So I finally played and beaten the first Resident Evil. My thoughts? It alright. It set the standard for survival horror and its definitely enjoyable.
I think my main problems with game is that a lot of the things meant for horror just piss me off more than anything else. The bosses are easy but annoying because of the tank controls so it never hits a high point. You have limited saves which is insanely infuriating for me personally. There's an argument that too many saves makes the player feel too safe and it makes the game not as scary. Counterpoint, the game can and should still just be scary. RE2 is still scary without limiting saves and putting save areas in the worst locations. I see this argument be made for games outside this genre like Dark Souls 1 and I hate it. I dislike the idea of losing tons of progress and doing it all over again. The enemys all take place in small corridors making running past them hard, and some are really fast too. The pistol is one of the worst guns in the franchise, it takes like 5 clips to down a zombie. Burning zombies bodies are tedious because of the process you have to take to do it. You have to watch a door animation every time you go through one, which is slightly confusing for me because I thought they were gonna use this to eventually scare the player but it never did. For others, this is scary, for me, this is annoying. Which is to not say that I don't get scared often, because I can, but my immersion is broken by all these tedious things you have to do. One last thing to top off my list of annoyances is the box pushing. There is a lot of fucking box pushing segments in this game, like a lot, like holy shit. This is a push-like video game.
Now to list some good things and be positive for a moment. I do think the atmosphere is pretty spooky, and the decision to keep the color palette of areas to a black and white helps create a iconic setting. Speaking of iconic settings though, the mansion is the most iconic setting of this whole franchise, the vibe of the mansion is absolutely stellar, with this feeling that something is always trying to kill you (which is probably true). The ost is pretty enjoyable, sometimes I do think it neglects the spooky atmosphere but in turn, it is kind of a bop. My favorite part of Resident Evil games is that they let you get right into the action and don't bog you down with tons of story. The story is there and it exists to give the player a reason to keep going, and that's all I want from a story that isn't aiming high.
I enjoy this game but a lot of moments did upset me from small things that compounded to annoy me. If I had to rate the RE games I played from best to worst it'd probably be: 4, 2, 5, 1, 3. I tend to prefer the action focused ones because they can still maintain a scary mood if done well like 4, and unlike 5.
I think my main problems with game is that a lot of the things meant for horror just piss me off more than anything else. The bosses are easy but annoying because of the tank controls so it never hits a high point. You have limited saves which is insanely infuriating for me personally. There's an argument that too many saves makes the player feel too safe and it makes the game not as scary. Counterpoint, the game can and should still just be scary. RE2 is still scary without limiting saves and putting save areas in the worst locations. I see this argument be made for games outside this genre like Dark Souls 1 and I hate it. I dislike the idea of losing tons of progress and doing it all over again. The enemys all take place in small corridors making running past them hard, and some are really fast too. The pistol is one of the worst guns in the franchise, it takes like 5 clips to down a zombie. Burning zombies bodies are tedious because of the process you have to take to do it. You have to watch a door animation every time you go through one, which is slightly confusing for me because I thought they were gonna use this to eventually scare the player but it never did. For others, this is scary, for me, this is annoying. Which is to not say that I don't get scared often, because I can, but my immersion is broken by all these tedious things you have to do. One last thing to top off my list of annoyances is the box pushing. There is a lot of fucking box pushing segments in this game, like a lot, like holy shit. This is a push-like video game.
Now to list some good things and be positive for a moment. I do think the atmosphere is pretty spooky, and the decision to keep the color palette of areas to a black and white helps create a iconic setting. Speaking of iconic settings though, the mansion is the most iconic setting of this whole franchise, the vibe of the mansion is absolutely stellar, with this feeling that something is always trying to kill you (which is probably true). The ost is pretty enjoyable, sometimes I do think it neglects the spooky atmosphere but in turn, it is kind of a bop. My favorite part of Resident Evil games is that they let you get right into the action and don't bog you down with tons of story. The story is there and it exists to give the player a reason to keep going, and that's all I want from a story that isn't aiming high.
I enjoy this game but a lot of moments did upset me from small things that compounded to annoy me. If I had to rate the RE games I played from best to worst it'd probably be: 4, 2, 5, 1, 3. I tend to prefer the action focused ones because they can still maintain a scary mood if done well like 4, and unlike 5.