need to point out that the map system here is INCREDIBLE. Genuinely one of the best gaming UI’s I’ve ever worked with.
I was worried I’d have a hard time with the map as I wasn’t used to or very good at this style of gaming (never really played a gun game before this :P), but the maps were awesome to use, and I felt confident plotting out routes while trying to catch my breath in save rooms.

Mr X is also AMAZING. I really love him, and his theme music as he’s stalking you is awesome.
It was truly fascinating watching videos by people who tried to figure out his AI; his Terminator style of hunting was very fun and gave me quite a few frights, I absolutely love it!
I can see myself replaying this a lot in my lifetime, and the extra ghost modes and 4th survivor are awesome challenges. One day I will get good enough to complete them, but not today.
(I’ve only completed 4th survivor, 12 minutes whoop!)

Another thing I want to mention, although I know a lot of ‘gaming purists’ can get worked up about the offer to switch to easy mode if you die a lot, but I’m really grateful that there is an easy mode.
It was still challenging in it’s own rights, especially for my experience as a new player with no earthly idea of what the fuck I was doing. Yeah, some of the bosses felt a little bit flat, but I just had to remember I was in easy mode and that I’ll conquer standard and even hard modes later when I’ve gained the confidence to do so. It’s a little thing, but I appreciate that there are options like this for gamers that aren’t confident, skilled or physically able to keep up.

Though I’d rather butter up this game for being an amazing intro for me to the world of RE, I do want to give a little criticism.

The acting was amazing, I loved all the performances; but some of the story feels a little conflicting. I know every gamer that’s played RE2R has pointed it out already, but. I want to say it again anyway.

Nitpicking aside, I absolutely adore this game.
Now that I’m more confident in my gaming abilities, I can’t wait to tackle harder challenges as I play and terrify myself all over again.

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Resident Evil 3 (Remake), PS4

The ironically perfect game to come out during lockdown.
RE3 was... interesting to play. It was incredibly fun and with the item shop on the menu screen, has a fairly good replayability in my eyes. But as much as I enjoyed this game, it fell a little flat after the standard RE2 set.

Again, I can’t fault the actors; they did an amazing job and the cutscenes are very fun to watch. Usually I’m having a lot of fun playing this, but it felt so short.
Learning that there was a whole segment in the clocktower that was cut sucks ass, it really needed that extra location to explore. And also, apparently all the cool puzzles were in the clocktower; it would’ve been awesome to see a modern take on those puzzles...
Instead, the only puzzles here are those gems you collect for the thing in the train station at the start, which is more hide and seek than a puzzle; and... creating the vaccine? Finding the electric plugs in the warehouse before the lab? Again, more of a hide and seek mission than a puzzle.
There’s nothing wrong with hide and seeks, RE2 had plenty, but there were also OTHER puzzles to help diversify the searching.

The game also felt a lot more restricted by linear paths compared to RE2. They both have their set orders of doing things and nudge you in the direction it wants you to go, but RE3 felt soooo linear.
I enjoyed exploring the devastated Raccoon City, it would’ve been fun to explore more and have that same freedom of exploration in the other maps. The hospital and R.C. were the best to explore, I think; but even then, they did feel a little more closed-in compared to RE2.
I know 2 and 3 aren’t the same game and it’s not completely appropriate to do a 1-to-1 comparison, but they’re setting similar standards for remakes of classic games people love.

Also the intros to both games really show how I feel about them?
Like, RE2 had a little intro of just the city, and looked kinda like a Netflix series intro. It was clearly something quite grand that had a lot of effort put into it while still feeling respectful of the roots it grew from.
The into to RE3 being... propaganda footage of riots?
It was just footage of people smashing shit and running around with an Umbrella ad and shots of Nemesis spliced between. There would only have been riots BECAUSE of zombies, so why not show citizens running from, being attacked by and trying to attack zombies?
It felt weirdly disconnected, compared to a proud showing-off of the passion put in; that’s the kind of vibe I think both the games have, and are perfectly shown through their intro scenes.

Learning that original RE3 had choices that affect how you play, this game could’ve used something like that to help it feel, well, more!
The more I try to learn about the original RE3, the more it sounds like that’s still the superior. Not to be blunt, but I don’t think this was the best way to modernise that game for new audiences.

While I understand that the action elements are a lot more present in this game, it felt lacking in the horror to me.
In RE2, when you cut up zombies and shoot them, their limbs slowly fall off, and they’re forced to try move and attack you with that loss of a limb. It was really cool and gory, it both set the tone and was pretty entertaining if you cared to have fun with it.
Here in RE3, the zombies don’t have any kind of adaptive damage done to them, they just kinda disappear or explode into nothingness. Which I didn’t really find all that comical tbh, it just felt a bit lame?
The tower defence segment in the hospital sucks ass too, it felt like it was there purely as a padding to make it feel like there was more going on, but it felt out of place, even from my pov as a relatively new gamer to the re world and not having done research on the original at all before playing. Running around shooting zombies that explode with cartoonish slime effects? Doesn’t quite feel right...
At least in RE4, another action centred game, when enemies die it’s due to the kind of infection they have; dissolving into sludge because the body is no longer alive for the host? Even if that's a bit of a reach for the otherwise arcade-y presentation of bodies dissapearing to clear up memory space, and the glowing item pick-ups left for you to loot.
That feels more fitting than supposedly the same kinds of zombies from RE2 just exploding here because it’s Jill and Carlos, and they’re in a more action kind of game.

Also... more complaining, but the quick time events were LAME.

The intro with Nemesis chasing you where you just… run forward? Running through rail roaded areas and having the QTE be... just press a button or hold joystick up? What the hell, that totally ruins all sense of panic and urgency!
It crashes right through and ruins the tone, and after playing RE4&5 where the QTE felt so much better and actually feel as urgent as the situation requires, why weren’t the QTE better here?

All this complaining aside, I still had a lot of fun my first time playing. I just have really fallen in love with this series and wish that this game was better? Or at least on a closer level to RE2R.
The story was still pretty interesting, regardless of how on-rails it felt, and the characters were very fun and charismatic to get to know over the course of the game.
It just feels very short and flat, especially in comparison to its original game, which is a real shame. We can’t have perfection- I know -but this unfortunately didn’t come as close to the levels or RE1 & 2 remakes.
Still worth playing, but please don’t pay full price for this game, get it on sale.

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Resident Evil 4, PS4

This game... Incredible.

I had so much fun playing this; even though my roommate sat next to me scared out of her mind for most of the game, I was playing with a smile on my face and laughing most the way through it.

The tone is still quite scary, there’s a distinct survival horror element to the game, but THIS is how action is incorporated well into RE.
I think this is also in large part due to the campiness of it. Trying to wander around carefully without being spotted was tense, but when taking on a hoard of enemies, it was exhilarating in a rather action-game kinda way without being too jarringly different from how we’ve fought enemies in RE1-3.
The Ganado were so unsettling, it was a fun subversion to have incredibly human-like enemies chase after you instead of the slow and creepy ways of the zombies. Also killing them in just the right way sends them flying; putting an enemy to their death with a gay little twirl causea endless amounts of joy.

The introduction of currency was a risk, but it paid off. The merchant jump scared me more than the Ganados, but he had some cool stuff to buy which was very nice.
Also, man, the Quick Time Events here were great! I know QTE in games aren’t generally favoured, but they fit in so well here.
Running away from a boulder? Mash those buttons! Need to perfectly execute an attack or defend yourself in a pinch? Make sure you press these buttons in time, or you’ll fumble to your death! Caught in the grips of your enemy? Roll that joystick around as frantically as you can to break free!
All the QTE felt right at home here, perfectly conveying the urgency of situations and getting your heart racing with fear alongside Leon.

This game was a fun challenge, most the time when I died I knew where I had messed up, it rarely ever felt like I was dying unjustly. Of course there were a few times, especially during Ashley escort sections; but hey, the game wasn’t made in 2020.
For a game of it’s time, it is so long and fun - definitely worth your money and time invested into this. There’s awesome places to explore, interesting bosses and mini bosses to battle against, and epicly cheesy dialogue that made me laugh on multiple occasions. Not to mention the best healing/weapon item - EGG.

While I didn’t find myself scared for most the game, more-so experiencing the stress of fighting against an overwhelm of enemies; when you meet the regenerators in the lab areas, oh boy. I felt as scared as I did playing RE1 and 2. They were horrifying, and awesome enemies to fight.
I’m glad that there was the lab section with those enemies that felt truly terrifying and keep that horror element, as the rest of the game was a lot more survival action.
Despite the obvious shift to action, I don’t think it felt bad at all, and can see why this was such an incredibly well received game.

I could talk about how some of the segments with Ashley were annoying, but I don’t think I really need to say much about it.
It sucks when she won’t shut the fuck up while you’re trying to secure the area and figure out what to do, and when she kinda lets herself get kidnapped or die; but at the end of the day, she is a very scared young woman thrust into a world of terror during a time when this was probably the better achievements of AI at that point in gaming.
She’s fine, I think people are too quick to take their frustrations out on her instead of her mediocre AI.

To end, this game is awesome.
I feel that even if you’re not all that into RE, you could definitely enjoy this game. It’s campy and over the top, but we love to see it.
With rumours that it could be remade soon, I hope they follow the standards set by RE1R and RE2R, and doesn’t fall flat like RE3R did.
This is a really great game that felt large and exciting to play, I’m looking forward to replaying and getting good at the extra modes.

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Resident Evil 5, PS4

Oh boy, what a hot mess.
I’ll admit, the start of the game didn’t really grab me like the other RE games I’ve played, but once shit started going off the wall, I couldn’t help but enjoy it.

I’m sure that it’s been pointed out before, but it did feel quite uncomfortable to go to Africa and shoot black people. I know that they’re all infected, but even with the game showing that it’s definitely not a good thing, it really sucks that it feels like such a white-saviour attack and taking advantage of this African town.
It made me especially sad to see enemies wearing tribal gear, and reading journals from townsfolk being forcibly infected; while it was nice to see tribal gear as a display of culture and have them as objectively good enemies - since they were hard to defeat, and having cool contraptions in the ruins to show that they weren’t dumb savages... bro, it feels a bit icky and wrong killing and destroying all of that!
As much as the later parts of the game showed off how interesting and wild this story was, I can’t enjoy this without feeling a strong sense of guilt at how racist a lot of this felt.

In no way trying to dismiss, downplay or ignore what I’ve just said; this game did get a lot more fun as I played.
The start was slow to catch my interest, and I was worried that I wouldn’t enjoy this game as much as I’ve enjoyed the rest of the series so far - but there were some genuinely beautiful and interesting areas to explore (ignoring the fact that the colour palette looks like piss and shit. Classic PS3 era look).

This game wasn’t scary, and didn’t have anything like the RE4 regenerators to help have at least one aspect of the game bring a genuine chill.
I want to say there is an aspect here of me becoming more accustomed and desensitised to horror, and that I’m able to handle myself better with fear responses; but I don’t think that is solely the case.
It just didn’t feel scary, it was very action-y.
However, my enjoyment came a lot more from Wesker than anything. I was glad to see that enemies twirling to their death was still a thing if you hit them right; but oh my lord, the first Wesker fight was one of the best boss fights I’ve ever played. I died a few times just egging Wesker on and making him dance, it was so incredibly fun and I may just have to replay that fight next time I’m having a bad day.
The second Wesker fight was really fun as well, and although it didn’t seem clear enough to me that I had to simply initiate a QTE to deal the final blow to Wesker’s final form, that fight was pretty interesting too.
I genuinely love Wesker, I like how he holds himself as a piece of shit villain and his story is pretty interesting to me. It was very nice to see his character explored here, and to get a bit more to his backstory through lore files. I
t’s a shame it took so long to grab my interest, but once Wesker was revealed to be behind these events, I was hooked. It is cartoonish and stupid, but god it was funny.

One thing that really wasn’t funny was the AI for Sheva.
I think she is a cute and interesting companion character, and I’d like to see more of her eventually! But Jesus her AI is awful in this game!
I’m more than willing to accept that a certain percentage of my deaths in any given game will be my fault, and that sometimes you have to die to understand how to progress; but holy shit, it’d be nice for Sheva to not run to her death half the game. I’m pretty sure over 75% of my deaths were caused by her AI just being plain stupid.

If you need help imagining how awful it is, not only is she just in the way most the time and can’t just follow your footsteps or lead the way in a comfortable manner; but a real anecdote from my playthrough is that; upon coming up to a room where I could see a hoard of armed and shielded enemies ready to attack that hadn’t been activated yet, I went to stand around the corner and reload all my weapons and get ready to throw a grenade in so that I’d have a better chance at fighting.
Instead of following my lead and reloading, Sheva ran in with next to no bullets (I hadn’t had the chance to give her any) and tried to grab a single herb.
There were about 5 heavily armed enemies attacking her all at once, so I was forced to run in and rescue her, wasting a full heal on her and taking so much damage trying to get out of there that it wasn’t even worth the single healing herb she retrieved. She even used it before I could request it from her to mix and make another full heal to make up for what we’d lost.
Like? How is that fun?
If Chris OR Sheva die, thats an automatic game over; so with the AI being this shit and Sheva leaping into death’s arms so enthusiastically, this game was quite frustrating to play alone. It felt like I was babysitting a dumb younger sibling that didn’t know how to play, except a dumb younger sibling would do way better than this AI.
Companion characters in RE isn’t such a bad thing; I genuinely enjoyed Billy and Rebbeca as a pair in RE0. But this is pitiful.
The AI and controlling of characters in 0 was great, once I got the hang of it I could work around it with ease and minimal frustration. Even Ashely’s dinky AI in RE4 was better than Sheva’s here. Those are two games that did companion AI better, and they came way before this game.
Genuinely, what the fuck.

While typewriters were kind of redundant in RE4, they feel like such an iconic part of the Resident Evil series that it sucks to have them removed. The lack of item boxes in RE0 was a risk they wanted to take, and while it was annoying, it did force me to think more carefully about item management. It was a similar thing for RE4 lacking item boxes, but in that case, it was more than ok to excuse as you could expand your pockets to the biggest I’ve ever seen in an RE game.
Here, with a lack of both typewriters and item boxes, it felt like something was missing the whole time.
Not even the currency feels fun, as there’s no merchant. Instead, you just buy shit and upgrade your weapons at the end of every chapter. While it seems that especially during this era of the RE franchise, the over the top-ness of the plots and enemies seemed to be the way the series was heading, it unfortunately feels like a much bigger departure from what makes RE it’s own thing, and shedding so much of it's core identity in the process...
While I know I didn't enjoy the hiding-behind-walls and peeking-out-to-shoot-enemies thing because I'm not well-versed in gun games, I really didn't enjoy this cover shooting. It felt too much like a C.O.D. game, and not Resi!
Running and hiding to surprise-attack Wesker is one thing, but I dunno. In RE it just feels much more like an RE thing to have to run around the enemy to attack it in a flustered state and not really be able to hide - I’m talking running around zombies and trying to find the right time to stand still and shoot, and deciding wether you want to destroy a licker, guns a-blazing, or carefully creep around them to get to the safety of a save room.
With such a lack of that kind of strategy to survive, this feels a bit more like a spinoff game than a main game to me. RE4 did a better job at blending the classic survival horror mechanics we’ve grown fond of in 1-3 with the action and cheese we’ve grown to love.
RE5 did get a great amount of cheese and campiness towards the end, but maybe my main grovel here is that it feels like too much of a departure from the classic tropes and mechanics that made me fall in love with RE.
At the very least, I’m glad the QTE are like 4 and not like 3R, I’ve actually begun to appreciate the art of a good QTE through 4&5.

As a final note for this game; I enjoyed the latter half when it went off the rails, most my enjoyment was from Wesker because I love him as a villain, and while Sheva was a good companion from a story perspective, her AI makes playing needlessly miserable.
Don’t take out your frustrations with the AI out on her, she’s cute, clever and fun.
If you play this, maybe keep a critical eye on all of it as you play while also not taking it so seriously, but I do think it is worth playing if you like RE, have patience and don’t mind it going wild towards the end. I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would, despite all the issues I had with the game.

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In Closing...

I’ve really fallen in love with the Resident Evil franchise.
I’ve had such a good time playing, it’s still a bit surreal that I’m even playing them after trying to ignore my interest in the games for so long because I had no way of playing.

I’m looking forward to playing 6 and 7, and am slowly collecting other games like Code Veronica and Revelations, and a few of the dinky spin offs, to add to my collection. Thank you for reading this far, feel free to tell me what you thought of the games I’ve played so far as well - I’d love to hear.

Stay safe, throw eggs, eat herbs, and reload your weapons.

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2021

Continuing with last year’s resi post, I’m gonna be talking about these games babeyyyy!
I didn’t get to play much (and honestly I inhaled so much last year that even I’m surprised looking back... God, I love this series)
Like last time, I’m gonna get into it and although I’ll try not to spoil too much, expect some mild spoilers. Let's go!

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Code Veronica X, PS2

This game is goofy and charming, and I had such a great time with it.
I found it at a decent price online for PS2 and bought it, and man, this makes me want to get the older games on PS1 so baddd.
There was just something about playing it with the controller and hearing my lil old PS2 whirring as I played that really immersed me; as much as I love emulation, there definitely is a ‘click’ when you play older games on older consoles.

That said, lets get into it.

I hear a lot of debate about whether this was meant to be the ‘actual’ RE3 or not, and there’s plenty for and against, but in my heart, I’m taking this as the continuation to RE2 lol.
You follow Claire as she continues her investigations into where her brother disappeared to, when she’s caught and sent to an Umbrella Facility on Rockfort Island. All hell breaks loose as the virus spreads across the island, and Claire has to make her way out before it’s too late.
Along the way, she meets a nasaly Canadian teen named Steve, whom she bumps into a couple of times before they decide to team up and get off the island together. They eventually end up in Antarctica, and if you couldn’t tell just by the locations alone, this game is a lil whacky.
The main antagonists are the Ashford twins, and they’re a little strange, though enjoyable. I found myself laughing at the sheer absurdity of some of the cutscenes,

While the plot is anywhere but down to earth, it was fun to follow and still felt like a Resi game.
While Steve was silly, I didn’t find him all that annoying, so a particular scene that happens near the end of the game regarding him succeeded in making me quite emotional. It was awesome to see the Redfield siblings together again, the set designs were honestly pretty rad and the music is very memorable.

I noticed a few things during my playthrough that were pretty cool.
As this is an older Resi game, it has all those door loading screens. They’re really slow and I got a bit impatient at times, but when you were heading in the right direction and it was ramping up to something like a boss fight getting triggered in the next room, the controller would rumble as though it were Claire’s heartbeat.
This really excited me and added some more tension, and as it was only an occasional thing, it was pretty fun!
Another thing is that because these environments are 3D and not pre-rendered, there is motion in the (not so) static cam! I know it's really simple, but with subtle and smooth tilts and pans across some of the larger spaces, it made the areas feel so dynamic.
It also reduced the need for so many camera angles, as it could just move slightly to show more, so I never really found myself getting disoriented.
Admittedly, it did take me a while to get used to the tank controls, as the only games I've played that still have them are RE0/RE1R, and they’ve been refined - but once I figured out how to use my weapons properly, tank controls were pretty fun tbh!
It makes me curious to play the ogs, and I’m definitely keen to try figure out a way to play them next year!

One thing I noticed that wasn’t as positive, though; as this is an older game there are some spots where you can soft lock yourself in a corner or fuck yourself over with tedious insta kills.
I remember the boss fight on the plane, I somehow fucked myself over entirely on that and was lucky to be able to brute force my way through it.
There were some sections near the end that had me redoing the same sequence of events over and over because of an insta kill up ahead that was difficult to navigate.
The worst of them all for me was the fact that Chris and Claire share item boxes - this makes sense and is pretty neat on it’s own, but this means if I wanted Chris to use a particular weapon or he was holding onto some healing that I really needed, I couldn’t access them unless I was willing to put them in the box and finish his sections without them if I wanted Claire to have them.
There were some sections that I utterly fucked myself over with, and because there’s no indicators of when the swaps are about to happen, how the hell was I supposed to know lol?? It’s obviously not that big a deal, as I did manage to finish it, but hmmm reeks of the bad side of 90s/00s gaming...

Overall, despite some things that didn’t age well, in both story and gameplay, I had so much fucking fun with this and am looking forward to my inevitable replay.
I know that I’ll beat my ridiculous time that was 50+ hours cause I forgot to turn my Playstation off and left it running overnight a couple of times lmao.

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Resident Evil 6, PS4

Wow, what a mess of a game...
I’m sure anyone who knows of this game knows about the messy development schedule and how it kinda messed up everything (there's a good youtube video on it actually)
So I’ll spare that speil and just say: oh my god, why do we need this many cooks?

This game is different to previous ones, in that there are campaign modes that have different but interwoven stories. The plot takes place over the span of about six months, though not every campaign takes up the whole six.
The first one is of Leon and Helena, this is the closest to a familiar Resi formula (think RE4/5) - the second is Chris and Piers, which felt more like C.O.D. than Resi - the third was Jake and Sherry, which was surprisingly nice, kind of like a mix between the vibes in Leon and Chris’ campaigns - and the last one is Ada’s campaign, which aims to tie up all the loose ends.
What loose ends? I honestly couldn’t tell you, because the plot was so strange and convoluted that I could barely follow, even after playing through every campaign myself and watching a few lore recaps. It's that bad.
(I just watched another two lore recaps for this review just to make sure, and man, I still don’t know what’s going on...)

In all honesty, this game is my least favorite so far.
The soundtrack isn’t all that memorable, I found the gameplay to be ass and I didn’t know what was going on even as I was playing. Things just happened, and it often felt like plot points were competing with themselves on what could be more shocking instead of figuring out if anything made sense first.
It’s clear that some hubris and the assumption that the name ‘Resident Evil’ would make it sell well, which sucks.

As I mentioned in my RE5 review- 5 took so long for me to get into, the start dragged on and it was only when the stupid plot stuff was stripped away and my main man Wesker started to reveal his plan for TOTAL GLOBAL SATURATION that I was really getting into it. Here for RE6, I don’t think I even really had a moment where I could get behind anything. And I was trying, ok?
I wanted to follow along and see whats going on, but everything was so ass that the most fun I had was making Leon trip over dead bodies and making everyone either do the tit-punch-of-life or a really homoerotic giving-of-the-tic-tac when I had dangerously low health.
This review is going to be so long and vague cause that’s how the game felt, but to try stick to some kind of structure, I think I’ll just try to quickly recap each campaign and chuck out a few points I liked, and bitch about the things I couldn’t stand.

To start with, Leon and Helena’s campaign.
This one tried to follow the more familiar Resi formulas, with game pieces feeling similar to the Raccoon City outbreak and the whole gameplay path of ‘battle bioweapons, then they get increasingly more dangerous as you get deeper into it. Literally, cause you’re going underground into the pits of bioweapon hell.’
The familiarity of it was nice... I guess. I can’t commit to saying that it was nice, because honestly it was all stuff I’ve seen before, and it was done better in the other games! I did enjoy seeing Leon in his prime dilf-age, looking tired and miserable in his early middle-age; and I like that even though he’s clearly so jaded, there’s little flashes of that rookie cop who just wants to help despite it all.
Helena was... fine. I just felt weird that she’s not familiar at all and it took way too long to figure out who she was and how she related to Leon.
There’s a cathedral that you go to near the start of their campaign, and although the puzzles were a bit of a slog, I enjoyed the slower pace and having to work through it to open a secret underground. Leon’s campaign had some of the best music as well, two of the three song recs I’m doing are from his lol.
This was probably the most straightforward of all the campaigns plot-wise, but it was still confusing, despite having its moments. I honestly think the most fun I had with this campaign was finding out Leon can trip over stuff and figuring out how to roll around on the floor. (I took a screenshot of his ass while he was crawling and then he looked back into the camera and now thats my Playstation home screen :P)
Overall... Decent, but nothing original was good and nothing familiar was fun, unfortunately.

The next campaign is Chris and Piers’.
I have quite a few problems with this one tbh, mainly cause they did Chris so dirty. I don’t know what it is with Resi developers absolutely fucking him over in some way, but bruh. I think I understand him more intimately than you developers ever could, and I am deeply upset at the blatant shoving aside of his trauma and PTSD when it could’ve been a really interesting development through the campaign and for his character.
While I just complained about Helena being a new character and finding it hard to relate to her and all, Piers was a little easier for me. And no, its not purely cause he’s a cutie and I like his scarf thingy, it’s more because we got to see him in flashbacks and stuff working with Chris so we see HOW their relationship worked in more context than we got with Helena. Piers was good to have as a companion character, (I actually played him instead of Chris lmao) but my one major gripe with him was... why on earth did you pressure Chris into going back into the field when you can see he’s clearly in need of a real holiday where he’s not an alcoholic amnesiac? HE NEEDED HELP! WHY ARE YOU PUSHING HIM TO REMEMBER IN THE MOST TRAUMATIC WAY POSSIBLE????
Because their plot was sorta simple and most of their gameplay felt like a C.O.D. rip-off, I was kinda bored for most the playthrough. This campaign reminded me why I never really played gun games growing up lol.
However.. To end this chunk on a better note, the final boss looked cool af even though it was weird. And the um. Very spoliery plot point regarding Piers in the boss fight was fun, it was just a shame that all these kinds of fights (where you’re fighting a giant creature of some kind) really dragged out. And iirc, I think that I had a similar situation to the Wesker fight in RE5 where the finishing blow is one you have to initiate with a QTE, so I kept fighting way longer than I had to cause I was trying to deliver the final blow myself... I might be wrong on that but. Hmmmm...

The Jake and Sherry plot was interesting.
It had a lot of silly stuff going on, and a lot of the pacing was janky or dragged out, but I enjoyed them. I was so enamoured seeing Sherry all grown up, and that she still loves Leon and Claire for helping her out of RC, she’s just such a cutie!
While she feels like a retread of Leon’s naive-rookie routine, she has enough of her own uniqueness that I genuinely enjoyed her for most of this. Jake on the other hand, while I didn’t hate him, it did take a while for me to come around. In all honesty, I think it was just hard for me to imagine him being Wesker’s illegitimate son… I for one love to sexualise Wesker cause I think it is the ultimate form of entertainment, however I cannot fathom him canonically doing acts that result in a child... He is like a ken doll down there, his only attraction is to power, he gives the same lack-of-sex vibes that Light Yagami does.
Regardless, Jake has some serious daddy issues, and although I actually really liked the scenes where he and Sherry got to talk a bit, especially as they meet up after being experimented on, it felt weird and sudden that Jake had such strong and swaying feelings about Wesker. It felt artificial, like it’s only written that way to make more drama or something, not to actually develop Jake as a character.
By the end, I’m glad to see how far Jake did come as a character, both from going through all this hell and finding out so much about his father and the bioweapon world, and from working with Sherry and learning about how much hell she’s been through as well.
In this aspect, I think the Jake/Sherry campaign was my favourite, as the plot felt the nicest and this was The Unique Story for this game; not Leon’s way too familiar and contrived plot, and not Chris’ shooty gun one. If this campaign was fleshed out better, and had competent writers, I feel it would’ve been nice to focus on these guys for the plot of the game, and have the rest of the campaigns be delegated into quick side stories or bonus things like the Ada campaigns in RE4.

Then, there’s Ada...
I really liked just playing single player as a single person again, this forced two player means that you have shitty AI partners if you have no friends to play with. (like me :c).
Honestly, I found these guys worse than Sheva in RE5 - I don't know how that happens, but Ada being alone was a fresh breath.
Up till this point, there were so many plot points that didn’t make sense and hadn’t been fully resolved yet, and I was hoping that Ada’s campaign would clear things up, but it didn’t really. I don’t know if it was a net zero on things cleared up, or if I had more questions than answers after completing. I don’t have much more to add that I haven’t already said so. Lol. Ada’s a cutie.

Overall, this game was so clunky, and I don’t just mean plot wise.
The UI was fucking awful, and it changed slightly with every campaign. A strange scrabble wheel to select weapons is not helpful, and coloured lights that don’t fucking mean anything to me is annoying as hell. I know I can’t compare it to the more modern games like RE2R where I just loved the UI, but bro, this was abysmal.
There was also no map, you just click a button and it points to where you’re supposed to go, and to me it made the already linear and railroaded maps feel even more so. This game just sucks lol, I might play it again just to play the other characters in each campaign, but its not really worth it.
I can tell you a massive part I won’t look forward to in replays is all the shitty QTE, they’re ugly af and feel like massive fuck-you’s to the pacing and intensity of the gameplay. RE4 got it right and made them enhance the experience (although they didn’t need to be there, they were a nice addition imo) RE5’s were... less good, but they tried I guess, and here in RE6... god I hate them so much.

Oh, and one last thing- one of the best parts of Resi games is finding lore files across the environment and reading it IN THAT ENVIRONMENT. That doesn’t happen here.
Instead, there are these annoying blue medallions that you have to destroy, and that unlocks lore files in an arcade cabinet screen outside of the game. Its shit. RE5 did this a bit, but it had a blend of some in-game files and then BSAA documents to read from the menu outside the game. Why would they just get rid of everything and have all the lore files in a menu outside the game!
They’re not even interesting to read, and half the charm is coming across them in context!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!

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Resident Evil 7, PS4

This game is the soft reboot the series desperately needed. This was the game that originally piqued my interest in the series due to it being VR compatible. No, I did not play in VR, but I had a lot of fun regardless.
I think I’d like to try playing it in VR and see how it changes the experience, as I noticed that the field of view was really narrow, and everything felt right on top of my nose and way too close in a not-so-fun way. This honestly gave me a bit of trouble with navigating the space, as it affected my in-game spatial awareness - though, I’m also not willing to hold that against this game, as I haven’t really played many first person games like this, at least not recently.
Overall, once I kind of got a feel for it all, I had a pretty good time.

Being first person, the player is meant to assume a more projective role onto our protag, Ethan Winters. He’s simple, he’s boring, he has some of the worst one liners in response to the shit that goes on around him - I LOVE IT.
I have a few things to say about the whole Ethan thing, but I think I’ll save it for the RE8 chunk. This game’s premise is that you’ve lost your wife, Mia, and haven’t heard from her until just recently, where she gives her location. Ethan rushes over to Dulvey, Louisiana, where he comes across the Baker estate, and encounters all the mouldy horrors that await him.
You have to make your way through the Baker family, while their estranged daughter Zoe tries to help you through the trials on the property until you can finally escape.

All in all, I liked this one - and it was the scariest by far. I got pretty spooked on my fist few playthroughs of RE1/2R, but here in 7, there were times where I ended up pacing around the room before I realised it, and had to play in much smaller chunks than I usually do.
I ended up watching a playthrough alongside my own, not to spoil myself, but just to see that someone else made it through in a similar way that I did lmao. Just mad props all round for bringing horror back, and realising that the true horror was Americans all along.

While the Baker family as bosses were fairly unique, and the plotline with Eveline was interesting for the most part, the enemy designs were really bland tbh. The first couple of times you see a moulded, its gross as fuck and a good spook, but then as you get further into the game and keep seeing the same moulded enemies, it really wears thin.
It felt like there were only two or three variants on the mould design, with only a couple of other little unique things to fight - that gets really, really boring, really, really quickly. I thought we had all learnt by now that the more you see the mysterious scary monster, the less scary and more goofy it gets...

There also wasn’t that many puzzles tbh, but after how abysmal 6 was, I was so happy to see anything that vaguely resembled a puzzle in this game lol. Instead, my main gripe is with Mia, and the weird shit that happens at the end.
It’s hard to talk about without completely spoiling the game, but there was a lot that just didn’t gel with me, and seemed to follow the classic ‘everything unravels into madness’ towards the end. Despite that, I enjoyed it a lot, and even though there are other Resi games I’d rather replay more than this one, I think I’ll enjoy coming back to it on occasion.

I also gotta squeeze in a quick appreciation for the tapes, I thought they were so clever and a great way to add tension in a unique manner. Great reboot, and I highly recommend playing or watching a playthrough if this game catches your fancy, I don’t think you’ll be too disappointed.

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Resident Evil 8, PS4

Whew, what a game.
I was excited for this one to come out, and it was super fun to play it while it was fairly new. I say fairly, cause although I wanted very much to play it as soon as I got home from the shops, I unfortunately am an adult with things that take up my time so I couldn’t neglect all responsibility and play immediately.
The three times I’ve played this already have more than made up for that. I had so much fucking fun with this game, that even though I have very real grievances with it, I’m willing to look past them a litlle because I just had that good a time with it.
I even streamed a playthrough on Twitch, which was super fun, and I’m interested in replaying a few other Resi games while I’m still in my uni holidays too.

You reprise your role of Ethan Winters, with significantly more spunk.
Ethan’s been relocated to Europe now that he’s been reunited with his wife, and they had little baby Rosemary. The game starts up with their domestic stuff as you do the night routine and put Rose to bed, but just when you’re about to sit down to eat, Mia gets shot. A full on raid of the house as Chris Redfielf himself refuses to communicate and takes away Ethan’s baby right in front of him. The van he was placed in was destroyed, leaving him abandoned in the middle of a Winter-y nowhere, and he comes across the village.
It’s here that you learn that Mother Miranda and the Four Lords have stolen your baby, and it’s up to you to get her back. Like!? That’s fucking awesome!

I mentioned something I wanted to talk about in regards to Ethan in the RE7 section, and that would be the whole ‘projection onto protagonist.’
I know that it was a huge thing back in the 90s/00s, but I don’t think you can really get away with those kinds of games unless you have a custom character (even then, I’d still argue against that). In RPGs with silent protags, even someone like Link from LoZ, they’re silent and were intended for the player to project onto them so that they feel part of the world and journey.
I don’t think that can really happen, though, as even silent protags can have quite strong personalities, which can break that ‘immersion.’ Ethan was intended to have this level of projection, however his personality in 7 was so boring and strange that pretty much everyone felt taken out of it. Also, if you want us as players to project onto him, why is he saying one-liners? Shouldn’t we have the option to choose what one liners we say, if we are truly meant to 'be the protag?’
I think that the developers took that kind of criticism that was floating around from 7 and really fleshed out Ethan more in 8, and I appreciate that so much. Cause the fact is, I’m not Ethan Winters, but I sure as hell wanna make sure he gets his baby back.
I appreciated that he felt much more like a person, and it honestly made some of his weird comebacks and dialogue feel better because they weren’t trying to go ‘oh, but its you lol.’
The one thing that does bother me about Ethan here though, is the fucking lengths they go to to hide his face.
I get it, he’s not supposed to be the star, but HE IS. Having distractingly obvious things such as drapes over mirrors, mirrors that are dirty or blacked out, ect, was silly in all the environments. I’d be willing to roll my eyes and get over it if we could’ve seen his face in the final cutscene, as the impact would’ve hit so much stronger if we could’ve seen his expression at the end of the game.
Fuck man, I love this boring little dude, and these small and weird choices make it a massive roadblock for people to like him, which is clearly the opposite of what the devs were intending.

Back to the meat of the game - the Four Lords were all unique, both in their ‘realms’ and final battles, though it was clear that some were given way more attention than others.
Lady Dimitrescu is obviously the fan favourite, her castle is super reminiscent of the Spencer Mansion from RE1, and it was so fun exploring through it.
I know I’m almost infamous for how cranky I get with modern stuff sometimes, and it feels like sometimes I’m the only one with these ‘outdated’ opinions - but this game got so much right. The attention to detail was so apparent in the castle, though I will say I loved stock sound effect #3 for the breaking vase sound.

Donna Beneviento is the next lord, and her house was really nice tbh,

Next is Morau, and he was just gross tbh lol.
He was kinda sad and pathetic, which could elicit sympathy in some, but I was a bit more ehhh on this part.
I remember exploring the village and having fun going ‘this feels like RE4!’ - but when I got to Morau’s boss fight, I remember turning to my roommate and going ‘eugh, this feels like RE6.”
It was still unique and interesting, and ultimately it was more enjoyable than actual RE6 boss arenas, so whatever.

The last lord, and my personal favourite, is Hiesenburg.
He and Lady D had such a raw charisma that was so enthralling to watch, the actors did such an amazing job bringing these guys to life. Heisenburg’s battle theme was also one of my favourites, however his battle was one of my least favourites (can’t decide if I like it more or less than the Morau one...)
I was saving my magnum ammo just for you, ya manwhore, why did you have to turn into the kaiju mecha thing... Based on his powers with metal telekinesis, I thought I was going to have to get creative, but nah. Launch shit at his face with a scrappy handmade tank lol. At least the music was super banging.
His factory was interesting, however it didn’t really feel like a Resi location at times. There were some parts that felt like the science facility in 4 and the caves in 5, and while I enjoyed it immensely, it did feel just a little adjacent.

All in all, I loved going through the village, and all of the Lords on the whole were super fun.
I’ve had so much fun replaying that even though the story kinda falls flat for me, its a rare case of me enjoying it anyway.
My gripes lay mainly with the main villain and Chris.
Chris was done dirty yet again, and I’d like to formally request that CapCom put him on the shelf or something until they figure out what they’d actually like to do with him before they destroy him even more.
If looking like the saddest not-my-roderick in RE7 wasn't enough, although he’s a smoking dilf here, he is so piss poor at communicating and makes some of the worst decisions ever that it frustrates me to no end.
He really expected Ethan to just butt out of all of this, when from his point of view, this whole mess started with Chris raiding the house, murdering his wife in front of him and stealing his baby. There’s even a lore file (fuck yeah lore file!) that states that Ethan’s gone through military training at Chris’ request - how the fuck do you have this man who survived the Baker incident on his own with only the inherent gun knowledge that all Americans have, and whom you’ve now put through training, to just sit aside and be a civilian? He’s not a fucking civvy, he’s more tied up in this than you want to think, Chris, and it’d actually work more in your favour to let him fucking help and just support him.
This is why Piers should’ve picked Chris up and sent him straight to rehab so he can work through his mental health and sober up. With the way things were going with the main antagonist, Mother Miranda, I thought that they were going to reveal that she has shapeshifted into being Chris to frighten and confuse Ethan. But no, it's lamer than that.

Sighhh... I think I need to replay if I want to get any deeper into it cause it has been a few months now since I’ve played, but there are really big gripes I have with this game that pain me.
Putting them aside though, this has been one of my favourite installments in the series.
The field of view and feeling like things were on the tip of my nose I brought up in 7 didn’t feel like that here, I don’t know if thats due to 7 being VR compatible and just meant to be played inside the helmet, or if they fixed up those kinds of things and really refined it here.
Either way, I enjoy it, and my last pissy moment will be to say that the map was a bit eughhh, if you zoomed in or out too far it changed what kinds of thing you could see on the map, and it was really fucking annoying. I liked the whole hand-drawn map aesthetic, but after being spoilt with how lovely the map was in RE2R... bruh moment.
One thing I really did love was that Ethan keep a dairy and draws little pictures for it, and I think that’s awesome.

Highly, highly recommend playing, even if you haven’t played much Resi before this, as its such a genuinely fun experience all around despite little things, and when you feel like you’ve got a grip over all the controls, boy does it feel good to play.
Yearning for Dark Shadows
The Final Movement (Hiesy battle, fuck yeah!)
Soundtrack Trailer

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In Closing...

I really love this series, and clearly have some strong opinions on them. I've really enjoyed playing this year, even though there were some parts that were slogs.
I've almost completed my collection, only the two Revelations games left :'(
I will be sad to have played through my collection, and looking forward to playing more of the older games in some form or other.
I have also been considering doing reviews of the movies, as I am a film student and all, and I've already seen most of them.
I'll see if I can polish off the rest of them for next year, but for now, thanks for reading and look forward to more ramblings in the next instalment :P

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2023

Well, it’s been a little bit, huh? The first thing I wanna say is... I kinda fucked this up.
Just a little bit.

See, I played both the Revelations games in 2022, but I put off writing about them because only writing two entries- both of which I felt luke-warm towards at best -seemed underwhelming.
I was playing one of the Wii shooters with my sibling, but we never ended up finishing it, and New Year’s came around. Then, suddenly, RE4R released, and I caved and bought it to play, taking notes all the while. And well, I figured I’d just write about all three and bundle them into this year’s Resi post- and here’s where I fucked up.

I only started using my new notes system this year (2023). So I’m running on memory for games I played 2 years ago now... And then one game I have ridiculously in-depth notes for.

Don’t get me wrong, my memory is pretty decent, so I had no doubt I’d get the gist across for a review when I started writing – BUT..........
Since I leveled up my note-taking and go even more in-depth with my new system, the Rev reviews may feel a bit more glossed over compared to RE4R. I have quickly studied the games and their plot again to jog my memory, and booted up the games to replay the first few chapters- everything short of a full replay.
But yeah.
I fucked up by putting it off for a whole year longer than I intended. Lol. Normal warning for surface level to mid range spoilers, and I’ll make a note of when I go deeper than that.

Anyway, here they are. Enjoy.

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Resident Evil: Revelations, PS4

Well. This uh. This certainly is a Resi Game.

I played this on PS4, but found out pretty quick into playing that it was originally made for the 3DS. This is noticeable not only by the strange gimmicks along with simple and somewhat sparse level design, but also by the fact that the story is presented episodically. Viewing it in the context of it being a game designed for handhelds, ok, fine, I guess a more pick up and play style would have some benefits from a chapter recap as you play.
However, the levels aren’t very long, and it was almost immediately tiresome to see a reel of what I’d just played at the start of new chapters. And boy, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I wanted to like this game so bad, and it almost had me, but ultimately, I can’t really say I favour it.

One thing I will give some credit to right away, is the setting of this game. Most of it takes place on a cruise ship, the Queen Zenobia, and it has a stronger focus on the slower paced survival horror style of gameplay- especially compared to games in the main numbered series at the time that were becoming increasingly action focused.
The idea of being trapped on a ship with a bunch of bioweapons for enemies is a confronting and scary setting, and this game certainly had its moments. While you’re on the ship, the waves are simulated by a slow and constant dutch angle rocking back and forth. While this is a cool choice stylistically, I found myself motion sick fairly quickly when playing on the TV (which got me wondering if I’d feel as sick playing on handheld as intended, but I’m sensitive to these sorts of things regardless).
Generally, the gameplay itself was fine, but the plot... oh, the plot...

It is So. Fucking. Messy.

It has the dumbest ‘twists,’ and a frankly awful and confusing presentation of cast and plot. The chapters aren’t chronologically presented, which isn’t necessarily a detriment- if done well.
But, with how convoluted things get, I think this was a shit choice. Not only were there certain characters I couldn’t recognise were the same person across different time periods, I just plain ol’ couldn’t keep up with certain character motivations and was left with a confused expression for a majority of my playthrough.

See, in the greater Resi timeline, this game is a little after Chris and Jill have founded the BSAA – their solution to counter bioterrorism, post RE3. There’s some fucked up bioterrorism going on at an... artificially floating island, named Terragrigia- that is self sustained by it’s advanced solar energy network.
Then, when it’s infested with bioweapons, some guy makes the decision to vaporise the island and destroy it. Some characters speculate on whether this was an inside job or something- but honestly, these flashbacks/history settings are so terrible that I honestly cannot follow.
I have played the game myself, watched other playthroughs/lore recaps as refreshers (both while playing originally and now for this write up lol) and just generally read up on the wikis, IT STILL MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE TO ME.
Pair this with the fact that Jill is paired with a bland, knock off Barry Burton, and Chris is paired with a one-note, oversexed, homebrand version of Jill... UGH!!!
It feels like they can’t focus on or commit to anything! The plot bounces all over the fucking place, setting up things that are seemingly there just to waste your time and fuck with you.
I don’t find this kind of thing fun or enjoyable, and it’s a great example of what I mean when I say something feels like it’s punishing you for paying attention.

So, the Terragrigia thing is just the backdrop (that’s honestly not enough to justify how much they harp on about it imo) to set up the fact that Chris has gone missing. His location signature was lost in the middle of the ocean, and some middle-aged man tasks Jill and Parker (homebrand Barry) with going out to find him.
The first chapter is the two of you arriving on the boat, and investigating to try and find Chris. There’s signs of bioterrorism, and there are even a few recent victims that were killed moments before Jill or Parker could do anything to help. This was a pretty good introduction, and I liked it! It set the scene, showed off the unique and claustrophobic setting of being on a boat in the middle of the ocean, and it genuinely felt like a return to survival horror despite keeping the over-the-shoulder action shooter setup when fighting.
It was a much slower pace, creeping around the derelict halls of a once grand cruise ship, with the occasional jump from this game’s ‘zombie.’
I remember the first time playing through this section, I was thinking that it was an interesting choice, and generally looking forward to what was going to happen... But that engagement didn’t last long, as it’s immediately destroyed by it’s shit pacing and storytelling.

The next section of the same chapter is a flashback to just before Jill and Parker get sent out to find Chris, and you’re just on some gross beach with a bunch of beached bioweapon corpses. This section exists SOLELY as a tutorial on how to use the scanning thingy, which could’ve been integrated into the hand-holdy intro sections on the boat more seamlessly.
If you’ve already got little cues that tell you to hold L2 to aim and R2 to shoot, what’s so bad about having a prompt during a close encounter with a bioweapon saying hold L1 to aim and R1 to scan?
You can even have Parker just say some shit like, “Scan this thing, I’ll keep it distracted!” Cue button prompts, scan completed, kill the thing, maybe make a comment on how their boss will be glad for the info and to keep an eye out for more shit to scan.
WHY does there need to be an entire sequence that grinds all momentum to a halt because you’re jumping back and forth in time within the SINGLE CHAPTER.

It just gets worse, and I’m going to TRY and keep it brief, cause I seriously get pissed off thinking about this game for too long lmao.

Turns out, Chris wasn’t on this ship, and now Jill and Parker haven’t been able to be contacted since they went looking for him. Chris is suddenly able to be contacted, and he along with Jessica (homebrand sex appeal) were actually in some snowy mountains, and are now going to try track down Jill and Parker.
You bounce between these two plot lines, AND a third where some ragtag duo go out to the same places other characters have been to, (but not at the same time as them, it’s before or after) and just do general recon or something.
That’s three character povs to keep track of, not to mention the secondary characters that are supposedly important AND all the bouncing around between times.

STOP IT!

JUST PICK A FUCKING THING AND COMMIT TO IT. SO MUCH OF THIS GAME COULD’VE BEEN GENUINELY GREAT TO PLAY AS A RETURN TO FORM, BUT YOU FUCKED IT UP WITH THIS INCONSISTENT SHIT! IT IS PURE SLOP!!
IT IS NOT FUN TO PLAY OR FOLLOW ALONG WITH AND WHOEVER WAS DIRECTING OR FORCIBLY ADDING THIS SHIT IN NEEDED A SLAP ON THE WRIST AND A FEW HOURS IN A TIME-OUT CORNER TO ACTUALLY THINK ABOUT WHAT THE HELL THEY WERE DOING.

Anyway!

There are more plot points that set up some shit about the cult (?) that started the bioterrorist attack on Terragrigia, as they’re the ones that have lured the BSAA to the boat in the middle of the ocean- and how there’s double crossers amongst them.
Whatever. I don’t care.
Nothing makes a lick of sense, and it’s hard to find any justification to play like this. Jill is the best and I like Chris fine enough, so it should’ve been reeeeaaal easy to set up at least one of them to have the best plot thread or gameplay in the game.
But no. I actually found myself getting the most enjoyment out of two side characters named Quint and Keith.

Quint. And Kieth.

Two guys who the designers apparently put so much effort into, making visual choices like ‘epic tattoos to show that he’s cool’ and ‘has a slightly larger head than usual to show that he is smart.’
They have a cool soundtrack during their sections, and they’re dorky as hell, but idk man. Amongst all this slop and just... Bland or irritating personalities for Chris and Jill to bounce off of- these two had so much more of a tangible personality and chemistry to them, so their parts are some of the more memorable that I played.
And I still didn’t care that much, cause it felt like I was playing a different game during their sections. I think, looking back on it, their sections are fine; but it seemed better because it was sandwiched between two other things that were a lot more tedious.
Chris and Jill had their moments too, but I’m honestly struggling to recount anything that isn’t fighting the same pale looking gloop bioweapons on a boat. Even the incessant ‘last time on Resident Evil’ recaps didn’t help, as there was just too much going on and nothing was actually clear!! Even in a recap!!!
And, the whole cult thing is just... eugh. They quote Dante’s Inferno a lot, but none of the quotes used felt particularly fitting to what was going on- rather, that it was being referenced for the auto-fellatio that it truly was. This game thinks it’s a lot clever-er than it is, and I often found the reveals or ways the story was explaining things was presented in a smarmy and almost condescending way.
IF the story was presented well enough, these things wouldn’t have come across in such a negative way; especially because there is nothing smart going on here.
If there was more care and effort put into making the story interesting, yet still mysterious- scaling back all the unnecessary wank and just focusing on one or two core plot points, that branch out into a few subplots or side info, and really hone in on what is motivating these characters instead of leaning into cliches... There could’ve been a REALLY great game here.
Instead, all this convoluted crap has blended together into a forgettable mess, which is a massive shame.

It’s all just an honest let down, especially when they forced us to play through so many sequences IN THE TERRAGRIGIA PANIC...
WHO FUCKING CARES!!! ITS JUST SHOOTY SHOOT BANG BANG AND I DON’T CARE!!!
I’VE COME HERE TO PLAY RESI, NOT C.O.D.!!!
Also, if it wasn’t annoying enough to have been duped into playing the same fucking maps twice, but with Chris and Jill, and scratching your head wondering why these seemingly parallel events aren’t interacting with each other, only to have it slammed on you that nothing in this story matters or makes any sense- I found two characters particularly miserable.

Sighhhhh. Bit of a tangent there, but seriously. It annoys me. I hate lazy designs and writing like this, do better.

Anyway, the controls were fine. Standard OTS shooter style that you’d expect from a game like this, and it generally handles pretty well. There's a weapons upgrade system that felt a bit tacked on to me, it was semi-obscured through menus and I'd just keep forgetting to use it. The gun is a gun, and without prompting (like the frequent visits with the merchant in RE4, as an example) I'm far less likely to remember to upgrade and customise my weapons - unless they feel so shit that I have to question why lol.
While some of the locations and set designs can feel bland and sparse at times- as I mentioned at the beginning, it was made for 3DS originally -but given that, the HD overhaul here is pretty nice and the character models don’t look too bad.
It’s nothing stand out, but nothing looked or felt particularly wrong to me either. The only real gripe I have with this game, other than the ridiculousness I’ve just spent a few rather long-winded paragraphs getting into, is this scanning reticle.
I did mention this briefly, but I need you to understand just how odd of a gameplay choice this is. When you scan enemies, you get to increase the percentage amount at the top, which will give your a healing item when you reach 100%. That’s nice, but there are plenty of healing items scattered about, AND if you just scan around the rooms, you’ll unlock more items to pick up, so it's kind of moot.
There’s barely any enemy variation either, so it’s not like you’re compelled to scan various new kinds of bioweapon you haven’t see before, because all of them look the same. It’s hard to ever feel pressed for resources due to the abundance of them you get from using the scanner. There are also little handprint things you can find that are only visible through the scanner, and whatever. They’re an optional collectable, that’s nothing bad.

The soundtrack was pretty decent, too. There are some tracks I genuinely enjoyed, but a few got annoying real fast. I don’t really have much to say on it beyond that.

So, in closing. This game sucked, and I wish it didn’t.
It had a lot of promise as a return to classic Resi for fans that felt alienated by the action focus modern Resi was taking. It’s a strange game with some genuinely good ideas buried beneath the shit, and I think it needed a bit more time to be refined, or a director with a sterner and clearer vision for this as a project.
And less sex appeal for objectifcation’s sake, please. The main Resi cast are already beyond hot and dripping with sex appeal, you don’t need to try so hard.
Put that energy into a strong and enjoyable gaming experience next time.

directory

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Resident Evil: Revelations 2, PS4

This game is so much better than it’s predecessor. Not perfect, but a massive improvement.
I actually had fun with this, too, and got sucked in pretty quickly while replaying chapter 1 as a refresher for this write up.

Like it’s previous counterpart, this spin off game is an attempt to bring back the horror aspects to the franchise while the main numbered games veered off into action shooters- and for the most part, I’d say it achieved that goal.
It is certainly scarier than I found RE5 or RE6 to be, and often reminded me of RE0 and Code Veronica at certain points.
If I were to describe Revelations 1’s scariness as: an unsettling but building fear that’s always in the background, paired with high strung tension from encounters with friends and foes - Revelations 2 felt more to me like a mix of two types of horror scares: immediate danger, and the unease of never feeling safe enough to recover from that danger.
Sure, Rev 2 is as cheesy as a B grade horror movie at times- but with a plot that’s easier to follow and gameplay that was generally fun and memorable, I had a great time.
I can’t deny that some of my feelings towards both these Revelations games comes from originally playing them back to back- but as a sort of call and response to each other as spin offs, I think it’s fair enough to draw comparisons in this way.

This game starts with Claire at a work function, meeting Moira Burton, Barry’s eldest daughter, as she’s a new recruit for the same organisation she works at. We have a little exposition to find out that Moira and Barry have a strained relationship, and are currently in some form of estrangement from each other.
The two ladies are working for Terrasave, a humanitarian company that aims to help those affected by bioterrorism- with one of the worst slogans I’ve ever heard: because ‘terr’ doesn’t have to end with ‘orrist.’ I thought it was a fairly well known thing within advertising that you DON’T want to put anything in your marketing that will remind customers of competitors or negative connotations - but this bad slogan is a form of self fulfilling prophecy, as some terrorists crash the party, shooting up the place and kidnapping Claire and Moira.
When Claire wakes up, alone in a grotty jail cell, she notices a strange bracelet that’s been welded around her wrist. Before she can really take in anything, her cell door opens, and she’s able to wander around the derelict halls where she hears Moira calling for help. She’s also got a strange bracelet, and the two of them are directed further into the facility they’re being held in.
There are telltale signs of bioweapon experiments, and before long they come across one of Claire’s coworkers, covered in blood and desperately trying to get help before she passes away at their feet.
The further into the facility they travel, the more they find strange experiments and have to fight off zombies, (yes, zombies are in a resident evil game again!) and they come to realise that there is a woman closely watching them, who eventually makes herself known via the bracelets. Both girls clearly want out, and head for a radio tower to put out a distress call, and it’s here that they realise they are on a small and isolated island by themselves.
That’s already an enticing plot: they’re stranded, there’s a dangerous variety of traps and bioweapons to contend with, and they have some crazed woman watching over them as she curates danger around them. To really add the cherry on top, at the end of every Claire and Moira section, each chapter is closed with a Barry section, set 6 months after the events we’ve just played through with the girls.
Barry’s side of the story starts with him traveling by boat to the island, listening to the recorded radio transmission of Moira in the hopes of recovering his little girl. It’s unclear to him whether she is alive or not, but he is determined to find out what happened and bring her home, no matter what it takes. As soon as he docks, a little girl named Natalia finds him, and insists on coming along with him to find Moira. As they journey, they start to grow a bond like father and daughter, and together they set out to get to the bottom of things.

That’s a lot of gameplay per chapter, and it’s a welcome amount compared to the previous game’s chapter length. Instead of playing what feels like 10-30 min worth of the game before you’re hit with a chapter break and ‘last time on Resident Evil: Revelations;’ here it feels closer to 30-60 min PER SECTION, making it at least a good hour or more that you’d play both parts of the chapter before you’re hit with a recap.
This is a much better pace to experience the story, as it not only gives time to get familiar with the game and it’s controls, but also lets the environment and story have time to breathe and sink in. While there are still recaps, they don’t feel as eye-rollingly painful, and are actually decent recaps of what was just played.
The chapters feel like a decent play session; and in it’s original release, each chapter came out episodically week by week. The game wasn’t developing the chapters each week, as the entire game was completed and they just spaced the releases as a way of spreading out the content and potentially making more money- copying the hype of other games around that same time that were seeing success with this episodic model of play.
I won’t speak much about that particular aspect, as when I played, it was years after release and I had the entire story ready to play at my leisure. But I will say I get an odd- and cautiously critical -feeling when larger AAA studios mimic the methods that smaller/indie studios use (often out of necessity) to squeeze a few extra bucks out of their customers, just because it was successful for a few select titles. I’d like to give a more thoughtful and nuanced opinion on this, but due to it being out of scope for this written retrospective, I’m not going to research further and I’ll just leave you with that comment, and you can draw your own conclusions based on it.

Other improvements to the formula of this spin-off series is that, instead of a clunky reticle to scan shit in the environment, the two supporting characters of each duo can make use of passive moves that act in similar ways to the scanning reticle, but in ways that are better integrated.
See, in each scenario you play, there will be one character who is more geared to offence and active attacks, and the other to passive and supporting attacks.
Claire has gone through this shit before, and Barry is an ex-S.T.A.R.S. member who currently works in the BSAA - both of them have had extensive weapons and combat training, along with the experience needed to make their way through bioweapon littered landscapes. They are both the active halves of their duos, with most of their moves tied to their guns.
The other halves, Moira and Natalia, do not wield guns, and make use of their own melee weapons for attack and defence. Natalia doesn’t use any firearms because, well, she’s like nine years old; and Moira has a very strong aversion to using guns after an accident in her childhood.
When she was little, she was playing around with one of her fathers guns and accidentally shot her little sister, and Barry was upset and blamed her, even though the sister survived. This guilt on both sides, and lack of communication or understanding towards each other is what’s led to the strain on their relationship, and is why Moira and Barry haven’t been able to see eye to eye for a long time.
So, instead, Moira makes use of a torch and a crowbar to blind and stun enemies accordingly; while Natalia can pick up and throw bricks, and make use of an uncanny sixth sense that allows her to see the auras of enemies nearby and point them out to Barry. During gameplay, it only takes a second to switch between characters as you’re playing, so you can easily look around for clues or blind enemies with Moira using the torch, or scope out the area for enemies with Natalia before switching over to Claire or Barry to start attacking.
I quite enjoyed this for the most part, as both characters in each section feel distinct in their own ways without feeling that one is too much of a burden over the other. The AI for the characters isn’t too bad either, and feels like a nice refinement on the gameplay ideas from RE0. Having the characters be a duo also meant that expositional dialogue didn’t feel as awkward as it would be if they were on their own, and I really enjoyed seeing how the characters got to know each other and evolve in their own ways during the story. Sometimes the responses during conversations did feel a bit stilted, with unnatural delays between responses as you’re walking around, but in general, this dynamic was fun!

There’s all the standard guns, melee attacks and sub weapon usage here you’d expect of a modern resi game, along with a dedicated button to use healing items, evading enemy attacks and to sprint.
The healing button is great, and so much better that you have to press and hold to confirm it’s usage, instead of wasting a valuable heal when you accidentally press the button.
The inclusion of the run and evade buttons elevated the combat, and allowed a bit more freedom for how you want to approach them- but it did make the game feel a lot more action heavy, which is at odds with some of the horror elements by reducing the tension somewhat. Nitpicky, yes, but as this spin-off series has been presented as an alternative to the fans that miss the earlier survival horror aspects, having such an action-biased combat scheme feels a bit strange in that regard.
However, I do think that it works while you’re playing, in the sense that it didn’t feel like I was struggling against the controls during encounters with enemies. At least, not much...

There were a lot of moments that felt very stop-starty, where there were overly directed sequences that took the camera controls away from me so that it can force me to look where it wants.
This happens a lot during slower gameplay moments where I found that I’d already seen and put together what it wanted me to look at, or I just plainly don’t want to look at it, yet the controls are yanked away from me in this manner. I get it, you want to make sure the player knows where to look during certain moment, but I really don’t like this style of camera direction.
The whole point of having the camera in my control with the dual stick is that, well, I CONTROL IT. I don’t want to have to struggle against it during a section that is still technically in gameplay, aka, my domain of control.
If you REALLY want to direct my attention to something specific, either make it visually interesting enough that I naturally want to direct my eye towards it, orrrrr just have a fucking cutscene.
I found this struggle against the camera particularly egregious when using the sprint button- the camera zooms in a bit and just snakes very narrowly behind you, making it difficult to see where you’re going or even move! I don’t know if they did this to discourage sprinting across levels, but at that point, why include it at all if you want to discourage it?
I ended up having to do a shitty claw grip of my controller where I had my thumb pressing the button to sprint, and my pointer wrapped around to control the camera because I would just be running into walls and corners if I couldn’t fight against the camera myself.
There is also something... strange... about the way Claire moves. It’s hard to really say, but there were lots of little things, that, added up made me feel very strange about her. She walked in a strange kind of hunch, one that looks like she’s unpracticed in wearing heels, and at certain times she dawdles strangely instead of the normal walking pace. When she walked faster or started sprinting, I noticed a very strange weight that made her a bit hard to direct at the start and stop of things, which I didn’t notice to the same degree with her partner Moira.
And this was strange, because during the Barry sections, he felt weighted and moved in ways that felt more natural; which leads me to thinking that Barry and Claire might share the same move sets, or at least the same base, which is odd.
That’s purely speculation, but on a quick replay of the first chapter, and some rounds in raid mode, Claire just felt off to me to play as, and that’s my only hypothesis as to why.

Getting more into the mechanics of the game, there were some choices made here.
Firstly, the weapons upgrade system from Rev1 is back. During the game, you may come across certain weapons parts, and when you can access a gun table that’s placed somewhere within the levels, you can combine those parts with your guns to upgrade and custom mod them depending on your play-style.
This is fine, I used it to upgrade my stuff but I don’t particularly care for it- I’m just not that much of a gun guy. I appreciate what it brings, but I think I prefer to just have weapons be what they are like in RE1make or RE2make, or like RE4 where there's just a certain amount of upgrades in certain categories that you purchase.
It just gives me a similar frustration as starting up Mario Kart 8, where you have to build a kart combo with stats that aren’t the most clearly spelled out (and some stats that are important are just.. not mentioned at all?) before you can race. I don’t want to spend ages figuring out a kart build, I want to race. I don’t really care to collect certain weapons parts and create a custom gun, I want to find the evil residents. You get me?
I feel like that particular frustration is just exacerbated by the fact that there’s a skill tree. Now, this isn’t a completely fresh concept to Resi, but, I didn’t like how they did it in RE5 or RE6 either lol. Here, when you complete chapters or do certain cool things for cool points, you’ll get a currency that you can use to purchase skills within the skill tree. These are things like: giving Moira a melee attack or finishing move with her crowbar, increasing the power of subweapons and certain attacks, increase the range between partners to use healing items on each other- that sort of thing.
I don’t love it, but it’s perfectly fine as far as skill trees go. They add some much needed moves to the characters- especially for Moira and Natalia -that makes it easier for them to not only survive, but contribute to any fights you get into. While I find myself frustrated at times by the fact that there is a skill tree, it works fine, and once you have unlocked most of the good things, it makes itself worth it.
Overall, it feels more refined compared to the way systems like these were implemented in Rev1, so I can’t complain too much. I didn’t even use the weapons upgrade shit in Rev1 much to be honest, so I think overall, I just don’t care for these things that tie into the game being more action focused than I would have liked.

In general, the locations you play through look and feel nice to explore, as much a grotty horror settings can. They’re definitely campy, but that is kind of expected of a Resi game, if I’m honest.
What sucks though, and I know I just praised it, is the fact that when you play a Claire section followed by a Barry section, you go through the same areas. Yes, there are changes, and there are some areas that are unique to each duo, but it does get pretty tiring when the differences are so slight that it dampens the more unique aspects of each.
And although I really loved that there were more puzzles here, and some that genuinely had me thinking, I did find that a good majority of puzzles felt more like fetch quests to gather items in a certain order to unlock places and things, and not disguised enough to stay interesting for me.
Within each level as well, it felt like there were separate sequences to go through as separate layers while you play. I don’t know exactly how I feel about it, as I enjoyed some of the spookier sequences, and did enjoy some of the more action focused areas; but there is a slight feeling of oil against water for me.
I’m more than willing to chalk it up to the necessities of game design, and again I think it’s the fact that these spin-offs are talked about as being the scarier alternative of it’s time that makes it stand out so much to me. This in itself is frustrating, as on the whole, I think I really enjoyed playing this game despite my gripes with it...

A gripe I don’t really have is with the visuals and sound design.
I enjoyed the look of the various buildings and landscapes, and although sometimes it was silly, it worked for me. And the music and sound design was just great, there’s a moody feel that the soundtrack brings to the visuals that just makes it all a really nice experience. The sounds of the weapons especially felt nice and had a good weight to them, which is always nice when they can pull it off.
The UI is a slightly different manner, as it’s all a uniform orange type of thing. I appreciate the consistency, however, at times I found it difficult to actually tell what I had in my pockets or figure out what upgrades I was giving my gun because things are too similar. I think it’s still better than Rev1’s, and you get used to it, but readability in UI is something I’m becoming increasingly nitpicky and passionate about, I think.
It does it’s job, though, so I can get over it. It’s not the tic-tac-tetris style UI of RE6, so I can live with it.

directory

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Resident Evil 4 (Remake), PS4

Wow. I was not expecting this, and overall, I think I’m pleasantly surprised by it.

I was a big fan of the og RE4- it was campy, a bit of a hot mess, and a really good time.
This remake seems to generally respect and enhance that original feeling, while taking the game in it’s own direction. There’s plenty I don’t like about this remake, but plenty I do, so lets get into it.

The general trend for the remake series is definitely one that tones down the exaggerated and kinda goofy nature of the originals, and replaces it with a more Hollywood-esque style of gritty and ‘grounded’ realism.
Speaking broadly, I can get behind that- however, with each remake added to the series, I get more and more concerned that ‘updating to modern standards’ is slowly morphing into a streamlined homogenisation that strips away most of the charm the original games had.
Before I start the nitty-gritty of my dissection, I just want to get the inevitable out of the way:

REMAKE FATIGUE. OH MY GOD.

I needed to get that out of the way, as I was not really interested in RE4R the way everyone else was when it was announced, instead feeling more disdainful; reading press releases and fan talk with a cynical and apprehensive view. As should be obvious, I ended up caving and getting the game, and had a good time with it despite it all. But man... You feel me?

Anyway.

The plot of this game has been heavily renovated. Things are darker and more ‘realistic,’ favouring story beats that have an overall more cohesive narrative.
The basics of the story are still largely the same, but with expansion and refinement in certain areas. The follow through of plot and motivation between chapters makes a lot more sense compared to the original, and certain beats were changed (and even omitted) to give greater and different impacts for each scene.
For the most part, I really liked what they did- it gave a chance to better understand the characters we’re playing with, and it’s pretty hard to feel lost with how refined everything is... but ,it is at the expense of losing some of the more ‘iconic’ moments from the original, as they are ‘too goofy’ to be translated into this tonal shift.

Leon S. Kennedy has gone through a lot of training to become the government agent we see him as today, and is tasked with rescuing the President’s daughter, Ashley Graham, after she was kidnapped from her college campus. After tracking her down to a remote village in rural Spain, Leon is tasked with bringing her back home, safe and sound.
It’s a really simple plot, same as the original, but where it gets more depth is through finding out about the bioweapons and locations you battle against as you try to escape with Ashley. There are three main areas that the story takes place across; the village, the castle, and the island.
And, just like with the narrative beats, the locations themselves have been renovated to be more streamlined and expanded in certain areas to make this game an enjoyable, modern rendition of it’s original counterpart.
There are a lot of call-backs to the original too, the main example being the shooting gallery- which is not only a fun mini game to play, but has an expanded remix of the iconic drive song. I’m not great at shooting mini games- especially not on PS4 -but damn, the shooting gallery was so much fun. Having the remix of drive and ramping it up made it an absolute blast! (Pun intended). There’s a lot to love about the way so much has been enhanced by getting more attention, and I can say that I did genuinely enjoy a majority of the narrative changes.

Into the gameplay, which again, was generally pretty good!
The item management is still here; you will find treasures and collectables alongside weapons, ammo, healing and currency as you explore and fight enemies, and can arrange them physically in your inventory screen.
The modern Resi convention of quick-equipping weapons and sub-weapons to the d-pad is back, but expanded to have two options per direction, allowing you 8 possible slots to customise with weapons in whatever order you’d like. I appreciate this, and enjoy the seamless nature of the quick equip- though I do miss seeing Leon to the side modelling the item or equipment I have selected...
When collecting treasures, sometimes you get pieces with empty recesses in them, and sometimes you’ll get gems of a certain shape that you can place in those recesses- of which combining items to be fully decked out with whatever colour combinations you choose will result in a much higher price when selling those bedazzled items to the merchant.
The merchant himself has been fleshed out a little more too, his shop feels nice to browse through as you decide what you want to sell and upgrade, and he has more missions to give you around certain areas! In the original, the extent of these missions were pretty much just ‘shoot the medallions in this area,’ and you get a reward for doing so. Now, he has more that add a bit of variety- things like killing pests, bringing certain items to him, and circling back to specific areas when you’re nearly done with an area in order to fight a mini boss.
It’s a nice optional thing to flesh out the time spent with each area, and expanding upon them in ways that are more involved than a simple scavenger hunt- though don’t worry, the medallions are still around, and the merchant still wants you to shoot them!
There werre actually enough things to do that I didn’t quite get all of them in my first play though, which in turn meant that there were still things to do and places to poke around in upon replay.
(Though, the merchant talks A LOT during the various screens while shopping... Idk if I’m just misremembering, but the og merchant never felt this annoying with the incessant chatter... hm...)

Moving around as Leon was... pretty good.
It took me a while to get the hang of it, as he felt very weighty and had a much stronger follow-through in his momentum than what I was expecting. His sprint also felt faster than I remembered the og feeling, and perhaps that’s simply the difference between the tank controls of the original and the dual stick controls of this remake.
This quick pace suits the action side of this action-survival-horror, and honestly, once you play for a few minutes, the speed felt normal anyway. I just think it surprised me a lot to feel how weighty AND fast Leon felt in my first impressions, which is why I wanted to mention it.
Leon also feels skilled; he felt fluid moving between various guns, using the knife, and fighting with throwable items and melee attacks. More attention has been placed on the fact that he's spent 6 years in special military training, and it’s certainly paid off.
However, I can’t help but feel the various melee attacks feels a lot more limited here... Now, I’m more than willing to admit a rose-tinted bias here, but I remember getting almost giddy when I had the option to kick and supplex enemies with ease. There was an almost explosive feeling to it in the original, you could literally kick people’s heads off – and yeah, yeah, I get it. This remake is trying to be more grounded and less arcadey in this aspect, but despite the melee attacks having a good weight and follow through to them, it just didn’t feel as impressive to me. That’s totally a personal feeling and not really anything the game has done objectively wrong, but that is unfortunately one of the many little nitpicks of things the game has to contend with when trying to remake a game that has been placed on such a high pedestal by many.

While I’m nitpicking differences in the gameplay and mechanics, I want to talk about the QTEs. Quick Time Events were prompts in the original game that played during certain scenes (mainly cutscenes, but in some boss fights as well), and would prompt the player to do things such as hit a button combination in a short time limit, or mash buttons and wiggle the stick in rapid succession.
They are divisive, to say the least, but if you read my retrospective on the og RE4, you’ll remember that I said I kinda liked them! I’ve heard that some people don’t like them due to the panic of being quickly prompted and only having a second or two to respond, and hitting the wrong thing results in an insta-death half the time- and yeah, that’s definitely annoying.
But, I don’t know...
In the same way that the tank controls of RE1 made me feel more connected with my characters by getting flustered and struggling to move in a way that I could link to the feelings of fight or flight responses for the characters I’m playing as, I quite enjoyed the ways QTEs were used in RE4.
Leon’s feeling just as flustered when there’s suddenly a boulder, or a giant mechanised statue of the antagonist, chasing him down some narrow corridor as I am suddenly having to mash a button to get him out of there. I particularly enjoyed the cutscene QTEs for the Krauser knife fight in the og, requiring you to get the right combo of buttons within a split second to successfully parry and continue the fight. They’re fun!
It’s not like I love all QTE by default, as I did not enjoy their usage in RE5 & RE6 half as much- but when implemented smartly like the og... I just appreciated it. The QTEs for this remake have been dramatically reduced, and for a lot of people, that’s a plus.
I really loved the accessibility options for the QTEs here, giving the option between mashing buttons or a press and hold. Some of our hands/reflexes aren’t what they used to be, and sometimes the option for something less physically demanding is nice. However... It does feel a bit lesser without the QTEs, if I’m honest.
It’s not even that every single QTE in the original was good, but there was a frantic-ness about it that I miss. I felt this the most with the Krauser knife fight I mentioned earlier, which has been turned into a more traditional mini boss instead of a QTE cutscene.

Which brings me to the biggest issue I have with the renovation of mechanics here.

The Kinfe.

In the original, the knife was a permanent sub-weapon you could rely on in the game.
Run out of ammo? Get up close and personal to slash with your knife.
Need to open boxes? Knife attack!
And fighting Krauser? Well. Let’s just say, you’ll wanna use your knife.
It felt special, and to me was a defining characteristic of how I played and thought about gun and weapon usage. In this remake? There is a knife degradation system.

I understand from a game mechanic view that having degradation might encourage players to get creative with other weapons instead of relying on the knife, or treat the knife as something more special because it comes with a limit- but I felt the opposite.
I HATE WEAPON DEGRADATION SYSTEMS. SOOOOOO MUCH.

I didn’t feel like the knife was special, because you’d find knives everywhere to make up for the fact that they can only be used so much. Once you use them all up, they break and you can’t use them again, except for Leon’s special knife, which can be repaired for a cost at the merchant’s.
This is supposed to be the trusty knife! It doesn’t feel trusty or even special anymore! Resi on the whole is KNOWN for it’s knife only runs, as knives are ALWAYS present in some capacity.
I didn’t like the way knives broke in RE2R either, but it didn’t feel as offensive to me, as they were only sub-weapons, and mostly used for defence. IN THAT CONTEXT, I can begrudgingly agree with the philosophy of knife degradation, because that game was much more focused on surviving the horror with limited inventory.
Here... it’s an action game. Depriving Leon of his knife just feels cruel.
I want to be free to attack boxes and barrels while I’m looking for items, to kill snakes and rats indiscriminately alongside hoards of ganados when I’ve run out of ammo, or when I simply want to use my knife.
In this remake, I can still do all of that, but there’s a greater cost to contend with due to the degradation. I can’t even enjoy some simple knife fishing, as I’ve gotta keep it in the back of my mind that every slash could be my last.
I pretty much never wanna see weapon degradation in games, and will only begrudgingly take it under very specific circumstances. It feels like it detracts from the game far more than any ‘innovative thinking’ or game balancing it may provide, and it’s simply a frustration I hate having to put up with.
Have the guns run out of ammo!
Have limited inventory space that makes me hum and haw over which items are important to me and which I’ll need to use up and get rid of!!
But do NOT make my knife so brittle that it’s useless after a few hits!!!

‘But the realism-’ I hear you say.
Yeah, sure. A kitchen knife, heck, even some survival knives, are probably not going to stand more than a few hits when used in combat - but when there’s an option to parry a chainsaw with the knife... I think some liberties can be taken.
Although the game postures itself as something more mature and realistic compared to its original goofy and contrived nature- it’s still filled with silly shit!
It’s a video game! It’s ok to lean into it; the original did with the arcadey feeling that ran through it all. Why is this new direction so hesitant to allow certain things, while being equally goofy in other areas?
I know that the knife thing gets better when you get a grasp of the parry system and learn the most effective ways to make use of it, AND that there’s much better options for it when playing in NG+ and you have all the upgrades- but why do I have to wait for a replay to have it feel tolerable?
That’s still a full first run-through where it feels miserable!
And just due to the fact that it is the way it is, I actually felt discouraged from engaging with the knife at all during battle, and felt more comfortable using it only for things outside of battle.
L. Skill issue. Whatever.
But I fucking HATE weapon degradation in general, so I’m sure you understand that even though I’m aware of the nuances and probable intentions the dev’s had when implementing this: I don’t care, I don’t like it, and I don’t think it achieved what they set out to do with it.

Onto graphics, the game looks fine. Maybe a little flat in the colour grading at times, but that’s something I’d expected due to the original having a muted sepia look.
I don’t really know how to articulate this the exact way that I want to, but I’m just not the kind of guy who’s overly impressed with 'realistic graphics' in games. I’m fine if things look a little janky- and in all honesty, I think that jank or intentional style choices add charm and a unique look to certain games.
RE4R is using the same engine that a lot of previous games in the series have been using- it seems to be a great one for what they want to do with the look of it all, but I can’t help but feel that it looks a little too familiar at times. I think this is partially due to assets being reused, having played a lot of games in this engine and starting to see how it works and where the seams are, and remake fatigue. I could complain about it looking like RE2R and RE8, but I feel so half-hearted about that complaint. It’s the same engine, and a remake of a game I remember decently- of course it’ll look familiar.
I’m fine to chalk that up to primarily my own tastes and fatigue that I’ve outlined, but overall, the game looks fine. Great if you’re into this mostly realistic style, I just don’t think I care enough to care.
What I do care about, however, are the presentations for certain things that really pissed me off.

Firstly- STOP WITH 'CUTSCENE' MOMENTS THAT TAKE A HOLD OF THE CAMERA AND SWING ME IN RANDOM PLACES!!! FUCK OFF!! IF YOU WANT CONTROL OF IT, HAVE A CUTSCENE, GAMEPLAY IS FOR ME!!?!!? And repeat all the shit you read previously for the Rev2 stuff I had the same complaint for.

Secondly- YELLOW MARKERS.
This has been memed to death by now, and Resi isn’t the only game/series to go overboard with the yellow markers. But, whoever is walking around with open cans of bright yellow paint, reigning terror across this remote Spanish village - stop it! Who knows where they’ll go next!
Joking aside, I want to go on a tangent and dissect this and give thoughts real quick.
SOMETIMES, yes, the paint markers are helpful in showing me where I need to go, or what I need to do when I’m feeling lost. Yellow is such a naturally bright colour that it’s easy to draw the eye to, making it a psychologically/colour-theory-ily understandable choice to make sure players see the hints you leave for them.
A lot of the time, I believe the devs make these markers so obvious because they were common tricky points for their focus groups- which are often comprised of people with varying gamer skills, and I’d say that devs will try to pay attention to the less experienced gamer’s feedback to iron out any wrinkles and make the game more approachable.
It all makes sense and I understand it, especially after having the opportunity to study this kind of thing a little bit and venturing into indie game dev myself. There’s so much to think about and consider that often will go unnoticed by the players, which can feel frustrating when you’re berated for choices you made intentionally with their favour in mind.
HOWEVER, this yellow paint shit is getting out of hand.
It often feels jarring and non-diagetic, bringing more attention to it than intended and breaking the immersion for the player. It can also feel very patronising to have the methods and solutions to puzzles pointed out so obviously to you, for both experienced and less experienced gamers. Things don’t need to be THAT obvious, and I’m not sure that slapping yellow paint over everything is the fix-all solution it’s being treated as.
It might take more work, but maybe if so many players are struggling with certain sections, you need to discuss with your team whether this is an intentionally hard area, that you want players to struggle through, or if there are better ways to create the problem you want players to solve.
There’s not going to be ONE solution that pleases all players, but I feel as though many gamers with mid to high level experience in games are going to become too frustrated when they see the yellow paint and no longer want to be a part of the core audience anymore. It’s a tricky balance to make games inviting enough to appeal to new-comers or ‘the broader audience,’ without alienating ‘the target audience,’ - but too often with modern games, I can’t help but feel they’re spreading themselves too thin to catch every audience instead of focusing on their target.
Look at ways that are less obvious than yellow paint, see what kind of diagetic methods to give hints would work, and really spend the time setting up ways to teach the players how you want them to play and approach the problems you throw at them. If there's not going to be a single solution for every problem, why is yellow paint treated as a singular solution>

What’s uniquely frustrating about the yellow paint in Resi is that, in RE8, they ALMOST had something really interesting in context with the yellow paint, but didn’t do anything with it.
They knew the yellow paint in that game was garishly out of place, and called attention to it, but just didn’t deliver in the way I was expecting based on the way they set it up.
To then go to a game where there’s no reason for the yellow paint to be everywhere, YET IT STILL IS, is frustrating.
The one counter to this, which I alluded to earlier, is that these yellow paint signals ARE helpful to those that need them.
Great, but that is only good as a stepping stone, and if people ever move up to a higher skill level in gaming where they don’t need it anymore, what then?
I understand that from an accessibility standpoint, making sure that players who aren’t very good or don’t feel confident in playing but still want to play have an option. I support that, but to mix that into the DNA of the visual presentation of the game just sucks for every other player who wants an option to not have it.
It’d take more work, but why can’t yellow paint-ifiying the landscape be exclusive to easy mode? That’s the area to have it, and by not not having it in normal and hard difficulties, it’s effectively training wheels for those that want it in easy.
With this, there’s also some comment I want to make on the way older games did this. I’m more inclined to say that older games did a better job of communicating things visually, and in many ways the hardware limitations present helped devs to think carefully about the way they wanted to present things. Heck, even in RE2R, there wasn’t yellow paint slapped haphazardly around the place- I distinctly remember the use of lighting and contrast in certain areas to point out which way to go.
This tangent is not just a critique exclusive to RE4R, but to all yellow paint games out there. I don’t like the overly researched and pathologised method of communicating things to players, it just says very clearly to me that you don’t trust me to play and enjoy the game the way you wanted me to, and would rather drag me by the hand through everything instead of giving me time to enjoy the spaces within the game you’ve created.
Maybe there’s also an aspect of insecurity to this, which I don’t doubt could be from having unrealistic pressures and crunches forced upon dev teams in the increasingly dystopian work environments- but please.
At least add a bit of diversity to the way you want to overly direct my play experience, it’s become so cliché even the meme of yellow paint is worn out.

And lastly, something I feel is the most relevant to bitch about regarding graphics, is the lack of boss transformation animations.
To set the scene: in the original RE4, pretty much all the multi-phase bosses had grotesque animations showing the pure body horror of being a bioweapon. It’s memorable, and helps keep you immersed in the moment as you see the familiar human looking parts morph further into the inhuman.
It’s kind of a staple thing to expect in the Resi franchise; bioweapons are a form of body horror, and bioweapons are behind every game - it’s what we’re here for.
Now, in RE4R, there was a noticeable lack of transformation animations. I’m sure you can imagine the disappointment when I’m fighting the village leader in some sort of barn or shed that’s on fire, and instead of having some transformation to gawk at, he disappears behind a wall of flames, and re-emerges a few seconds later in his next form.
Every boss felt like this, and even if some bosses felt like clever call-backs to their originals, or added something to make the experience unique to this game, I felt incredibly disconnected from the fight as a whole.
For a AAA remake title that has the legacy it does, whadda hell!?
I can’t imagine the time and resources it must take to model and animate such things, as I’m a 2D artist myself, but it is incredibly disappointing to see this remake take shortcuts like so.
To pair with this, what I mentioned earlier about QTEs being stripped away hold for battle the most, in my opinion. I don’t think I was ever able to enjoy or get good at using the parry/evade mechanics introduced for this game, as their prompts weren’t as clear or understandable to me compared to something like a well placed QTE.
And yet another thing to tack on at the end of this, is that I felt a surprising lack of unique death animations for Leon too... Again, maybe this is nostalgic misremembering, but I would have so much fun getting Leon killed and seeing a new unique animation depending on how he died.
It was almost a little consolation; yeah you suck and you died, but look, isn’t it funny seeing Leon get his face dissolved to the bone, or decapitated, or dramatically falling-to-his-knees-at-the-realisation-that-Ashely-died to death?

I guess I could summarise this with something along the lines of: all the little details in the original, that might not seem like much on their own, all worked together to give the original the polish and charm that it had, and that there feels like a distinct lack of that here.
Which is a shame, because there is genuinely a lot of details that ARE here that DO ADD to the experience- it just doesn’t feel like enough for me, unfortunately.
Like, I really do appreciate that it kept some of the puzzle aspects across various parts of the game and even added more, and that there’s a semi-stealth thing going on that allows different options if you can approach enemies without alerting them.
Considering the og was such a cultural influence on how modern OTS shooters were made from that point on, I found it really interesting to have stealth come back to remind us of it’s survival style origins.
It just... also feels like it’s missing a lot, or only has call-backs to the original as a form of obligation.

In regards to music, I honestly didn’t feel like much stood out to me.
I have a note written to myself to pay attention to the music, and after 3 playthroughs, the only song I knew I wanted to include at the end is drive.
I didn’t really feel connected to or excited by any of the tracks, which is a shame, because I really love a majority of the various OSTs this series has. Even the more ambient and atmospheric tracks can be quite memorable to me, but here... I just didn’t feel it.
I really don’t know what it is, but to guess, maybe the soundtrack just felt a bit too generic for me? I wasn’t as keen on other remixes of tracks from the original, drive really was the stand out.
Idk. It’s a shame, nothing felt really out of place as far as I can recall, but I can’t recall really enjoying much about it either. It just kinda lived in the background for me, which isn’t the worst, I suppose.
The sound design was pretty good though, the weapons and various soundscapes sounded generally pretty good, and I like that they’ve used a different stock sound effect for breaking vases that sounds a lot less cartoonish.

And, well... That’s about all I can say in a vaguely non-spoiler-ish way without going into detail.

ANYWAY...

I clearly feel complicated about this game, as there’s a lot I genuinely liked, and a lot that irked me.
I love the way the overall story was tightened up and expanded, but I don’t like the way some of the details were handled. The gameplay was good, not perfectly for me, but I learnt more about the mechanics and had a good time playing overall.
There’s nuance to be had, and I already waffled on about it... so, yeah.
Hope your salt shaker is empty.

The one no-nuance take I can close on, is why the hell are Leon’s alternate outfits so sexless?
They’re not really cool, there’s not enough cunt in them, they just look kinda ugly and boring. Do better, this is the pretty boy of the series we’re dressing up here!

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In Closing...

Wow. That's it, that's all the mainline games so far.
The only remaining games I have left on my shelf are the two Wii shooters, which I will attempt one day...

I'd like to dig around and try some of the more weird and niche spin-offs in the coming years, and properly try out the original PS1 trilogy.
I'm also interested in talking more about peripheral media for Resident Evil, like the live-action and animated movies, and the novel series as well.
Who knows what I'll get up to, but you'll certainly hear from me again.

I love this series, despite any frustrations I have with it, and always look forward to writing about them like this.

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