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Banned Footage Vol. 1 starts off Resident Evil 7's post-launch content support, and for me, it's a mixed bag. I quite liked Nightmare, the game's endless waves mode, as it was fairly challenging and the way the basement level would expand as you fought your way through and picked your upgrades wisely was fun, especially with Jack Baker occasionally chiming in to give your underwear a filling. Bedroom was a fun little puzzle box and solving it while under constant threat from Marguerite was tense and fun, but considering the puzzles are always set the same way it has absolutely zero replay value. It's good, but it's very much a one-and-done 20-minute experience. Ethan Must Die I'll admit to not putting much time into it, it's thoroughly not my thing and it doesn't seem others enjoy it much either. Overall, BFV1 is a perfectly fine pack of DLC that I'd recommend to big fans of the game, but I'd recommend it on sale unless you really want to get mileage out of EMD.
With Resident Evil 7's big claim to fame being bringing old-school survival horror game design back into the mainstream AAA sphere, turning Not A Hero into an action-packed first-person shooter was a bizarre move on the part of outsourced developer HexaDrive. A bizarre move that actually kind of works, as Not A Hero does remain fairly fun throughout its short runtime. Giving the weapons more power is supplemented by a new enemy type which is only vulnerable to a specific type of ammo. You'd think this would add strategy to combat encounters but this new enemy is rather rare so the mechanic doesn't come up as much as I'd like. The DLC manages to be fairly tense at points, in a different manner from the base game, though a pervasive sense of "Is that all?" flows through it. It's not standout in any way, playing fine enough, looking great but primarily reusing environments from the base game, and being scored fine enough. I do like how it follows up on the dropped Lucas Baker thread, giving us a satisfying conclusion to that plotline while also expanding a bit on his connections to The Connections. Chris Redfield does look pretty weird in this one, I can see him being an older version of the Chris from RE1R, but definitely not the same Chris from RE5/6. It's not a bad design inherently it just looks weird in comparison to prior games. Ultimately a decent DLC pack that's worth it for fans of the base game, especially at the extremely high price point of free.
This review contains spoilers
After eight Resident Evil games in a row that were okay at best and downright atrocious at worst (RE5 and the Revelations games were probably the highlights of that era, but that's not saying much) it's fairly satisfying to play a Resident Evil game that was not just good, but outstanding. Almost every single moment of this game had my heart pounding out of my chest. A return to not only survival horror game design but also what made Resident Evil as a franchise scary to begin with, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard is a triumph in horror gaming. Simply referring to RE7 as a return to form for the series, while true, is selling the game short, as it presents a plethora of original and unique concepts for the series as well.
On a gameplay level, RE7 feels exceptional to play. Resource management, fight or flight, and frequent puzzles are all back and in full swing, feeling almost exactly like the old-school games, just from a first-person perspective. The change in perspective proves beneficial too, as never before have you had to face your enemies so up close and personal. The weapon balance is absolutely perfect, with your pistols, shotguns, and more feeling powerful enough to be essential defense tools, yet weak enough to prove that you can't blast yourself out of every situation. Even in normal mode, the game provides a hearty challenge and oftentimes you will be running dry on ammo up until late game even if you're conservative with your resources. Although the game is admittedly somewhat short on enemy variety, I consider this a minimal issue considering the threat represented by the molded. Unlike the zombies of old, they don't just slowly shamble towards you, they make a mad dash and clobber you to death. This not only makes them highly dangerous but also necessitates mastery of the new block mechanic to survive. Player movement is another thing I'd like to praise, as I find Ethan's speed to be perfect for a horror game. It's not so slow as to ruin exploration but not fast enough to easily outrun enemies, and it's horrifying knowing that one is on your tail and you can't just easily sprint away. Item crafting actually feels like a core mechanic of the game, rather than tacked on like Revelations 2, with crafting itself requiring resources simply to perform the act rather than just the resources of whatever you needed to make.
Even the boat and mine sequences, areas that even fans of the game regularly criticize, I found to be much better than I anticipated. Although the boat sequence starts fairly slow, the moment you get a weapon it comes up to the pace of the rest of the game. The mine sequence turns into a molded blastfest, but that's just the structure of every Resident Evil game, so I find it hard to find fault in that.
If there's any complaint I have gameplay-wise, is that as cool and unique as the puzzles often are, the game too often seems to have little faith in the player and spells them out for you. The biggest example is the clock puzzle, where you have to find the correct time for a small, desktop clock by looking at the clock in the main hall. What would have been an interesting yet fair puzzle is ruined when the game hands you a memo outright telling you that it's the same time as the hall clock. While this isn't a huge problem, as there are still plenty of puzzles that aren't like this, it was slightly frustrating. Nonetheless, this is still a masterful survival horror experience, crafted by people who have much love for the originals while also paving the way for something new.
It was a surreal experience playing a Resident Evil game and being invested in the plot for once. While I won't claim RE7 to be the pinnacle of scriptwriting, as it does have a few narrative flaws, it's head and shoulders above most games in the franchise. I personally only consider a handful of RE games to be well-written (RE1, RE2, RE3, RE1R, RE4, and RE7, with big asterisks for 1 and 4), so this was certainly an enjoyable surprise. While the premise starts perhaps too closely with Silent Hill 2, it eventually evolves into the tragic story of the Baker family. A family of sadistic killers gives way to the story of innocent, loving people who made the mistake of rescuing someone, their kindness being taken advantage of and transforming them into agents of a cruel girl's bidding. Not only do the Bakers all have distinct personalities but they also offer a genuinely effective mix of nailbiting horror and comedic levity, and when you finally get to see their true selves late in the game, it becomes highly saddening. Showing Mia's degradation via the mold almost immediately from the get-go showcases the devastating effects that this new virus causes and immediately sets the stakes high. Although RE7 initially seems entirely disconnected from the greater world setting of Resident Evil, as the game progresses Capcom ties the game into prior entries effectively, foreshadowed with great mystery, which not only connects the game further into series lore but also helps explain RE7's otherwise self-contained story. There's an intriguing mystery to solve here, and the way it wraps up at the end is satisfying, despite a very underwhelming final boss.
If I have any problems with it, however, it's that I think Eveline is a bit of a mixed bag as a greater-scope antagonist. While I find the idea of a BOW whose entire purpose is to blend in with human civilian populaces before unleashing the most nightmarish infestation imaginable incredibly scary, in practice she ends up just being a very cliche scary little girl trope which isn't scary nor narratively investing. In fact, I often found her quite cringeworthy. My other criticism is the choice between saving Mia or Zoe. While I don't think it's nearly as arbitrary as people seem to make it out to be (I can see why anyone would reasonably pick one or the other) I do wish we spent a little more time with Zoe to make the choice more impactful. Otherwise, it's a very solid story that emphasizes the importance of family connections, yet also how easily said connections can be corrupted into a perpetual hell of abuse, exaggerated to its logical extremes.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering Capcom has one of the best art teams in the industry, Resident Evil 7 is one of the most graphically impressive games I've played in a very long time, especially after the ray tracing update. Each musty room of the Baker's home is teeming with small environmental details which helps make it feel like a lived-in space. Directly compare it to the often empty corridors of Revelations 2, which came out a short two years prior on the same platforms, and the difference is staggering. Textures are often high quality even when put up to reasonable scrutiny, and asset quality pushes as far as it reasonably can without tanking performance. From the dirtied interiors of the Baker mansion to the hauntingly infested outdoor bayous to the rotting and mold-infested basements, Resident Evil 7 has no shortage of terrifyingly detailed setpieces. The next-generation update pushes this even further, with many of RE Engine's negative quirks being ironed out. Gone are the game's questionably implemented and heavily pixellated screen-space reflections, replaced by high-quality RT reflections. The Baker house looks slimy, groggy, and wet without being overly shiny. Sometimes, however, the reflections do look a little awkward, such as the tree reflections not having leaves! The RT shadows also add heavily to the presentation, as much as you'd expect from a horror game, as beams of light cast dark shadows across the broken landscape. Human faces are expressive and highly realistic, and their sweaty visages are menacing. The molded, while fairly similar to the ooze from Revelations, are horrifying masses of meat and flesh that can emerge from nearly anywhere if you're not careful. While the game could have only benefitted from greater enemy variety, I really like what's here already. Once again, however, I'm not massively fond of the game's anti-aliasing, as it's either not effective enough or too blurry. The next-gen update's implementation of FSR 1.0 is also too smeary for my tastes.
Surprisingly enough, the game runs phenomenally on my PC. Even with max settings and max ray tracing running at native 1440p, the game typically ran consistently at around 120 FPS, with no stuttering problems whatsoever. I was surprised to see it running so well, but I did run into one issue, which was sustained drops to around 45 FPS seemingly at random. This occurred without rhyme or reason, typically lasted a minute at most, and happened maybe only five times throughout my entire playthrough, but it was immensely distracting whenever it happened. It's not a major problem due to its relative rarity, but it's something to keep an eye out for.
After the absolute mess that was Resident Evil 6's soundtrack and the competent but unfitting soundtrack for Revelations, Revelations 2 finally pushed the series back onto the right track with a decently effective industrial score, which is only amplified tenfold for RE7. RE7's soundtrack isn't exactly what you'd call pleasant listening, as its clanging, droning, and moaning is highly oppressive. It perfectly bobs and weaves with the environments, and upon listening to it as a standalone album, I realized that many of the sounds I had thought were environmental sound effects were actually intelligently atmospheric parts of the score. No matter whether it's some of the game's softer ambiance or the pounding, anxiety-inducing themes of the game's boss fights, the game never lets up. It grabs you by the balls and nearly rips them off. RE7 also boasts one of the franchise's best save room themes, with its reversed synths giving the vibes of sitting in front of a dim lantern, enjoying a brief respite of safety, yet mortified of what lurks outside. The game also boasts highly immersive and intelligent sound design, with every creak and bump in the Baker house putting me on edge and immersing me further within its world.
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard might be a return to form, but as stated earlier, that's selling short one of the freshest, most original entries in the franchise. A true love letter to what it means to be Resident Evil, RE7's horrifying scares, finely tuned survival horror gameplay, solid and engaging story, beautifully immersive visual presentation, and oppressive soundtrack and atmosphere make it one of the franchise's finest entries, and one of the best horror games I've ever played. Although it does suffer from occasionally wince-worthy moments and perhaps some minor tech issues, this hardly takes away from what might be 2017's GOTY. Welcome back, Resident Evil.
On a gameplay level, RE7 feels exceptional to play. Resource management, fight or flight, and frequent puzzles are all back and in full swing, feeling almost exactly like the old-school games, just from a first-person perspective. The change in perspective proves beneficial too, as never before have you had to face your enemies so up close and personal. The weapon balance is absolutely perfect, with your pistols, shotguns, and more feeling powerful enough to be essential defense tools, yet weak enough to prove that you can't blast yourself out of every situation. Even in normal mode, the game provides a hearty challenge and oftentimes you will be running dry on ammo up until late game even if you're conservative with your resources. Although the game is admittedly somewhat short on enemy variety, I consider this a minimal issue considering the threat represented by the molded. Unlike the zombies of old, they don't just slowly shamble towards you, they make a mad dash and clobber you to death. This not only makes them highly dangerous but also necessitates mastery of the new block mechanic to survive. Player movement is another thing I'd like to praise, as I find Ethan's speed to be perfect for a horror game. It's not so slow as to ruin exploration but not fast enough to easily outrun enemies, and it's horrifying knowing that one is on your tail and you can't just easily sprint away. Item crafting actually feels like a core mechanic of the game, rather than tacked on like Revelations 2, with crafting itself requiring resources simply to perform the act rather than just the resources of whatever you needed to make.
Even the boat and mine sequences, areas that even fans of the game regularly criticize, I found to be much better than I anticipated. Although the boat sequence starts fairly slow, the moment you get a weapon it comes up to the pace of the rest of the game. The mine sequence turns into a molded blastfest, but that's just the structure of every Resident Evil game, so I find it hard to find fault in that.
If there's any complaint I have gameplay-wise, is that as cool and unique as the puzzles often are, the game too often seems to have little faith in the player and spells them out for you. The biggest example is the clock puzzle, where you have to find the correct time for a small, desktop clock by looking at the clock in the main hall. What would have been an interesting yet fair puzzle is ruined when the game hands you a memo outright telling you that it's the same time as the hall clock. While this isn't a huge problem, as there are still plenty of puzzles that aren't like this, it was slightly frustrating. Nonetheless, this is still a masterful survival horror experience, crafted by people who have much love for the originals while also paving the way for something new.
It was a surreal experience playing a Resident Evil game and being invested in the plot for once. While I won't claim RE7 to be the pinnacle of scriptwriting, as it does have a few narrative flaws, it's head and shoulders above most games in the franchise. I personally only consider a handful of RE games to be well-written (RE1, RE2, RE3, RE1R, RE4, and RE7, with big asterisks for 1 and 4), so this was certainly an enjoyable surprise. While the premise starts perhaps too closely with Silent Hill 2, it eventually evolves into the tragic story of the Baker family. A family of sadistic killers gives way to the story of innocent, loving people who made the mistake of rescuing someone, their kindness being taken advantage of and transforming them into agents of a cruel girl's bidding. Not only do the Bakers all have distinct personalities but they also offer a genuinely effective mix of nailbiting horror and comedic levity, and when you finally get to see their true selves late in the game, it becomes highly saddening. Showing Mia's degradation via the mold almost immediately from the get-go showcases the devastating effects that this new virus causes and immediately sets the stakes high. Although RE7 initially seems entirely disconnected from the greater world setting of Resident Evil, as the game progresses Capcom ties the game into prior entries effectively, foreshadowed with great mystery, which not only connects the game further into series lore but also helps explain RE7's otherwise self-contained story. There's an intriguing mystery to solve here, and the way it wraps up at the end is satisfying, despite a very underwhelming final boss.
If I have any problems with it, however, it's that I think Eveline is a bit of a mixed bag as a greater-scope antagonist. While I find the idea of a BOW whose entire purpose is to blend in with human civilian populaces before unleashing the most nightmarish infestation imaginable incredibly scary, in practice she ends up just being a very cliche scary little girl trope which isn't scary nor narratively investing. In fact, I often found her quite cringeworthy. My other criticism is the choice between saving Mia or Zoe. While I don't think it's nearly as arbitrary as people seem to make it out to be (I can see why anyone would reasonably pick one or the other) I do wish we spent a little more time with Zoe to make the choice more impactful. Otherwise, it's a very solid story that emphasizes the importance of family connections, yet also how easily said connections can be corrupted into a perpetual hell of abuse, exaggerated to its logical extremes.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering Capcom has one of the best art teams in the industry, Resident Evil 7 is one of the most graphically impressive games I've played in a very long time, especially after the ray tracing update. Each musty room of the Baker's home is teeming with small environmental details which helps make it feel like a lived-in space. Directly compare it to the often empty corridors of Revelations 2, which came out a short two years prior on the same platforms, and the difference is staggering. Textures are often high quality even when put up to reasonable scrutiny, and asset quality pushes as far as it reasonably can without tanking performance. From the dirtied interiors of the Baker mansion to the hauntingly infested outdoor bayous to the rotting and mold-infested basements, Resident Evil 7 has no shortage of terrifyingly detailed setpieces. The next-generation update pushes this even further, with many of RE Engine's negative quirks being ironed out. Gone are the game's questionably implemented and heavily pixellated screen-space reflections, replaced by high-quality RT reflections. The Baker house looks slimy, groggy, and wet without being overly shiny. Sometimes, however, the reflections do look a little awkward, such as the tree reflections not having leaves! The RT shadows also add heavily to the presentation, as much as you'd expect from a horror game, as beams of light cast dark shadows across the broken landscape. Human faces are expressive and highly realistic, and their sweaty visages are menacing. The molded, while fairly similar to the ooze from Revelations, are horrifying masses of meat and flesh that can emerge from nearly anywhere if you're not careful. While the game could have only benefitted from greater enemy variety, I really like what's here already. Once again, however, I'm not massively fond of the game's anti-aliasing, as it's either not effective enough or too blurry. The next-gen update's implementation of FSR 1.0 is also too smeary for my tastes.
Surprisingly enough, the game runs phenomenally on my PC. Even with max settings and max ray tracing running at native 1440p, the game typically ran consistently at around 120 FPS, with no stuttering problems whatsoever. I was surprised to see it running so well, but I did run into one issue, which was sustained drops to around 45 FPS seemingly at random. This occurred without rhyme or reason, typically lasted a minute at most, and happened maybe only five times throughout my entire playthrough, but it was immensely distracting whenever it happened. It's not a major problem due to its relative rarity, but it's something to keep an eye out for.
After the absolute mess that was Resident Evil 6's soundtrack and the competent but unfitting soundtrack for Revelations, Revelations 2 finally pushed the series back onto the right track with a decently effective industrial score, which is only amplified tenfold for RE7. RE7's soundtrack isn't exactly what you'd call pleasant listening, as its clanging, droning, and moaning is highly oppressive. It perfectly bobs and weaves with the environments, and upon listening to it as a standalone album, I realized that many of the sounds I had thought were environmental sound effects were actually intelligently atmospheric parts of the score. No matter whether it's some of the game's softer ambiance or the pounding, anxiety-inducing themes of the game's boss fights, the game never lets up. It grabs you by the balls and nearly rips them off. RE7 also boasts one of the franchise's best save room themes, with its reversed synths giving the vibes of sitting in front of a dim lantern, enjoying a brief respite of safety, yet mortified of what lurks outside. The game also boasts highly immersive and intelligent sound design, with every creak and bump in the Baker house putting me on edge and immersing me further within its world.
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard might be a return to form, but as stated earlier, that's selling short one of the freshest, most original entries in the franchise. A true love letter to what it means to be Resident Evil, RE7's horrifying scares, finely tuned survival horror gameplay, solid and engaging story, beautifully immersive visual presentation, and oppressive soundtrack and atmosphere make it one of the franchise's finest entries, and one of the best horror games I've ever played. Although it does suffer from occasionally wince-worthy moments and perhaps some minor tech issues, this hardly takes away from what might be 2017's GOTY. Welcome back, Resident Evil.
Beginning Hour is a decent enough introduction to the world of Resident Evil 7, which features incredibly high-quality visuals but unfortunately does fall back on a lot of very cliche mid-2010s horror tropes and even a few bugs here and there. For starters, I do want to say that the atmosphere in Beginning Hour is excellent. From the moment you wake up in the dingy guest house, you're immediately on edge and while there isn't much that actually endangers you, it definitely feels like it. The visual presentation is top-notch, with highly detailed, almost photorealistic environments with great detail; even relatively unimportant rooms and environments are dense and filled with smaller details which make Beginning Hour infinitely more immersive. As awesome of an engine as it is, however, the RE Engine has always had two things that bothered me about it, being the anti-aliasing and the screen-space reflections. Both of these poor implementations are visible here, with messy, artifact-ridden reflections that almost make the game look worse with than without. The anti-aliasing, depending on the setting, either looks too blurry or isn't effective enough at cleaning edges. It doesn't ruin the otherwise excellent presentation but it certainly is distracting.
Although Beginning Hour looks great and maintains a generally spooky atmosphere, I can't say it was very scary. There are times when the game wants you to jump but it just comes off as weak when it needs to be. I'm not going to be too harsh, since this is a 30-minute demo that is fairly different from the base game, but it does feel very pedestrian in its horror, and never did it scare me. There is one enemy encounter in the basement that is fairly tense, but that tension is ruined when the enemy bugged out and froze in place twice for me.
Another thing I want to note is the series of puzzles necessary for the good ending feels a bit arbitrary and I can't imagine most players coming to the natural conclusion of how to complete those puzzles. However, I am under the impression Capcom intended Beginning Hour to be like PT in the sense that solving it was meant to be a community effort, and back in 2016 I can imagine that being quite fun.
Resident Evil 7 Teaser: Beginning Hour is a decent enough demo that I'd recommend people play before going into Resident Evil 7 proper, as it gives you some additional background to the game's world setting and introduces you to the visual style that it goes for. It's short, free, and hard to find too much fault in, but it certainly isn't scary and I can't imagine it having any real staying power.
Although Beginning Hour looks great and maintains a generally spooky atmosphere, I can't say it was very scary. There are times when the game wants you to jump but it just comes off as weak when it needs to be. I'm not going to be too harsh, since this is a 30-minute demo that is fairly different from the base game, but it does feel very pedestrian in its horror, and never did it scare me. There is one enemy encounter in the basement that is fairly tense, but that tension is ruined when the enemy bugged out and froze in place twice for me.
Another thing I want to note is the series of puzzles necessary for the good ending feels a bit arbitrary and I can't imagine most players coming to the natural conclusion of how to complete those puzzles. However, I am under the impression Capcom intended Beginning Hour to be like PT in the sense that solving it was meant to be a community effort, and back in 2016 I can imagine that being quite fun.
Resident Evil 7 Teaser: Beginning Hour is a decent enough demo that I'd recommend people play before going into Resident Evil 7 proper, as it gives you some additional background to the game's world setting and introduces you to the visual style that it goes for. It's short, free, and hard to find too much fault in, but it certainly isn't scary and I can't imagine it having any real staying power.
2016
I don't usually give games ratings this low - a half-star always feels exaggerated in my opinion and very few games deserve to be rated with so much scorn. Umbrella Corps might not be the most frustrating game I've ever played, nor the most broken game I've ever played, nor the most buggy game I've ever played (though it certainly features strongly in each category) but it certainly might be among the laziest, especially in the AAA sphere. While Capcom's recent push for Resident Evil to enter the online multiplayer sphere might seem strange, they've done it before and to great success, with their Resident Evil Outbreak games on the PlayStation 2 both being shining examples of what an RE multiplayer experience can be in the right hands.
Umbrella Corp is not that experience. It's lazy, under-budgeted, lacking in content, poorly designed, and artistically devoid, and for these reasons, its initial player base (which was relatively small for a AAA game, even at launch) has long since abandoned it in favor of better tactical third-person shooters. Every aspect of the game design feels fundamentally poorly thought out, and nothing stands out to me as even acceptable. Movement feels awful, as the player always feels like they're essentially gliding around on ice (without slipping) because there's zero bounce or momentum to player movement. There's zero delay, the player just immediately begins moving and immediately stops and this makes Umbrella Corps feel like a mobile game that I hooked a keyboard and mouse to. The shotgun is unbelievably overpowered in smaller maps (which is most of what Umbrella Corps' maps are) and the game can't even make use of its most conceptually interesting mechanics. Team-neutral zombies within a PvP shooter sounds incredibly cool but this mechanic doesn't even matter because each player comes equipped with a zombie jammer, which makes you practically invisible to them and them nothing more than environmental decoration, almost. The idea is to destroy your opponent's jammer so they'll be attacked and killed by zombies, but the time-to-kill in this game is so unbelievably high that if you destroy the jammer, you typically end up killing your opponent as well, rendering the entire concept that made Umbrella Corps stand out entirely superfluous. Even disregarding all of this, combat just feels terrible, with poorly-placed hitboxes and some of the most busted melee combat I've seen in a long time. The brainer might seem cool in concept, but when engaging another player also wielding a brainer it feels almost like random chance which one gets to lodge the pick into the other's skull. The game features so little in the way of game modes, with only three game modes, two of which are busted beyond belief and were so easy for my friends and I to cheese. The game's FOV is so uncomfortably close with no options to adjust (and no one cares enough about the game to mod it) We were even somehow able to get the game to load us into a PvP round with all of us on the same team...with zero objectives since there were no enemies. It's a true testament to Umbrella Corps' quality as a multiplayer experience.
Umbrella Corps might stink royally as a multiplayer TPS, but even if you're interested in the game, you'd most likely struggle to find players unless you got some of your friends on board like I did. Lucky, or perhaps unlucky for you, the game does have a singleplayer campaign to some extent, though one that consists of doing the same basic tasks over and over again in the multiplayer maps, lacking any meaningful narrative or gameplay progression. Whether it be collecting the data samples, or securing the briefcases, Umbrella Corps's campaign is as short as it is repetitive. After about 12 levels, I tapped out realizing that if it hadn't changed at all by this point, it most likely would not be changing anytime soon. Naturally, this mode is PvE and is simultaneously too easy and too frustrating. While for the most part, gunning down zombies and ganados is fairly simple, things get frustrating very quickly when enemies swarm you all at once with no regard for intelligent AI design, and the crows have to be among Resident Evil's most annoying enemies, as they run right up to you and mercilessly peck you to death while dodging right out of your range of fire. Most of the design faults with the multiplayer carry over here, as the only real difference are the objectives and which enemies you're facing. The only somewhat interesting thing is that the game implies that Albert Wesker, or at least a clone of him, is still alive. Why Capcom decided to shove such an important tease in Umbrella Corps of all things is very bizarre.
Umbrella Corps was made on a shoestring budget and this is most easily reflected in its presentation. While there are some relatively appealing aspects of the art direction on occasion (for example I enjoyed some of the set design in the Tricell HQ), the game could easily pass for a mobile game. The game's asset quality is never up to par, with low-resolution textures pitifully attempting to overcome their lack of quality with overaggressive normalmaps, making patches of hay in RE4's village map look rough and plastic. The game also features god-awful lighting, with RE2's Raccoon City and RE6's China being bathed in this bright red light with the most excessive bloom I've seen in a long time, making these maps look exceptionally flat. The game's lack of anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering also makes the game look cheap, turning moving scenes into a shimmering mess and far-off textures into blurry pixels. While I'm aware both can easily be forced with your video card's control panel, this is not something anyone should have to do in 2016. Graphical fidelity is all over the place, with RE4's village map having been remade from scratch in Unity, but RE5's village using assets and textures ripped right out of MT Framework means that the game can look like it's from two entirely different console generations at times. Umbrella Corps also has some of the worst skyboxes I've ever seen in a game, being so close to the player that you can easily observe the houses made from four polygons each.
I'm also not a fan of the soundtrack, it's primarily electronic, dubstep, and techno which while not inherently bad never stood out to me. It blended into the background but not in the way you'd want ambient music to, but in the way that boring, uninteresting music would. It never makes the game feel atmospheric, it never gets my pulse pounding and ready for action, and it isn't even all that fun to listen to on its own.
Umbrella Corps will go down in history as one of Capcom's greatest failures. While they've made some of the most highly regarded, influential games of all time, they've also made some extremely high-profile flops and I'm sad to say that Umbrella Corps is among the worst. With its lack of content, broken gameplay, pitiful campaign, unflattering visuals, boring soundtrack, and most importantly dead player base, this should be of interest to absolutely no one.
Umbrella Corp is not that experience. It's lazy, under-budgeted, lacking in content, poorly designed, and artistically devoid, and for these reasons, its initial player base (which was relatively small for a AAA game, even at launch) has long since abandoned it in favor of better tactical third-person shooters. Every aspect of the game design feels fundamentally poorly thought out, and nothing stands out to me as even acceptable. Movement feels awful, as the player always feels like they're essentially gliding around on ice (without slipping) because there's zero bounce or momentum to player movement. There's zero delay, the player just immediately begins moving and immediately stops and this makes Umbrella Corps feel like a mobile game that I hooked a keyboard and mouse to. The shotgun is unbelievably overpowered in smaller maps (which is most of what Umbrella Corps' maps are) and the game can't even make use of its most conceptually interesting mechanics. Team-neutral zombies within a PvP shooter sounds incredibly cool but this mechanic doesn't even matter because each player comes equipped with a zombie jammer, which makes you practically invisible to them and them nothing more than environmental decoration, almost. The idea is to destroy your opponent's jammer so they'll be attacked and killed by zombies, but the time-to-kill in this game is so unbelievably high that if you destroy the jammer, you typically end up killing your opponent as well, rendering the entire concept that made Umbrella Corps stand out entirely superfluous. Even disregarding all of this, combat just feels terrible, with poorly-placed hitboxes and some of the most busted melee combat I've seen in a long time. The brainer might seem cool in concept, but when engaging another player also wielding a brainer it feels almost like random chance which one gets to lodge the pick into the other's skull. The game features so little in the way of game modes, with only three game modes, two of which are busted beyond belief and were so easy for my friends and I to cheese. The game's FOV is so uncomfortably close with no options to adjust (and no one cares enough about the game to mod it) We were even somehow able to get the game to load us into a PvP round with all of us on the same team...with zero objectives since there were no enemies. It's a true testament to Umbrella Corps' quality as a multiplayer experience.
Umbrella Corps might stink royally as a multiplayer TPS, but even if you're interested in the game, you'd most likely struggle to find players unless you got some of your friends on board like I did. Lucky, or perhaps unlucky for you, the game does have a singleplayer campaign to some extent, though one that consists of doing the same basic tasks over and over again in the multiplayer maps, lacking any meaningful narrative or gameplay progression. Whether it be collecting the data samples, or securing the briefcases, Umbrella Corps's campaign is as short as it is repetitive. After about 12 levels, I tapped out realizing that if it hadn't changed at all by this point, it most likely would not be changing anytime soon. Naturally, this mode is PvE and is simultaneously too easy and too frustrating. While for the most part, gunning down zombies and ganados is fairly simple, things get frustrating very quickly when enemies swarm you all at once with no regard for intelligent AI design, and the crows have to be among Resident Evil's most annoying enemies, as they run right up to you and mercilessly peck you to death while dodging right out of your range of fire. Most of the design faults with the multiplayer carry over here, as the only real difference are the objectives and which enemies you're facing. The only somewhat interesting thing is that the game implies that Albert Wesker, or at least a clone of him, is still alive. Why Capcom decided to shove such an important tease in Umbrella Corps of all things is very bizarre.
Umbrella Corps was made on a shoestring budget and this is most easily reflected in its presentation. While there are some relatively appealing aspects of the art direction on occasion (for example I enjoyed some of the set design in the Tricell HQ), the game could easily pass for a mobile game. The game's asset quality is never up to par, with low-resolution textures pitifully attempting to overcome their lack of quality with overaggressive normalmaps, making patches of hay in RE4's village map look rough and plastic. The game also features god-awful lighting, with RE2's Raccoon City and RE6's China being bathed in this bright red light with the most excessive bloom I've seen in a long time, making these maps look exceptionally flat. The game's lack of anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering also makes the game look cheap, turning moving scenes into a shimmering mess and far-off textures into blurry pixels. While I'm aware both can easily be forced with your video card's control panel, this is not something anyone should have to do in 2016. Graphical fidelity is all over the place, with RE4's village map having been remade from scratch in Unity, but RE5's village using assets and textures ripped right out of MT Framework means that the game can look like it's from two entirely different console generations at times. Umbrella Corps also has some of the worst skyboxes I've ever seen in a game, being so close to the player that you can easily observe the houses made from four polygons each.
I'm also not a fan of the soundtrack, it's primarily electronic, dubstep, and techno which while not inherently bad never stood out to me. It blended into the background but not in the way you'd want ambient music to, but in the way that boring, uninteresting music would. It never makes the game feel atmospheric, it never gets my pulse pounding and ready for action, and it isn't even all that fun to listen to on its own.
Umbrella Corps will go down in history as one of Capcom's greatest failures. While they've made some of the most highly regarded, influential games of all time, they've also made some extremely high-profile flops and I'm sad to say that Umbrella Corps is among the worst. With its lack of content, broken gameplay, pitiful campaign, unflattering visuals, boring soundtrack, and most importantly dead player base, this should be of interest to absolutely no one.
1999
System Shock 2 has to be one of the richest games I've ever played. What does that mean? It means that in every single category, System Shock 2 excels at something. While the game isn't perfect by any means, it has easily rocketed to one of my favorite experiences. The game's design is so mechanically deep, with multiple different routes you can go down as a player. Soldier acts as a canvas for you to fully customize your playstyle, whether it be a combat expert who goes into every encounter guns blazing, a hacker who can manipulate security systems and turn turrets against their masters, to a psychic god who can manipulate their environment around them. Going for a weird mixture of all three, I found the game never limits you with the build you want to make, each one is equally viable. Even disregarding this, the game's mechanics contribute heavily to a highly immersive and most importantly - scary - atmosphere. There's nothing scarier than seeing a mutilated cyborg midwife bolting down a corridor only to have your pistol break on you when you try to fire. Very few games have given me that "holy shit oh god oh god" reaction on such a visceral level. Combat feels surprisingly good in this, thwacking hybrids with a wrench while sprinting at them feels fantastic and the gunplay has a surprising amount of oomph. What makes the game special among other things is the environmental exploration and how the level design feels entirely natural. Never once does the game ever feel like you're exploring levels, but rather lived-in environments that people used. This increases immersion tenfold and it's impressive how seamless everything feels, especially regarding backtracking. I will say that hunting for restoration bays doesn't feel nearly as nerve-wracking as they did in the first game, since they're usually immediately available to the player with a few exceptions.
The game isn't perfect, however, and that comes down to some of the weapon balance. Some of the weapons just aren't very good, such as the laser pistol, whose advantages of theoretically infinite ammo are outweighed by its small damage output even against mechanical foes. The laser rapier, a weapon that would burn fear into even the strongest of enemies in the original game, is significantly less effective in this one, with its high skill requirements betraying its general lack of usefulness. The hacking is also far inferior in this game. While not necessarily amazing in SS1 either, in SS2 it feels like random chance with little skill whether you succeed or not. It's not a massive problem since leveling up your hacking ability and using certain augmentations can make your chances better, but I would have preferred something with mechanics for me to learn and master, rather than just brute-forcing past them with stat upgrades. These are minor problems at the end of the day. System Shock 2 has to be one of the most mechanically satisfying games I've played in a long time.
System Shock has never been a franchise that prided itself on story, but rather its excellent worldbuilding. With the first game pioneering the now commonplace audio log, it only makes sense that the sequel would continue to improve upon that formula. Like the first game, SS2 primarily delivers its story content through these logs, following the lives of the members of the Von Braun before their inevitable demise at the hands of The Many. These accounts are detailed, well-acted, and even terrifying. You get to hear first-hand accounts of people in the process of transforming into lumbering hybrids, staff begging for their lives as their mutated boss blasts them into pulp, and the last survivor of the Hydroponics deck chronicling his observations while awaiting his eventual consumption within the body of the many. Such a richly detailed and dense world does not go to waste here, and the player even follows the same characters via these logs and even gets to see the results of the events described, such as finally watching two lovers escape on the Von Braun's last escape pod after hours of searching for one another. Every single item in the game, even a simple beaker, has a thorough explanation and worldbuilding, and small details like that help make System Shock 2 feel more alive. While I mentioned the series is typically somewhat light on a conventional scenario, the plot twist midway through the game is simply brilliant and I didn't see it coming at all. The ending is terrible and entirely atonal to the rest of the game, but it is simply the ending and doesn't prevent the rest from being taken seriously.
System Shock 2's visual presentation is a bit of a mixed bag, but it has some highlights. Looking Glass Studios' Dark Engine was a pretty antiquated beast even back then, and Irrational Games couldn't quite overcome its limitations. Even for 1999, the game's character models are truly horrendous, with games like 1998's Half-Life featuring much more lively and detailed models. Weapon models are beyond basic, featuring little detail, and are visibly more polygonal than other games. Environments flip-flop between being insanely detailed and a tad too basic, but when the game fires on all cylinders, it can far eclipse its contemporaries in this category. The pulsing masses of annelids on the walls and other animated textures are a nice touch for sure, but the lack of blood decals after combat does take away a slight bit of oomph from the combat. The game's sometimes lacking detail is made up for somewhat by Irrational's choice to target a somewhat comic book-esque art style, and the strong monster designs and environmental concepts do shine through. The midwives and hybrids that stalk you through the Von Braun are genuinely terrifying creatures, with intelligent use of body horror and sound design to evoke fear whenever they may appear. Even the robots are terrifying, mostly due to the danger they present to the player. The character portraits are somewhat variant in quality but generally add to this style.
System Shock 2's audio design is the stuff of gaming legend, primarily directed and music composed by Eris Broseus. Irrational put a lot of focus on this area of the game and it paid off - it's part of why the game is so scary. The game makes fantastic use of surround sound, and hearing a mumbling hybrid or psychic monkey far off in the distance while hacking a storage crate is frighteningly realistic. From the broken radio screams that midwives make when struck, to the hybrids' pleas for death, the game's gruesome palette is written by the audio. The soundtrack is often described as "unfitting of a horror game" but I couldn't disagree more. While the intense breakbeat fitting of a laser tag arena might seem unfitting, the high tempo of the music and pounding beats perfectly match the panic that the player experiences while being chased by the screaming hordes. Med Sci 1 and Hydro 1 are perfect breakbeat tracks, while still conveying tones of dread and panic. Even so, the game still has plenty of more conventionally scary ambient music, such as Hydro 2, which has a spaced-out ambiance that naturally fits the outer space setting of the game. It honestly makes me wish more game composers put more small rhythms into their ambient tracks rather than just drones, even if I still greatly appreciate good drone music. While I do miss the dynamic soundtrack of the first game, System Shock 2 has one of the best soundtracks in late 90s gaming, and Brosius and his team of composers deserve all of the praise for creating something both creative and terrifying.
System Shock 2 is often seen as a landmark title in the world of video games and I'm beyond happy to discover that those assessments are truthful. Its game mechanics, methods of storytelling, detailed worldbuilding, player freedom, art direction, audio design, and soundtrack are beyond worthy of praise and deservedly are the stuff of legends. Even if the game suffers from occasionally iffy weapon balancing, questionable hacking mechanics, and a thoroughly unsatisfying ending, these flaws feel almost negligible in comparison to the monolithic quality of the rest of the game. It's a worthy successor to the already outstanding original game.
The game isn't perfect, however, and that comes down to some of the weapon balance. Some of the weapons just aren't very good, such as the laser pistol, whose advantages of theoretically infinite ammo are outweighed by its small damage output even against mechanical foes. The laser rapier, a weapon that would burn fear into even the strongest of enemies in the original game, is significantly less effective in this one, with its high skill requirements betraying its general lack of usefulness. The hacking is also far inferior in this game. While not necessarily amazing in SS1 either, in SS2 it feels like random chance with little skill whether you succeed or not. It's not a massive problem since leveling up your hacking ability and using certain augmentations can make your chances better, but I would have preferred something with mechanics for me to learn and master, rather than just brute-forcing past them with stat upgrades. These are minor problems at the end of the day. System Shock 2 has to be one of the most mechanically satisfying games I've played in a long time.
System Shock has never been a franchise that prided itself on story, but rather its excellent worldbuilding. With the first game pioneering the now commonplace audio log, it only makes sense that the sequel would continue to improve upon that formula. Like the first game, SS2 primarily delivers its story content through these logs, following the lives of the members of the Von Braun before their inevitable demise at the hands of The Many. These accounts are detailed, well-acted, and even terrifying. You get to hear first-hand accounts of people in the process of transforming into lumbering hybrids, staff begging for their lives as their mutated boss blasts them into pulp, and the last survivor of the Hydroponics deck chronicling his observations while awaiting his eventual consumption within the body of the many. Such a richly detailed and dense world does not go to waste here, and the player even follows the same characters via these logs and even gets to see the results of the events described, such as finally watching two lovers escape on the Von Braun's last escape pod after hours of searching for one another. Every single item in the game, even a simple beaker, has a thorough explanation and worldbuilding, and small details like that help make System Shock 2 feel more alive. While I mentioned the series is typically somewhat light on a conventional scenario, the plot twist midway through the game is simply brilliant and I didn't see it coming at all. The ending is terrible and entirely atonal to the rest of the game, but it is simply the ending and doesn't prevent the rest from being taken seriously.
System Shock 2's visual presentation is a bit of a mixed bag, but it has some highlights. Looking Glass Studios' Dark Engine was a pretty antiquated beast even back then, and Irrational Games couldn't quite overcome its limitations. Even for 1999, the game's character models are truly horrendous, with games like 1998's Half-Life featuring much more lively and detailed models. Weapon models are beyond basic, featuring little detail, and are visibly more polygonal than other games. Environments flip-flop between being insanely detailed and a tad too basic, but when the game fires on all cylinders, it can far eclipse its contemporaries in this category. The pulsing masses of annelids on the walls and other animated textures are a nice touch for sure, but the lack of blood decals after combat does take away a slight bit of oomph from the combat. The game's sometimes lacking detail is made up for somewhat by Irrational's choice to target a somewhat comic book-esque art style, and the strong monster designs and environmental concepts do shine through. The midwives and hybrids that stalk you through the Von Braun are genuinely terrifying creatures, with intelligent use of body horror and sound design to evoke fear whenever they may appear. Even the robots are terrifying, mostly due to the danger they present to the player. The character portraits are somewhat variant in quality but generally add to this style.
System Shock 2's audio design is the stuff of gaming legend, primarily directed and music composed by Eris Broseus. Irrational put a lot of focus on this area of the game and it paid off - it's part of why the game is so scary. The game makes fantastic use of surround sound, and hearing a mumbling hybrid or psychic monkey far off in the distance while hacking a storage crate is frighteningly realistic. From the broken radio screams that midwives make when struck, to the hybrids' pleas for death, the game's gruesome palette is written by the audio. The soundtrack is often described as "unfitting of a horror game" but I couldn't disagree more. While the intense breakbeat fitting of a laser tag arena might seem unfitting, the high tempo of the music and pounding beats perfectly match the panic that the player experiences while being chased by the screaming hordes. Med Sci 1 and Hydro 1 are perfect breakbeat tracks, while still conveying tones of dread and panic. Even so, the game still has plenty of more conventionally scary ambient music, such as Hydro 2, which has a spaced-out ambiance that naturally fits the outer space setting of the game. It honestly makes me wish more game composers put more small rhythms into their ambient tracks rather than just drones, even if I still greatly appreciate good drone music. While I do miss the dynamic soundtrack of the first game, System Shock 2 has one of the best soundtracks in late 90s gaming, and Brosius and his team of composers deserve all of the praise for creating something both creative and terrifying.
System Shock 2 is often seen as a landmark title in the world of video games and I'm beyond happy to discover that those assessments are truthful. Its game mechanics, methods of storytelling, detailed worldbuilding, player freedom, art direction, audio design, and soundtrack are beyond worthy of praise and deservedly are the stuff of legends. Even if the game suffers from occasionally iffy weapon balancing, questionable hacking mechanics, and a thoroughly unsatisfying ending, these flaws feel almost negligible in comparison to the monolithic quality of the rest of the game. It's a worthy successor to the already outstanding original game.
1992
I didn't exactly expect to beat Probe Software's The Terminator in an hour but here we are. Legendary game designer David Perry worked as a programmer on this game, and in a 2003 interview, he described it as a disaster. After playing the game, I'm afraid I'm going to have to agree. The Terminator on Sega Genesis possibly has one of the worst opening levels in any game I've ever played, consisting largely of a single, linear hallway filled with terminators that you mindlessly grind through with explosives that have an incredibly obnoxious-to-use arc. Once you're through with that endlessly frustrating level, you're treated to three more incredibly short levels with monotonous, mindless gameplay, one of the most useless jumps I've seen in a platformer, and a complete lack of challenge. Seriously, most of the levels just consist of walking to the right and blowing enemies away, which sounds like any other game on a surface level, but believe me when I say there's quite literally nothing else to do aside from occasionally climbing a ladder. Sometimes you'll think the jump might be useful to get over a crouching enemy, but you'll instead be stun locked into a death trap, so don't even bother. It's barebones, cheap, and rushed out in time for the release of Terminator 2.
If anything, the presentation isn't half bad. The game does an acceptable job of filling players in on the film's story within its short length, obviously being abridged heavily but capturing the main beats. The game was praised for its graphics and sound back in the day and I can see why. While I think the character sprites look awfully rudimentary for the Genesis and that many of the environments look a bit bland, it's difficult to deny that the backgrounds often have good color coordination and decent shading. I'm a big fan of the game's sound engine, with the punchy drums and futuristic Genesis sound, but the actual musical compositions are fairly repetitive and leave a lot to be desired.
I don't know why I keep playing these licensed Terminator games hoping to find a diamond in the rough. Out of the five I've played, only Resistance was enjoyable, and Terminator for Genesis does not break that trend. With its monotonous gameplay, badly tuned difficulty balancing, and frankly lack of fun, it's a difficult experience to recommend to anyone, let alone Terminator fans. Visuals and audio are average-to-decent, but they can't make up for how the game plays.
If anything, the presentation isn't half bad. The game does an acceptable job of filling players in on the film's story within its short length, obviously being abridged heavily but capturing the main beats. The game was praised for its graphics and sound back in the day and I can see why. While I think the character sprites look awfully rudimentary for the Genesis and that many of the environments look a bit bland, it's difficult to deny that the backgrounds often have good color coordination and decent shading. I'm a big fan of the game's sound engine, with the punchy drums and futuristic Genesis sound, but the actual musical compositions are fairly repetitive and leave a lot to be desired.
I don't know why I keep playing these licensed Terminator games hoping to find a diamond in the rough. Out of the five I've played, only Resistance was enjoyable, and Terminator for Genesis does not break that trend. With its monotonous gameplay, badly tuned difficulty balancing, and frankly lack of fun, it's a difficult experience to recommend to anyone, let alone Terminator fans. Visuals and audio are average-to-decent, but they can't make up for how the game plays.
1990
I gave this one a genuine shot out of raw curiosity and I'm sad to say I didn't have fun with it. What Bethesda tried to do here was highly ambitious for the early 90s and frankly is a great concept for a game even nowadays. However, the execution is just...dull. I poured through the game's manual and put a genuine amount of effort into learning the game's systems and how it functioned instead of being filtered, but even once I understood what I was doing, The Terminator never became immersive, exciting, or interesting past the raw technical feat Bethesda accomplished. Running a full 3D game with an open world populated by numerous shops, NPCs, and driveable vehicles is incredibly impressive but it doesn't translate into a fun game. The problem is that there's simply just not much to do. You can explore the open world to some degree, but despite how innovative it may be, it's fairly barren in terms of intractability, being limited to driving, interacting with stores, training your aim at the shooting range, and healing at a hospital. Combine this with the game's fairly slow pace and The Terminator becomes a game with a lot of downtime with very little payoff. It's also not much of a looker, despite the highly impressive tech under the hood, and the lack of any music while playing hurts the atmosphere which that first film is so well known for. I hate to call The Terminator a bad game because it's just so ambitious and you can tell Bethesda wanted to create something unique, but it ultimately ended up being fairly dull despite the potential innovation.
Honestly one of the worst Resident Evil-related things I've played in a while. Little Miss is a frustrating, prolonged stealth section that struggles hard with being even remotely entertaining. It's dull, unoriginal, and uninspired for the most part. The stealth that was previously enjoyable in the base game is no longer fun, because now instead of being spotted resulting in a combat sequence or at least a chase, it now results in an instant game over. Little Miss gives you so little room for failure and while it never kicks you back too far, it just gets extremely repetitive very fast. Combine that with some of the most wince-inducing writing in the entire series, with Natalia's "Dark Alessa" and Lottie's overly edgy letters being an embarrassing attempt to be dark and cool. I barely stumbled through this one, but at least the ending is sort of hilarious.
The Struggle is like Desperate Escape but without being brutally unfun. It does struggle with difficulty balancing, however, as it lacks a normal mode, with casual being completely trivially easy and survival being beyond annoying. It has a few interesting mechanics, such as needing to hunt animals for continues, represented by food, but otherwise, it's just a trek through familiar levels and locations. It's not particularly interesting otherwise and it feels like filler content. I do like how it fills in some blanks in Revelations 2's story, such as what happened to Evgeny Rebic and how Moira learned to become competent with firearms by the end of the game. Evgeny and Moira have a fun dynamic, one of Revelations 2's writing strengths, and while "young adult versus old man" is not particularly original it is entertaining here. I wouldn't buy this one on its own, but if you already have the complete collection it's worth a go at least since it's less than an hour long.
Revelations 2 serves as Resident Evil's introduction to the 8th generation of gaming, but in many ways, it feels somewhat stuck in the past. After the extremely polarizing Resident Evil 6, Capcom intended to bring the series somewhat back to its roots, while also taking inspiration from popular contemporary zombie games such as The Last of Us. This can be seen in both the story and game design, with Revelations 2 taking surface-level elements from each and attempting to integrate them into RE's world setting and design philosophies. The result is not necessarily bad by any means. Still, it results in a game that, while a step in the right direction for a franchise with a lack of real identity at the time, can't help but feel derivative and unoriginal. In comparison to Revelations 1, Revelations 2 trades a memorable, tense atmosphere for much more fluid and polished gameplay, resulting in a game that has some of the most smooth and fluid combat in the franchise. Combat feels good to engage with, the dodge is much more fined tuned and feels less like random chance, and feels like perhaps the most pleasantly modern take on RE's action horror game design. Enemies attack fairly with properly telegraphed attacks and the game hardly ever feels unfair. The new stealth mechanic is hardly deep, featuring the most basic of enemy detection and hiding, but I found it to be an entertaining and welcome change. It is revision over reinvention, and I won't lie seeing the design philosophy that felt so fresh in RE4 be used in three subsequent games without major changes begins to grow tiring. Unfortunately, what bothers me is that a lot of Revelations 2's new inclusions feel superfluous as if the series is once again chasing trends. Mechanics such as crafting aren't necessarily new to the series but their inclusion here is functional but needless, failing to add depth or nuance to the gameplay. Despite this, Revelations 2 feels fluid to play, and while the slower pace feels nice coming off of RE6, I just wish that Capcom had gone the full mile and either made it a proper survival horror game or at least found new ways to reinvent the action horror formula the series has milked for so long. Not many complaints gameplay wise, here.
Raid Mode has been somewhat improved over Rev1, with the grind being reduced and the level design more consistent, but I find that it has very little staying power compared to any mercenaries mode. I had fun with the five or so hours I spent with it, but after realizing quite a lot of the maps were just increasingly more difficult versions of one another, the mission based structure of Raid just doesn't feel like a good fit. The weapon attachment system is once again just stat-boosts and don't fundamentally change how you use them, and if you end up sticking to just one character like I did so you could actually advance in Raid mode, if you want to play any other character you have to grind them all the way back up from level 1. It feels like chores rather than the plug-n-play nature of mercenaries, and I just didn't have fun with it despite its improvements.
The game's story was primarily written by returning writer Dai Sato, who previously worked on Revelations 1. I found that game's story to be ridiculous, nonsensical, and more over the top than RE6's, and while I didn't care for Rev2's story much, I can say I could at least take it seriously for the most part. Where the writing succeeds the most are the character interactions, which while dosed with healthy amounts of RE cheese, are pleasant and entertaining. Claire and Moira's back and forth bonding is often amusing and Barry's caring, older dad persona with Natalia is heartfelt and adorable. Claire is somewhat out of character, with her unable to talk to children like Natalia, despite being portrayed as a mama bear for most of her duration in the franchise. Other than that however, I enjoyed Moira's young adult angst even if she swears like a sailor, and the reinvention of Barry's personality as a gruff, older father who is perhaps too tough but comes from a place of genuine love is extremely fitting. What I don't like however, is the virus of the week story, a concept I grow increasingly tired of. While T-Phobos has a potentially fascinating concept of reacting to human fear, unfortuantely I find the game never defines how it works very well and misses out on making it truly scary. Is Capcom seriously telling me that Moira, someone who has never been in a bioterrorism situation and refuses to even touch a weapon didn't mutate into an afflicted at any point in the story? Since Claire and Moira are infected from the get go, why not use this to play with their perception of reality akin to games like Hellblade? Revelations 2 never makes full use of this concept, leading to the fear element to be underbaked and a simple gimmick to make T-Phobos stand out, which it does not. Alex Wesker isn't a very memorable antagonist and if it weren't for that iconic last name she would be yet another eugenicist for the pile. There's an interesting memo where she compares herself to Gregor Samsa from Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, but that's about as much characterization she gets. Revelations 2 might not be downright nonsensical like Revelations 1, but its a story that while improved does very little beyond the bare minimum.
If there's anywhere where Revelations 2 outright flops however, its the visual presentation. Rev2 really doesn't look much better than the console versions of Rev1, also resembling an enhanced 3DS game. However, Rev2 was developed first and foremost for consoles and PC, and when RE5, a game that released 6 years prior on the same systems looks at least ten times better than Rev2, there's a huge problem there. Character models look weirdly flat, with reduced detail compared to RE6, which was a game that already reduced character detail compared to RE5. Facial animations are simple and choppy, resembling puppets rather than people speaking. Texture quality is highly variant, with clothing on characters featuring pin-sharp detail but many parts of the environment looking almost like low-quality JPEGs. The game struggles heavily with outdoor environments, with the mountanous rocks that populate the island being little more than poorly textured and flatly modelled geometry. Piles of trash even resemble brush geometry from the original Half-Life. Indoor environments do fare better, and I enjoy the urban exploration vibes it presents, but they don't feel very lived in, rather just rooms where a couple of dressers were thrown around in. If there's any tech positives, its that the FXAA works well with the simplisitc visuals, producing less shimmering than other MT Framework games. The FMVs are much nicer however, while they do animate somewhat stiffly and the facial animation could use some work, they're leagues better than the game's actual presentation and I have to wonder how close the game could have looked like that with a proper budget.
Revelations 2 also feels extremely artistically pedestrian, if not a bit tryhard even. The game's monster designs for example are simply creatures with gory visages wrapped in barb wire with creepy smiles and stitched together apperances. Some of them such as the iron heads even blatantly rip off other, more creative games, such as Silent Hill 2's Pyramid Head. While I enjoy the vibes of abandoned buildings out in the forest, I can't pretend like its anywhere near as memorable as the Queen Zenobia from Rev1. The game just isn't very scary, because while it can produce a competent atmosphere its just simply things I have seen before in much better games. Areas like mutant Alex's hideout simply try too hard to be scary, with impaled dolls and "spooky" graffiti adorning the halls. Things like this prevent the game from being scary or even memorable, as its clear Capcom wants to scare its players again, but perhaps has forgotten exactly how.
At the very least, the soundtrack is often quite good, certainly better than Rev1's often unfitting score. The composition team wanted to metaphorically represent iron and water with their music and I'd say they achieved that goal admirably. From the droning electronic synths of the prison, to the Akira Yamoka-esque industrial grinding and pounding, to pulse pumping action tracks when needed, Revelations 2's soundtrack is up to the task. While it's somewhat reliant a bit too much on traditional horror compositional technique, such as rising violins for tension, they feel like much less of a crutch like they did in Rev1. Raid Mode even gives us a sick remix of RE6's Heat on Beat 2012, which I might even prefer to the original. Distant Memories, the game's results theme, is perhaps one of my favorite "safe haven" themes in the series, with its orchestrial flourishings while keeping the water-like production of the original Revelations.
Revelations 2 was undoubtedly a step forward for the series after RE6's poor action heavy exercize in excess. It's fluid action horror gameplay, entertaining character dynamics, slower pace, and effective soundtrack make it an entry that RE fans should check out, especially with how cheap it often goes on sale for. However, the game's lack of genuine scares, lack of invention, mediocre and trite story, poor visuals, uninspired aesthetics, and still-overly-grindy raid mode prevent me from recommending it more broadly. Both an improvement and a downgrade over Rev1, Rev2 still manages to be a decent, short romp nonetheless.
Raid Mode has been somewhat improved over Rev1, with the grind being reduced and the level design more consistent, but I find that it has very little staying power compared to any mercenaries mode. I had fun with the five or so hours I spent with it, but after realizing quite a lot of the maps were just increasingly more difficult versions of one another, the mission based structure of Raid just doesn't feel like a good fit. The weapon attachment system is once again just stat-boosts and don't fundamentally change how you use them, and if you end up sticking to just one character like I did so you could actually advance in Raid mode, if you want to play any other character you have to grind them all the way back up from level 1. It feels like chores rather than the plug-n-play nature of mercenaries, and I just didn't have fun with it despite its improvements.
The game's story was primarily written by returning writer Dai Sato, who previously worked on Revelations 1. I found that game's story to be ridiculous, nonsensical, and more over the top than RE6's, and while I didn't care for Rev2's story much, I can say I could at least take it seriously for the most part. Where the writing succeeds the most are the character interactions, which while dosed with healthy amounts of RE cheese, are pleasant and entertaining. Claire and Moira's back and forth bonding is often amusing and Barry's caring, older dad persona with Natalia is heartfelt and adorable. Claire is somewhat out of character, with her unable to talk to children like Natalia, despite being portrayed as a mama bear for most of her duration in the franchise. Other than that however, I enjoyed Moira's young adult angst even if she swears like a sailor, and the reinvention of Barry's personality as a gruff, older father who is perhaps too tough but comes from a place of genuine love is extremely fitting. What I don't like however, is the virus of the week story, a concept I grow increasingly tired of. While T-Phobos has a potentially fascinating concept of reacting to human fear, unfortuantely I find the game never defines how it works very well and misses out on making it truly scary. Is Capcom seriously telling me that Moira, someone who has never been in a bioterrorism situation and refuses to even touch a weapon didn't mutate into an afflicted at any point in the story? Since Claire and Moira are infected from the get go, why not use this to play with their perception of reality akin to games like Hellblade? Revelations 2 never makes full use of this concept, leading to the fear element to be underbaked and a simple gimmick to make T-Phobos stand out, which it does not. Alex Wesker isn't a very memorable antagonist and if it weren't for that iconic last name she would be yet another eugenicist for the pile. There's an interesting memo where she compares herself to Gregor Samsa from Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, but that's about as much characterization she gets. Revelations 2 might not be downright nonsensical like Revelations 1, but its a story that while improved does very little beyond the bare minimum.
If there's anywhere where Revelations 2 outright flops however, its the visual presentation. Rev2 really doesn't look much better than the console versions of Rev1, also resembling an enhanced 3DS game. However, Rev2 was developed first and foremost for consoles and PC, and when RE5, a game that released 6 years prior on the same systems looks at least ten times better than Rev2, there's a huge problem there. Character models look weirdly flat, with reduced detail compared to RE6, which was a game that already reduced character detail compared to RE5. Facial animations are simple and choppy, resembling puppets rather than people speaking. Texture quality is highly variant, with clothing on characters featuring pin-sharp detail but many parts of the environment looking almost like low-quality JPEGs. The game struggles heavily with outdoor environments, with the mountanous rocks that populate the island being little more than poorly textured and flatly modelled geometry. Piles of trash even resemble brush geometry from the original Half-Life. Indoor environments do fare better, and I enjoy the urban exploration vibes it presents, but they don't feel very lived in, rather just rooms where a couple of dressers were thrown around in. If there's any tech positives, its that the FXAA works well with the simplisitc visuals, producing less shimmering than other MT Framework games. The FMVs are much nicer however, while they do animate somewhat stiffly and the facial animation could use some work, they're leagues better than the game's actual presentation and I have to wonder how close the game could have looked like that with a proper budget.
Revelations 2 also feels extremely artistically pedestrian, if not a bit tryhard even. The game's monster designs for example are simply creatures with gory visages wrapped in barb wire with creepy smiles and stitched together apperances. Some of them such as the iron heads even blatantly rip off other, more creative games, such as Silent Hill 2's Pyramid Head. While I enjoy the vibes of abandoned buildings out in the forest, I can't pretend like its anywhere near as memorable as the Queen Zenobia from Rev1. The game just isn't very scary, because while it can produce a competent atmosphere its just simply things I have seen before in much better games. Areas like mutant Alex's hideout simply try too hard to be scary, with impaled dolls and "spooky" graffiti adorning the halls. Things like this prevent the game from being scary or even memorable, as its clear Capcom wants to scare its players again, but perhaps has forgotten exactly how.
At the very least, the soundtrack is often quite good, certainly better than Rev1's often unfitting score. The composition team wanted to metaphorically represent iron and water with their music and I'd say they achieved that goal admirably. From the droning electronic synths of the prison, to the Akira Yamoka-esque industrial grinding and pounding, to pulse pumping action tracks when needed, Revelations 2's soundtrack is up to the task. While it's somewhat reliant a bit too much on traditional horror compositional technique, such as rising violins for tension, they feel like much less of a crutch like they did in Rev1. Raid Mode even gives us a sick remix of RE6's Heat on Beat 2012, which I might even prefer to the original. Distant Memories, the game's results theme, is perhaps one of my favorite "safe haven" themes in the series, with its orchestrial flourishings while keeping the water-like production of the original Revelations.
Revelations 2 was undoubtedly a step forward for the series after RE6's poor action heavy exercize in excess. It's fluid action horror gameplay, entertaining character dynamics, slower pace, and effective soundtrack make it an entry that RE fans should check out, especially with how cheap it often goes on sale for. However, the game's lack of genuine scares, lack of invention, mediocre and trite story, poor visuals, uninspired aesthetics, and still-overly-grindy raid mode prevent me from recommending it more broadly. Both an improvement and a downgrade over Rev1, Rev2 still manages to be a decent, short romp nonetheless.
1998
I got a chance to play this at my local arcade and it's a fun, obscure little top-down shoot-'em-up with an appealing visual style and satisfying combat. As is unfortunately common with arcade games, sometimes enemy attacks can be a bit cheap, and there was a boss fight at one point where you couldn't dodge a potent attack, practically necessitating continues. However, the actual shooting is satisfying and rewarding, and clearing each floor in a frantic panic to find the enemy holding a keycard is chaotic in a very fun way, especially in co-op where it becomes even messier (again, in a good way). The additional weapons you pick up can cause some fun destruction but sometimes I felt they didn't do enough to switch up the gameplay loop. The game is clearly inspired somewhat by Resident Evil, featuring an underground laboratory where zombies, bioweapons, and giant mutated animals are commonplace. It wears its inspiration on its sleeve, but it has a surprisingly detailed and elaborate PSX-esque presentation that shines brightly and will make it stand out in any arcade. Appealing character designs and robust technical execution lead to a very good, if not great-looking game, with some particularly impressive special effects. Unfortunately, the arcade hardware just seemingly can't keep up, with performance problems being commonplace and the game often slowing to an absolute crawl as a result. It's not gamebreaking but it is immediately evident when it happens. Nonetheless, Chaos Heat is an entertaining, obscure top-down, Capcomesque shmup from Taito that deserves a bit more attention than it actually gets. If you ever see a cabinet out in the wild (to my understanding they're uncommon) absolutely give it a shot in spite of its flaws.
1997
A true FPS classic that, despite a high learning curve, easily became one of my favorites in the genre. While the opening levels might be overly difficult and punishing, the gameplay and level design of Blood finally shines through after slamming your head against the wall repeatedly. The weapon arsenal is robust, satisfying, and for the most part, every weapon is handy. The level design is often inventive and creative and requires exploration and ingenuity in terms of discovering secret pathways without feeling overly labyrinthine like Hexen or Doom 2. Learning how to properly throw the dynamite at different lengths to properly counter the game's ferocious enemies is a difficult skill to master but feels near orgasmic when you do. Thankfully the levels are largely consistent too, and the game mostly avoids the 90s FPS curse of a weak third act. Making the cultists, the game's default enemy, one of the most dangerous was a brilliant subversion of typical shooter conventions. Blood may be punishingly difficult but once you learn how the game functions, it becomes one of the most fun FPS games I've ever played. I can't say I cared for any of the boss fights, they're fairly standard shooter fights. Shial especially strikes me as entirely superfluous and I kind of just ran out of ammo and repeatedly stabbed her to death with the pitchfork for ages. The final boss Tchernobog is a weakling, going down almost instantly with multiple napalm shots. They are a relatively minor part of the game, so it's not a huge deal, but it is noticeable when it happens.
The game's presentation is a gleeful combination of gothic and post-war Western aesthetics, blending them with surprising ease to create a grungy, dingy-looking atmosphere of cathedrals and stagecoaches. While Blood did look slightly outdated even in 1997, with games like Quake 2 and Hexen II easily kicking its ass on a technical level, I believe it to be the visual peak of pseudo-3D FPS visuals. The intractability of the environments and the smaller details such as Caleb's weapon sprites visibly becoming lighter and darker based on the lighting is impressive, and the enemies all have expressive and detailed sprites made from clay models. Environments look as detailed and lived-in as the Build engine can allow for, and levels such as the Overlooked Hotel are filled with smaller details and just exude charm. Caleb himself has an incredibly cool design, reminding me of a demonic version of Colonel Mortimer from For A Few Dollars More. Speaking of Caleb, he could have easily been the edgiest, most wince-inducing thing in the world, but he's the perfect blend of intentionally camp and genuine awesomeness that makes him infinitely endearing. If there's any weak spot, it's the soundtrack, which is fairly mediocre to my ears. My opinion on the OST can swing fairly moderately depending on whether you selected the MIDI or CD tracks, and I played most of the game on the former and was thoroughly unimpressed. A lot of the MIDI tracks simply have repetitive, boring, and unimaginative compositions that neither stand out nor build an effective atmosphere. The CD tracks, on the other hand, feel like what the composers always intended the music to sound like. The compositions are still nothing special, but the additional vocals and sound effects create a competently creepy and effective atmosphere that is far superior to anything the general MIDI tracks can offer.
Blood is easily one of my new favorite FPS games, with its creative level design, phenomenal weapon arsenal, and satisfying and innovative combat loop leaving me longing for more. Tackle on appealingly edgy art direction in the best possible way and some impressive use of at-the-time outdated technology and you get something truly special, and a true shooter classic. It's a shame the soundtrack isn't more memorable, but it hardly brings down the game. Highly recommended, and a must-play for anyone who loves FPS games.
The game's presentation is a gleeful combination of gothic and post-war Western aesthetics, blending them with surprising ease to create a grungy, dingy-looking atmosphere of cathedrals and stagecoaches. While Blood did look slightly outdated even in 1997, with games like Quake 2 and Hexen II easily kicking its ass on a technical level, I believe it to be the visual peak of pseudo-3D FPS visuals. The intractability of the environments and the smaller details such as Caleb's weapon sprites visibly becoming lighter and darker based on the lighting is impressive, and the enemies all have expressive and detailed sprites made from clay models. Environments look as detailed and lived-in as the Build engine can allow for, and levels such as the Overlooked Hotel are filled with smaller details and just exude charm. Caleb himself has an incredibly cool design, reminding me of a demonic version of Colonel Mortimer from For A Few Dollars More. Speaking of Caleb, he could have easily been the edgiest, most wince-inducing thing in the world, but he's the perfect blend of intentionally camp and genuine awesomeness that makes him infinitely endearing. If there's any weak spot, it's the soundtrack, which is fairly mediocre to my ears. My opinion on the OST can swing fairly moderately depending on whether you selected the MIDI or CD tracks, and I played most of the game on the former and was thoroughly unimpressed. A lot of the MIDI tracks simply have repetitive, boring, and unimaginative compositions that neither stand out nor build an effective atmosphere. The CD tracks, on the other hand, feel like what the composers always intended the music to sound like. The compositions are still nothing special, but the additional vocals and sound effects create a competently creepy and effective atmosphere that is far superior to anything the general MIDI tracks can offer.
Blood is easily one of my new favorite FPS games, with its creative level design, phenomenal weapon arsenal, and satisfying and innovative combat loop leaving me longing for more. Tackle on appealingly edgy art direction in the best possible way and some impressive use of at-the-time outdated technology and you get something truly special, and a true shooter classic. It's a shame the soundtrack isn't more memorable, but it hardly brings down the game. Highly recommended, and a must-play for anyone who loves FPS games.
2012
Resident Evil 6 is a genuinely bad, dull, and bloated game that is somewhat redeemed by a very solid Mercenaries mode. The game's main problem is the lack of any significant level design. Capcom gives the player zero agency, railroading them through area after area, and while they may seem varied at first it quickly becomes clear that they're all the game design equivalent of straight corridors. This is at odds with the game's oddly deep movement system, which encourages players to flip stylishly, dodge roll, slide, dash, and generally maneuver around the game's combat arenas, which largely get very little use considering the aforementioned overly restraining levels. While Resident Evil 5 didn't offer the same level of exploration as prior games, it at least had combat arenas that you could move and position yourself in strategically, which 6 lacks. The combat loop isn't particularly satisfying either. Melee attacks are way too powerful, meaning you can practically punch the majority of common enemies to death, which can be further upgraded to do even more damage. Quickshots allow almost instant kills, which while surprisingly fun, do trivialize many enemy encounters by practically guaranteeing staggering the enemy without having to aim. Many enemies are downright annoying too, with the sniper and rocket launcher J'avo spawning in the middle of large hoards and stunlocking you while you're busy with other enemies. What makes all of this even worse is how this is spread out throughout four five-hour campaigns, each of which varies somewhat in quality but none of which is even passable. Leon's campaign is generally the fan favorite but I found it to be a largely dull enterprise without much to comment on. Chris's campaign felt the most in tune with what the game wanted to be, and I felt the J'avo worked better with the movement than the zombies did, but despite that, it's still a rather mind-numbingly boring enterprise.
Jake and Sherry's campaign has possibly the worst level in the entire game, with the "open-world" snowbound segment being an excessively large key hunt with annoying ice physics and a lack of real landmarks. It does improve the moment Ustanak shows up, but the extreme linearity of the game means that he never lives up to the high standards of Nemesis, coming off as a pale imitation. Ada's campaign was perhaps my least favorite, being essentially Separate Ways 2, of which I was already not a fan in Resident Evil 4. It's just a rehash of the other campaigns, reusing multiple boss fights and level setpieces, making it perhaps the most boring stretch of an already boring game. The game becomes a soul-sucking slog by this point and I was questioning whether I even wanted to finish it, but I forced myself through it hoping it would impress me even a little. These campaigns are overly long, bloated, poorly designed, and worst of all, downright unmemorable, and represent the worst elements of the 7th gen gaming industry.
The reason I can recommend this game at a heavy discount, however, is The Mercenaries mode. I've always loved Mercs as a side mode, I find it to be the perfect compliment to these games that never fail to addict me. I put about 25 hours easily into this one with friends, and while it's probably my least favorite of 4/5/6's Mercs modes, it's still absolutely worth putting time into. The movement system actually works here, as the large arena levels allow you to use your advanced maneuverability in ways that genuinely feel fluid and fun. There's a ton of content here, with possibly the most load-outs in the series for any singular Mercs modes. Part of why it's not my favorite in the series (aside from just generally preferring the gameplay loop of 4 and 5) is the relatively inconsistent map design. While I really enjoy quite a few of the maps, there are a few that I'm not particularly fond of, such as Requiem for War with its tight corridors and The Catacombs for the different ways enemies can gang up on you. Ada Wong is only unlocked by storming your way through the campaign, which does limit how well it works as a standalone experience, if to a minor degree. She can be unlocked by playing the Survivors DLC, but when your only two options are playing the worst campaign or buying awful DLC, its a poor situation. If you attempt to play Mercs with anyone else, you can only use maps that you both have which is ridiculously frustrating and also a massive time waster for people who just want to jump in without having to unlock things themselves. Nevertheless, despite these strange issues, it's still a mode with a lot of fun to offer and was seemingly the only part of the game I actually enjoyed.
Although I wasn't particularly impressed with RE5's storytelling, finding it bland and impossible to take seriously, RE6 might take it to another level. The story is unnecessarily hard to follow due to largely being told in medias res and out of sequential order. This makes things unnecessarily confusing for no real reason than continuing the game's mystery, which is easy to predict and makes the entire narrative framework feel entirely pointless when the extremely stupid plot twist is revealed. The plot itself isn't the stupidest I've seen, even for this series (Revelations is probably far stupider), but it follows a very strange narrative through line that I find an incredibly strange direction to take the series and not in a way that feels fresh or interesting, but rather perplexing from a creative standpoint.
The characterization is very weak for the most part, with Leon lacking much in the way of any interesting dynamics, Chris having a poorly-plotted Shadow the Hedgehog arc that lasts for all of two chapters, and Ada having zero development since RE4 making this a fairly boring affair for such beloved characters. There are two bright spots however: I actually found myself quite liking Piers, as he didn't put up with any of Chris's bullshit and helped to snap him back into a sensible soldier. His death scene was genuinely emotional and well done, especially with how mutated Piers never once spoke, further isolating Chris's pleas. I also liked the little characterization we got between Jake and Sherry, but unfortunately, there are maybe a handful of scenes with them bonding, so that element feels woefully underutilized. RE6's writing is just a mess of poor plotting, underbaked or underutilized characters, and messy structure that very understandably ended up becoming entirely inconsequential to the greater Resident Evil world setting.
In regards to presentation, I found RE6 to be oddly enough a major step back compared to RE5. While RE5's color grading is a controversial choice in the fanbase even today (I personally quite like it), I find it hard to understand why RE6's extreme contrast look was a better choice. Black levels are absurdly deep and easily give Doom 3 a run for its money in terms of "absurdly dark", while white levels bloom painfully, with there being almost zero middle ground in terms of color saturation. This not only makes the game excessively dark, now allowing the player to survey their environment, but it also means it can affect gameplay visibility at points too. The monster designs are incredibly boring, with certain monsters being obvious expies of monsters from prior games or other franchises. The bloodshots are self-admitted expies of the lickers, and the whoppers and shriekers are simply Left 4 Dead ripoffs. I dislike how a lot of the j'avo mutations, while conceptually interesting, always have to work around them still being able to use guns, somehow. The game also features surprisingly significant tech downgrades too. Character models feature less detail and complexity than they did in RE5, with Chris's model, in particular, featuring a flat block for hair instead of the realistic tufts from RE5, among other things. Texture quality is much lower, too, with giant walls in plain sight featuring extremely low-res textures without even a normalmap to simulate depth. Environmental detail is far lower, with a few areas which would stick out like a sore thumb even in Revelations. The area in which Jake and Sherry are captured and tortured has such little detail and low-res textures that it would look bad on the PS2. However, that's not to say there aren't positive aspects. Facial animation is a huge improvement over RE5, being much less cartoonish and more expressive. Shaders can actually be quite nice, with sweat on characters appearing very realistic. All in all, it's not an awful-looking game necessarily, but it looks average at best for the time, with its visually appealing aspects buried under a mountain of odd downgrades compared to its 2009 older brother.
Another major disappointment is the soundtrack, composed by a variety of people both within Capcom's internal sound team as well as outside commissioned musicians. RE6 represents a major musical shift from previous games, replacing the James Horner inspired horns and pounding percussion with a score composed almost entirely of strings. Percussion is oddly minimal for an action game, so the music doesn't push the action forward, nor does it ever deviate from this to be suitably atmospheric. The often pulse pounding music of RE5 especially propelled the player into a world of white-knuckle action, and RE6 doesn't give the same results. Unfortunately, RE6 just has zero musical atmosphere, preventing any real immersion into the game. There's no equivalent "save room" track (RE5 and Revelations didn't have save rooms proper, but they still had similar safe haven tracks), and any ambiance the game provides is weak. It primarily, no matter the situation, sticks with its strings, which isn't strictly a bad thing in concept, but the actual musical composition is bland, uninteresting, and sometimes annoyingly repetitive. The track that plays when Chris and Piers fight the helicopter is especially irritating. I listened to the majority of Capcom's official album, trying to see if perhaps the game's mind numbing action prevented me from properly appreciating the music, but no, it is still bland both in and out of context. There's one bonus though, and that's Heat on Beat 2012, the game's Mercs track. While I genuinely miss the individual character themes from RE4, HoB is an energetic, pulsing electronic track that keeps the pace up without getting tiring.
I went into Resident Evil 6 knowing that it wasn't going to be much of a horror game. I was still wanting to give the game a chance, as considering my moderate enjoyment of Silent Hill Downpour, it wouldn't be the first time I've appreciated something that didn't connect with the majority of players. Unfortunately, not only does RE6 not contain anything I enjoy out of Resident Evil as a franchise, but it's also just a poorly designed third-person shooter in its own right. With its overly long campaigns, restrictive level design, underutilized mechanics, unengaging story, mediocre visuals, and boring soundtrack, it stands, for me, as the worst mainline Resident Evil game (even if there were worse RE games that came out the same year). The Mercenaries mode is very good, and if you can find the game for about $5, it's worth checking out just for that if you won't be missing Ada. It's a game that seems confused of its own audience, and it certainly didn't find one in me.
Jake and Sherry's campaign has possibly the worst level in the entire game, with the "open-world" snowbound segment being an excessively large key hunt with annoying ice physics and a lack of real landmarks. It does improve the moment Ustanak shows up, but the extreme linearity of the game means that he never lives up to the high standards of Nemesis, coming off as a pale imitation. Ada's campaign was perhaps my least favorite, being essentially Separate Ways 2, of which I was already not a fan in Resident Evil 4. It's just a rehash of the other campaigns, reusing multiple boss fights and level setpieces, making it perhaps the most boring stretch of an already boring game. The game becomes a soul-sucking slog by this point and I was questioning whether I even wanted to finish it, but I forced myself through it hoping it would impress me even a little. These campaigns are overly long, bloated, poorly designed, and worst of all, downright unmemorable, and represent the worst elements of the 7th gen gaming industry.
The reason I can recommend this game at a heavy discount, however, is The Mercenaries mode. I've always loved Mercs as a side mode, I find it to be the perfect compliment to these games that never fail to addict me. I put about 25 hours easily into this one with friends, and while it's probably my least favorite of 4/5/6's Mercs modes, it's still absolutely worth putting time into. The movement system actually works here, as the large arena levels allow you to use your advanced maneuverability in ways that genuinely feel fluid and fun. There's a ton of content here, with possibly the most load-outs in the series for any singular Mercs modes. Part of why it's not my favorite in the series (aside from just generally preferring the gameplay loop of 4 and 5) is the relatively inconsistent map design. While I really enjoy quite a few of the maps, there are a few that I'm not particularly fond of, such as Requiem for War with its tight corridors and The Catacombs for the different ways enemies can gang up on you. Ada Wong is only unlocked by storming your way through the campaign, which does limit how well it works as a standalone experience, if to a minor degree. She can be unlocked by playing the Survivors DLC, but when your only two options are playing the worst campaign or buying awful DLC, its a poor situation. If you attempt to play Mercs with anyone else, you can only use maps that you both have which is ridiculously frustrating and also a massive time waster for people who just want to jump in without having to unlock things themselves. Nevertheless, despite these strange issues, it's still a mode with a lot of fun to offer and was seemingly the only part of the game I actually enjoyed.
Although I wasn't particularly impressed with RE5's storytelling, finding it bland and impossible to take seriously, RE6 might take it to another level. The story is unnecessarily hard to follow due to largely being told in medias res and out of sequential order. This makes things unnecessarily confusing for no real reason than continuing the game's mystery, which is easy to predict and makes the entire narrative framework feel entirely pointless when the extremely stupid plot twist is revealed. The plot itself isn't the stupidest I've seen, even for this series (Revelations is probably far stupider), but it follows a very strange narrative through line that I find an incredibly strange direction to take the series and not in a way that feels fresh or interesting, but rather perplexing from a creative standpoint.
The characterization is very weak for the most part, with Leon lacking much in the way of any interesting dynamics, Chris having a poorly-plotted Shadow the Hedgehog arc that lasts for all of two chapters, and Ada having zero development since RE4 making this a fairly boring affair for such beloved characters. There are two bright spots however: I actually found myself quite liking Piers, as he didn't put up with any of Chris's bullshit and helped to snap him back into a sensible soldier. His death scene was genuinely emotional and well done, especially with how mutated Piers never once spoke, further isolating Chris's pleas. I also liked the little characterization we got between Jake and Sherry, but unfortunately, there are maybe a handful of scenes with them bonding, so that element feels woefully underutilized. RE6's writing is just a mess of poor plotting, underbaked or underutilized characters, and messy structure that very understandably ended up becoming entirely inconsequential to the greater Resident Evil world setting.
In regards to presentation, I found RE6 to be oddly enough a major step back compared to RE5. While RE5's color grading is a controversial choice in the fanbase even today (I personally quite like it), I find it hard to understand why RE6's extreme contrast look was a better choice. Black levels are absurdly deep and easily give Doom 3 a run for its money in terms of "absurdly dark", while white levels bloom painfully, with there being almost zero middle ground in terms of color saturation. This not only makes the game excessively dark, now allowing the player to survey their environment, but it also means it can affect gameplay visibility at points too. The monster designs are incredibly boring, with certain monsters being obvious expies of monsters from prior games or other franchises. The bloodshots are self-admitted expies of the lickers, and the whoppers and shriekers are simply Left 4 Dead ripoffs. I dislike how a lot of the j'avo mutations, while conceptually interesting, always have to work around them still being able to use guns, somehow. The game also features surprisingly significant tech downgrades too. Character models feature less detail and complexity than they did in RE5, with Chris's model, in particular, featuring a flat block for hair instead of the realistic tufts from RE5, among other things. Texture quality is much lower, too, with giant walls in plain sight featuring extremely low-res textures without even a normalmap to simulate depth. Environmental detail is far lower, with a few areas which would stick out like a sore thumb even in Revelations. The area in which Jake and Sherry are captured and tortured has such little detail and low-res textures that it would look bad on the PS2. However, that's not to say there aren't positive aspects. Facial animation is a huge improvement over RE5, being much less cartoonish and more expressive. Shaders can actually be quite nice, with sweat on characters appearing very realistic. All in all, it's not an awful-looking game necessarily, but it looks average at best for the time, with its visually appealing aspects buried under a mountain of odd downgrades compared to its 2009 older brother.
Another major disappointment is the soundtrack, composed by a variety of people both within Capcom's internal sound team as well as outside commissioned musicians. RE6 represents a major musical shift from previous games, replacing the James Horner inspired horns and pounding percussion with a score composed almost entirely of strings. Percussion is oddly minimal for an action game, so the music doesn't push the action forward, nor does it ever deviate from this to be suitably atmospheric. The often pulse pounding music of RE5 especially propelled the player into a world of white-knuckle action, and RE6 doesn't give the same results. Unfortunately, RE6 just has zero musical atmosphere, preventing any real immersion into the game. There's no equivalent "save room" track (RE5 and Revelations didn't have save rooms proper, but they still had similar safe haven tracks), and any ambiance the game provides is weak. It primarily, no matter the situation, sticks with its strings, which isn't strictly a bad thing in concept, but the actual musical composition is bland, uninteresting, and sometimes annoyingly repetitive. The track that plays when Chris and Piers fight the helicopter is especially irritating. I listened to the majority of Capcom's official album, trying to see if perhaps the game's mind numbing action prevented me from properly appreciating the music, but no, it is still bland both in and out of context. There's one bonus though, and that's Heat on Beat 2012, the game's Mercs track. While I genuinely miss the individual character themes from RE4, HoB is an energetic, pulsing electronic track that keeps the pace up without getting tiring.
I went into Resident Evil 6 knowing that it wasn't going to be much of a horror game. I was still wanting to give the game a chance, as considering my moderate enjoyment of Silent Hill Downpour, it wouldn't be the first time I've appreciated something that didn't connect with the majority of players. Unfortunately, not only does RE6 not contain anything I enjoy out of Resident Evil as a franchise, but it's also just a poorly designed third-person shooter in its own right. With its overly long campaigns, restrictive level design, underutilized mechanics, unengaging story, mediocre visuals, and boring soundtrack, it stands, for me, as the worst mainline Resident Evil game (even if there were worse RE games that came out the same year). The Mercenaries mode is very good, and if you can find the game for about $5, it's worth checking out just for that if you won't be missing Ada. It's a game that seems confused of its own audience, and it certainly didn't find one in me.
1990
I wanted to like Journey to Silius a lot more than I did. For the first few levels, I was genuinely convinced I had found a hidden gem. Silius has a very fun movement system and some rock-solid game mechanics. For the most part, it's a pretty fun jump-n-shoot romp through Terminator-inspired environments and enemies. Unlike, say, Mega Man where you always have full control of your movement, Silius is similar to a lighter version of Castlevania's movement where you have to commit to your jumps. This leads to many tight situations where timing your jumps perfectly is a challenging and fun obstacle in its own right. The player's ability to duck also makes the game feel more dynamic, as now you can avoid enemies in ways more nuanced than some other games. The first few levels are decently designed, rarely feel unfair, and generally require a level of trial and error I find acceptable.
A consistent problem that a lot of NES games have, however, is that the game is simply too stingy with continues. While not as bad as some other games due to its extremely short length, Silius only gives the player one continue (read: six lives) to beat all fives levels, and with a game as difficult as Silius, I feel like it's simply unfair to kick the player back to the first level. The Ninja Gaiden trilogy, considered some of the most challenging of NES platformers, has infinite continues, so Silius doesn't have much of an excuse. I also felt that level four is when the game begins to lose its luster. Some of the enemy placements border on the absurd in ways that make Castlevania's infamous Medusa hallway look like child's play. The boss fights range from decent to terribly unfun, with only the first boss feeling decently designed. The hitboxes of the floating fish-like enemies are also larger than the actual sprite and can hit you even if you're ducking and visibly under them. Don't get me wrong, Silius is still a good bit of fun, but the rough edges become more obvious the more time you put into it.
If people remember anything about Journey to Silius though, it's easily its presentation. The soundtrack is legendary among the remix community, and the hard-hitting drums, distinctive SunSoft bass, and catchy tunes that bend and break the NES's sound chip are easily the highlight of the game among all else. The visuals are also rather attractive, and the first level's vision of an apocalyptic, green future hellscape is distinctive (and almost certainly a remnant of its brief tenure as a Terminator-licensed project). Even backgrounds that would typically be basic colors are given significantly more detail in Silius than even some Super Nintendo games. Jay McCray's sprite animates fluidly and the bosses feature large and detailed sprites. Sometimes, however, tiles from the bottom of the screen can appear at the top, which could look distracting.
Journey to Silius is a game I certainly don't regret playing because I had a lot of fun with its platforming, its first few levels, its detailed visuals, and its phenomenal soundtrack. However, the overly punishing continues system, the questionable enemy placement, and the poor boss fights roughened up the experience for me. I wish the game was put in the hands of more capable developers like Capcom, but as it stands, it's still a decent time despite these flaws. Silius might not be a hidden gem, but it is a diamond in the rough, buried under its own flaws.
A consistent problem that a lot of NES games have, however, is that the game is simply too stingy with continues. While not as bad as some other games due to its extremely short length, Silius only gives the player one continue (read: six lives) to beat all fives levels, and with a game as difficult as Silius, I feel like it's simply unfair to kick the player back to the first level. The Ninja Gaiden trilogy, considered some of the most challenging of NES platformers, has infinite continues, so Silius doesn't have much of an excuse. I also felt that level four is when the game begins to lose its luster. Some of the enemy placements border on the absurd in ways that make Castlevania's infamous Medusa hallway look like child's play. The boss fights range from decent to terribly unfun, with only the first boss feeling decently designed. The hitboxes of the floating fish-like enemies are also larger than the actual sprite and can hit you even if you're ducking and visibly under them. Don't get me wrong, Silius is still a good bit of fun, but the rough edges become more obvious the more time you put into it.
If people remember anything about Journey to Silius though, it's easily its presentation. The soundtrack is legendary among the remix community, and the hard-hitting drums, distinctive SunSoft bass, and catchy tunes that bend and break the NES's sound chip are easily the highlight of the game among all else. The visuals are also rather attractive, and the first level's vision of an apocalyptic, green future hellscape is distinctive (and almost certainly a remnant of its brief tenure as a Terminator-licensed project). Even backgrounds that would typically be basic colors are given significantly more detail in Silius than even some Super Nintendo games. Jay McCray's sprite animates fluidly and the bosses feature large and detailed sprites. Sometimes, however, tiles from the bottom of the screen can appear at the top, which could look distracting.
Journey to Silius is a game I certainly don't regret playing because I had a lot of fun with its platforming, its first few levels, its detailed visuals, and its phenomenal soundtrack. However, the overly punishing continues system, the questionable enemy placement, and the poor boss fights roughened up the experience for me. I wish the game was put in the hands of more capable developers like Capcom, but as it stands, it's still a decent time despite these flaws. Silius might not be a hidden gem, but it is a diamond in the rough, buried under its own flaws.