It's a bit odd to me that this was made with the intention of "returning the series to its horror roots" when it is nearly just as action-heavy as Resident Evil 5, featuring similar game design and similarly over-the-top setpieces. I guess the opening is a bit slower, but after a while, Capcom just can't help themselves and go all in on the action-horror madness. This is not strictly a complaint, mind you, I enjoy the action-horror direction to some extent, but just something I found a bit silly. Otherwise, the gameplay is largely the same as in RE5, with similar ways the player engages in combat and approaches enemies. It's still quite fun, even in a somewhat dialed-back context, and it works well enough within the game's more pick-up-and-play style of level design. However, this quicker pace means the game doesn't build much tension or horror, and I often found myself wishing the game was much scarier than it was. I suppose the fact that you could mow down most early-game enemies with little trouble and Revelations' overreliance on cheap jumpscares prevented it from being the "return to form" that I had hoped for. Credit where it’s due, however, the very first-time ooze Rachael appeared, and the subsequent chase to the cafeteria genuinely scared the everloving shit out of me and showed the potential for what Revelations could have been in more capable hands. There's still a baseline competence to it all, however. Combat is a decent bit of fun, and the dodge mechanic from Resident Evil 3 is back and vastly improved. While it's still fairly jank and doesn't always feel like it registered properly, this time around it felt like an actual skill I had to learn and it was satisfying to pull off. Enemies are generally fun to fight and even the more traditionally annoying enemies such as hunters generally have weaknesses that allow you to combat them without much trouble. Something that significantly hurts the game however is Revelations' awful pacing. After a few levels, the game will switch to another perspective in a different location which not only robs the game of its fantastic cruise ship setting but also is where the game wears its RE5 blood on its sleeve most apparently. These segments aren't strictly unfun but they feel entirely unsubstantial and I always wanted to return to the main scenario every time without fail. I also wasn’t a fan of the final level being primarily an underwater level. While I didn’t mind the ones that came before, they felt like filler, and ending the game on that note feels anticlimactic, though the awesome final boss partially makes up for that. Generally speaking, Revelations’ campaign feels like a weird mishmash between classic and at-the-time modern RE design conventions that definitely feature more of the latter than the former, but don’t entirely meld, but don’t necessarily fail either. It just comes off like a whole lot of “competent, but nothing special”.
Raid Mode is Revelations’ attempt at a mercenaries-style side mode, and unfortunately, it doesn’t hit the franchise’s high standards. While it’s quite good fun at first, after about five hours, Raid Mode’s flaws just become more and more evident. Instead of being an arena filled with enemies that the player can mow down to a time limit, it’s instead mission-based, with certain objectives for the player to fulfill to get to the end of the stage. Unfortunately, this means that Raid Mode is entirely at the whims of the mission designers, and the levels are not remotely consistent. Some of them can be beaten in three minutes on a first try, some stretch upwards of fifteen on repeat attempts. Some are well-designed and paced, and others are unfun slogs that you’ll never want to replay. The grinding and repetition of it all sets in too, as certain missions are recommended only if you have a certain amount of XP, meaning you’ll be replaying older missions quite a bit after a while to get the necessary amount to progress. I’m also not a huge fan of characters having little differences other than stat boosts, as opposed to mercs characters having entirely different load-outs and movesets, proving to be much less interesting and allowing less experimentation. I’m sure it’s much more fun with friends, but the servers are absolutely barren, forcing me to play it as a solo experience. I’m totally down for Capcom experimenting with the sidemode formula but unfortunately, Raid Mode feels too underbaked for me to fully recommend.
Revelations’ story, written by Dai Satō of Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell fame, unfortunately, is a disappointing mess. While Resident Evil 5’s story was underbaked if not often downright stupid, Revelations’ story is messy. First of all, the constant jumping between perspectives is not just a pacing killer for the gameplay but the story as well. Revelations’ story isn’t absurdly complicated when laid flat, but when the game is constantly leaping from character to character, location to location, tone to tone, it becomes legitimately difficult to keep up with. This is the very first time I had to consult Wikipedia to find out the extent of what happened, and perhaps I’m just a big dumb idiot but this is the first time I’ve ever had to do that for an RE game, and I don’t think for the right reasons. The game keeps trying to pull so many different twists on the player that it feels like an M. Night Shyamalan film. Chris isn’t in any danger, Jill and Parker were fed false information! Veltro isn’t back, it was a setup by O’Brian! Turns out the attack on Terragrigia wasn’t unprompted but was done in collaboration with the FBC! Turns out Jessica and Raymond were double agents for Tricell! I understand the game is called Revelations, but the number of times the game tries to pull the rug out from under the player is maddening and comes off as a cheap attempt at layered storytelling. I also find O’Brian’s plan to lure out Morgan’s guilt by tricking Jill and Parker into thinking Veltro had been revived to be…extremely ill-advised. It’s honestly a miracle that things went as well as they did, at multiple points, the plan just puts his employees in unnecessary danger and I’m surprised most of them weren’t mauled to death or seriously injured.
Jill Valentine is probably the dullest she’s ever been (circa 2012) with zero personality or character development in sight. While she wasn’t exactly interesting in RE5 either, she was a supporting character and not the protagonist, and games like the original RE3 proved she could be a rather strong lead at that. The supporting characters are a mixed bag as well. I found Parker rather charming despite not being all that original and enjoyed hearing how he reacted to situations. I also found his dynamic with Raymond to be more endearing than I would have thought, even if it’s not very fleshed out. Unfortunately, the rest all fall flat for me. Jessica’s whole personality is being the flirty double agent, Morgan is an antagonist who wants money and power because of course he does, Chris is dull as usual, Norman hams it up the whole time despite virtually zero screentime, and Keith and Quint take the cake for being perhaps the most annoying characters in the whole series with their constant pop culture references and creepy comments about female characters. O’Brian threatens to be interesting as a grizzled and jaded old soul with his heart in the right place, but his relationship with Morgan is never fully explored and feels underdeveloped. The constant references to The Divine Comedy also come off as slightly pretentious rather than thematically relevant. I also found the worldbuilding to be a bit subpar. I always found memos to be one of the most interesting ways Resident Evil often told its stories, but the ones here are generic and reminiscent of, if not carbon copies of ones found in earlier games.
When the HD ports of Revelations were released, many gaming journalists criticized the game for featuring outdated visuals. While the PC port does offer a fairly significant boost in visual fidelity and asset quality compared to the 3DS original, it is still a 3DS game at its core, and what an impressive 3DS game it is! While an obvious, and understandable downgrade from Resident Evil 5, it is genuinely impressive how it’s not that far behind in terms of visual fidelity. Environments are densely detailed and the main hallway and the kitchen where you encounter your first ooze are prime examples. They have a lived-in feel that, while not as potent as some of the classic Resident Evil games, is still present and noticeable. Character models look nice too, featuring sufficient detail and appropriate proportions and although lip sync isn’t exactly very good, I doubt that would be very noticeable on a 480p 3DS screen. I can’t say I particularly care for Jill’s facial redesign. It looks good in the promotional CGI renders, but in-game, she looks somewhat misshapen and swollen. Moving away from Julia Voth’s face isn’t an inherently awful idea but this in particular felt poorly executed. I found the game’s use of color to be fairly interesting as well. Steely blues were expected and appreciated for the game’s setting, but the use of burnished orange as a contrast was surprising and provided for some great tonal clash that reminded me of a James Cameron film, especially during the Teragrigia sequences. Texture quality, even at max settings, often leaves a bit to be desired, but I found it to be an acceptable if even appreciable upgrade from the 3DS version. Unfortunately, Capcom was slightly lazy when upgrading the visual presentation, as some assets are entirely untouched from the 3DS original. Tiptoing around the dead bodies of ooze creatures isn’t remotely creepy when you can tell their models haven’t been updated at all, and therefore almost certainly won’t get up. I’m usually critical of MT Framework’s FXAA implementation but I found the simpler presentation lends itself much better to it, and there was significantly less shimmering than say, in the Resident Evil HD Remaster. The game also runs like a dream as well, maintaining 120 FPS at max settings all of the time, with the only frame drops being in elevators, which function as invisible loading screens. However, the lack of any native anisotropic filtering severely hurts the presentation, and while this is easily fixed by forcing it in the GPU control panel, by 2013 this shouldn’t have been something that required fixing.
While they’re a bit polarizing, I do love the ooze as enemy types. Their sick, mottled, slimy skin combined with how they slide around as if boneless is genuinely unnerving. I especially like how there’s a little bit of variance among them, which does give off the impression that their appearance is slightly determined by the person infected. The rest of the monster designs are pretty cool too, and I genuinely found the sea creepers, farfarello, and scarmiglione to be very cool creature designs, though admittedly only the creepers unnerved me. I felt that the hunters, fenrir, and globsters could have stood to be more original, and I felt very little from my encounters with them on a visual level. The pre-rendered CGI cutscenes are a bit of a mixed bag. While having such a prevalence of them was undoubtedly necessary to retain a certain level of detail on the 3DS, the problem is that the assets used in these CGI cutscenes look no different from the in-game ones, which causes them to look very cheap in a game otherwise known for its home console-level presentation. The lack of quality lip sync becomes even more apparent in these cutscenes, and I cannot give Capcom the “3DS” excuse this time around. Oddly enough, a few cutscenes, without rhyme or reason, are rendered with much higher fidelity assets and smoother animations, and while they’re not perfect they do represent a monumental upgrade from most of them. Cutscene cinematography and editing are generally uninspired and I felt nothing from them from a filmmaking perspective. Despite a few setbacks, however, Revelations has a genuinely highly impressive visual presentation especially considering the base hardware.
The original soundtrack, unfortunately, leaves a decent bit to be desired. It’s not bad by any means, it’s very well produced and made with quality conventional composition standards. However, I find it to be unfitting of the kind of game Revelations is purported to be. It’s a big-budget action film score, and while that’s not necessarily bad - a lot of Revelations is like a big-budget action film - it flounders when it needs to be atmospheric and creepy. The game could seriously use fewer rising violins, not only is it a horror cliche but I found it antithetical to the game’s lonely, ghostship atmosphere. Even going back to the scores for the PS1 games, they used a lot of droning synths and deep orchestral sounds, discordant compositions, and other ways to sonically unnerve the player. Revelations doesn’t have much of that, and while it’s not absent, it is missed. Where it does succeed however is its use of motifs, and I found that each entirely character having their own leitmotif and the same “Revelations” theme recurring at many pivotal moments to be intelligent scoring. It also succeeds in the big bombastic action setpieces, reminiscent of both RE5’s soundtrack and the works of James Horner, with “Ride to Sea” being a particular favorite. While I found “Rest & Intensify”, the game’s equivalent of a save room theme, to be initially rather boring, it did grow on me over time as a relaxing haven even if it’s still far from my favorite. It’s a perfectly serviceable soundtrack. Outside of maybe one or two tracks, it isn’t very memorable, and at some points even works against the game’s intended atmosphere. However, when it does work, it works well, so credit where it is due.
It’s interesting to see how Revelations’ reception has shifted over time. When released on the 3DS, it was very positively received, but with each subsequent port, it seems people become progressively less forgiving of its weaknesses. Unfortunately, I found I agreed with most of the complaints that people have about the game. Revelations just isn’t much of a return to form. It’s yet again another action horror game that prioritizes bombastic setpieces over the atmosphere and scares. It’s not scary, it’s not particularly original, it’s possibly one of the worst-written games in the series, and it has a soundtrack that often works against it. Despite this, Revelations makes up for this by being genuinely fun a lot of the time. Gameplay feels good to pull off - even the dumb setpieces are fun to plow through - and the visual presentation is outstanding within context. Although the script is a mess, certain character dynamics are endearing and the ship’s lonely atmosphere can be genuinely effective when left to silence. Even in the face of all of its flaws, it’s still a competent Resident Evil game and is worth playing for die-hard fans. General fans of horror games will want to look elsewhere though, you aren’t going to wet your pants here.
Raid Mode is Revelations’ attempt at a mercenaries-style side mode, and unfortunately, it doesn’t hit the franchise’s high standards. While it’s quite good fun at first, after about five hours, Raid Mode’s flaws just become more and more evident. Instead of being an arena filled with enemies that the player can mow down to a time limit, it’s instead mission-based, with certain objectives for the player to fulfill to get to the end of the stage. Unfortunately, this means that Raid Mode is entirely at the whims of the mission designers, and the levels are not remotely consistent. Some of them can be beaten in three minutes on a first try, some stretch upwards of fifteen on repeat attempts. Some are well-designed and paced, and others are unfun slogs that you’ll never want to replay. The grinding and repetition of it all sets in too, as certain missions are recommended only if you have a certain amount of XP, meaning you’ll be replaying older missions quite a bit after a while to get the necessary amount to progress. I’m also not a huge fan of characters having little differences other than stat boosts, as opposed to mercs characters having entirely different load-outs and movesets, proving to be much less interesting and allowing less experimentation. I’m sure it’s much more fun with friends, but the servers are absolutely barren, forcing me to play it as a solo experience. I’m totally down for Capcom experimenting with the sidemode formula but unfortunately, Raid Mode feels too underbaked for me to fully recommend.
Revelations’ story, written by Dai Satō of Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell fame, unfortunately, is a disappointing mess. While Resident Evil 5’s story was underbaked if not often downright stupid, Revelations’ story is messy. First of all, the constant jumping between perspectives is not just a pacing killer for the gameplay but the story as well. Revelations’ story isn’t absurdly complicated when laid flat, but when the game is constantly leaping from character to character, location to location, tone to tone, it becomes legitimately difficult to keep up with. This is the very first time I had to consult Wikipedia to find out the extent of what happened, and perhaps I’m just a big dumb idiot but this is the first time I’ve ever had to do that for an RE game, and I don’t think for the right reasons. The game keeps trying to pull so many different twists on the player that it feels like an M. Night Shyamalan film. Chris isn’t in any danger, Jill and Parker were fed false information! Veltro isn’t back, it was a setup by O’Brian! Turns out the attack on Terragrigia wasn’t unprompted but was done in collaboration with the FBC! Turns out Jessica and Raymond were double agents for Tricell! I understand the game is called Revelations, but the number of times the game tries to pull the rug out from under the player is maddening and comes off as a cheap attempt at layered storytelling. I also find O’Brian’s plan to lure out Morgan’s guilt by tricking Jill and Parker into thinking Veltro had been revived to be…extremely ill-advised. It’s honestly a miracle that things went as well as they did, at multiple points, the plan just puts his employees in unnecessary danger and I’m surprised most of them weren’t mauled to death or seriously injured.
Jill Valentine is probably the dullest she’s ever been (circa 2012) with zero personality or character development in sight. While she wasn’t exactly interesting in RE5 either, she was a supporting character and not the protagonist, and games like the original RE3 proved she could be a rather strong lead at that. The supporting characters are a mixed bag as well. I found Parker rather charming despite not being all that original and enjoyed hearing how he reacted to situations. I also found his dynamic with Raymond to be more endearing than I would have thought, even if it’s not very fleshed out. Unfortunately, the rest all fall flat for me. Jessica’s whole personality is being the flirty double agent, Morgan is an antagonist who wants money and power because of course he does, Chris is dull as usual, Norman hams it up the whole time despite virtually zero screentime, and Keith and Quint take the cake for being perhaps the most annoying characters in the whole series with their constant pop culture references and creepy comments about female characters. O’Brian threatens to be interesting as a grizzled and jaded old soul with his heart in the right place, but his relationship with Morgan is never fully explored and feels underdeveloped. The constant references to The Divine Comedy also come off as slightly pretentious rather than thematically relevant. I also found the worldbuilding to be a bit subpar. I always found memos to be one of the most interesting ways Resident Evil often told its stories, but the ones here are generic and reminiscent of, if not carbon copies of ones found in earlier games.
When the HD ports of Revelations were released, many gaming journalists criticized the game for featuring outdated visuals. While the PC port does offer a fairly significant boost in visual fidelity and asset quality compared to the 3DS original, it is still a 3DS game at its core, and what an impressive 3DS game it is! While an obvious, and understandable downgrade from Resident Evil 5, it is genuinely impressive how it’s not that far behind in terms of visual fidelity. Environments are densely detailed and the main hallway and the kitchen where you encounter your first ooze are prime examples. They have a lived-in feel that, while not as potent as some of the classic Resident Evil games, is still present and noticeable. Character models look nice too, featuring sufficient detail and appropriate proportions and although lip sync isn’t exactly very good, I doubt that would be very noticeable on a 480p 3DS screen. I can’t say I particularly care for Jill’s facial redesign. It looks good in the promotional CGI renders, but in-game, she looks somewhat misshapen and swollen. Moving away from Julia Voth’s face isn’t an inherently awful idea but this in particular felt poorly executed. I found the game’s use of color to be fairly interesting as well. Steely blues were expected and appreciated for the game’s setting, but the use of burnished orange as a contrast was surprising and provided for some great tonal clash that reminded me of a James Cameron film, especially during the Teragrigia sequences. Texture quality, even at max settings, often leaves a bit to be desired, but I found it to be an acceptable if even appreciable upgrade from the 3DS version. Unfortunately, Capcom was slightly lazy when upgrading the visual presentation, as some assets are entirely untouched from the 3DS original. Tiptoing around the dead bodies of ooze creatures isn’t remotely creepy when you can tell their models haven’t been updated at all, and therefore almost certainly won’t get up. I’m usually critical of MT Framework’s FXAA implementation but I found the simpler presentation lends itself much better to it, and there was significantly less shimmering than say, in the Resident Evil HD Remaster. The game also runs like a dream as well, maintaining 120 FPS at max settings all of the time, with the only frame drops being in elevators, which function as invisible loading screens. However, the lack of any native anisotropic filtering severely hurts the presentation, and while this is easily fixed by forcing it in the GPU control panel, by 2013 this shouldn’t have been something that required fixing.
While they’re a bit polarizing, I do love the ooze as enemy types. Their sick, mottled, slimy skin combined with how they slide around as if boneless is genuinely unnerving. I especially like how there’s a little bit of variance among them, which does give off the impression that their appearance is slightly determined by the person infected. The rest of the monster designs are pretty cool too, and I genuinely found the sea creepers, farfarello, and scarmiglione to be very cool creature designs, though admittedly only the creepers unnerved me. I felt that the hunters, fenrir, and globsters could have stood to be more original, and I felt very little from my encounters with them on a visual level. The pre-rendered CGI cutscenes are a bit of a mixed bag. While having such a prevalence of them was undoubtedly necessary to retain a certain level of detail on the 3DS, the problem is that the assets used in these CGI cutscenes look no different from the in-game ones, which causes them to look very cheap in a game otherwise known for its home console-level presentation. The lack of quality lip sync becomes even more apparent in these cutscenes, and I cannot give Capcom the “3DS” excuse this time around. Oddly enough, a few cutscenes, without rhyme or reason, are rendered with much higher fidelity assets and smoother animations, and while they’re not perfect they do represent a monumental upgrade from most of them. Cutscene cinematography and editing are generally uninspired and I felt nothing from them from a filmmaking perspective. Despite a few setbacks, however, Revelations has a genuinely highly impressive visual presentation especially considering the base hardware.
The original soundtrack, unfortunately, leaves a decent bit to be desired. It’s not bad by any means, it’s very well produced and made with quality conventional composition standards. However, I find it to be unfitting of the kind of game Revelations is purported to be. It’s a big-budget action film score, and while that’s not necessarily bad - a lot of Revelations is like a big-budget action film - it flounders when it needs to be atmospheric and creepy. The game could seriously use fewer rising violins, not only is it a horror cliche but I found it antithetical to the game’s lonely, ghostship atmosphere. Even going back to the scores for the PS1 games, they used a lot of droning synths and deep orchestral sounds, discordant compositions, and other ways to sonically unnerve the player. Revelations doesn’t have much of that, and while it’s not absent, it is missed. Where it does succeed however is its use of motifs, and I found that each entirely character having their own leitmotif and the same “Revelations” theme recurring at many pivotal moments to be intelligent scoring. It also succeeds in the big bombastic action setpieces, reminiscent of both RE5’s soundtrack and the works of James Horner, with “Ride to Sea” being a particular favorite. While I found “Rest & Intensify”, the game’s equivalent of a save room theme, to be initially rather boring, it did grow on me over time as a relaxing haven even if it’s still far from my favorite. It’s a perfectly serviceable soundtrack. Outside of maybe one or two tracks, it isn’t very memorable, and at some points even works against the game’s intended atmosphere. However, when it does work, it works well, so credit where it is due.
It’s interesting to see how Revelations’ reception has shifted over time. When released on the 3DS, it was very positively received, but with each subsequent port, it seems people become progressively less forgiving of its weaknesses. Unfortunately, I found I agreed with most of the complaints that people have about the game. Revelations just isn’t much of a return to form. It’s yet again another action horror game that prioritizes bombastic setpieces over the atmosphere and scares. It’s not scary, it’s not particularly original, it’s possibly one of the worst-written games in the series, and it has a soundtrack that often works against it. Despite this, Revelations makes up for this by being genuinely fun a lot of the time. Gameplay feels good to pull off - even the dumb setpieces are fun to plow through - and the visual presentation is outstanding within context. Although the script is a mess, certain character dynamics are endearing and the ship’s lonely atmosphere can be genuinely effective when left to silence. Even in the face of all of its flaws, it’s still a competent Resident Evil game and is worth playing for die-hard fans. General fans of horror games will want to look elsewhere though, you aren’t going to wet your pants here.