Nemesis, the supposed black sheep of the family.. in a way I can see why, but I really really liked it! The game has only one protagonist this time: Jill Valentine. Jill is pretty serious in RE1 but generally is portrayed as always out of her depth.. she has developed a bit since then and is more serious and out for revenge on Umbrella. The game however kicks off with the zombies having already overrun Raccoon City, which is great from an action point of view but I was very interested to see "Early" outbreak RC. Where RE2 sort of dropped the ball with "being in a city in a zombie outbreak", you are primarily stuck in a few larger locations and there aren't THAT many zombies, especially at once. RE3 fixes that in a big way.. there are lots of zombies roaming the streets with you and they respawn very often.
The new big bag, Nemesis, is the big talking point of this game. He is definitely terrifying when he shows up and is clearly a response to two big 'weakness' in the first two games - once you clear up an area of enemies, you essentially have free run of the place until a certain small handful of story sections that will repopulate enemies (REmake 1 tried to fix this with Crimson Heads, who will reanimate later on in the game, presumably after you've taken down all the regular zombies) and even then, later in the game you tend to have a good amount of ammo so taking out a few extra enemies is pretty easy. How does Nemesis fix this? By chasing you through zones like a dog and not wanting to go down easy! Like RE2Remake, he goes down with a bunch of hits but not for very long. While Nemesis shows up in the first 30~ minutes and stays until the end of the game, there are plenty of long stretches where he doesn't show up at all for a while that serves fine in terms of breathing room, there's basically no section where the point is to get something complicated done while he is harassing you.
The story isn't bad, Jill has to work with a small mercenary company that may or may not be the bad guys (The Russian guy obviously is, the cute hispanic guy who flirts with Jill obviously isn't) and they have to work their way out of a zombie and puzzle infested city. The usual right? There's a neat twist in that when you get several hours in and it looks like the game might be ending.... BOOM! Nemesis has a rocket launcher and your ticket out of town goes down. What is more unfortunate about the story - the writing and voice acting is garbage. "They won't stop me this is my, last escape.." is a line you'll see a lot - and it was physically painful to read each time. Each document you find is written in Google-Translate level English straight from Japanese, obvious phrases and expressions included. Did they have no editors on this game? At all?! And the voice acting for basically everyone but Jill is horrendous, and even she is not great. Also the ending is a bit meh, we get no real closure on Nemesis, other than we learn he was probably a STARS member. It would've been better as a character we know, like the movies.
I can't believe I said something nice about the movies...
Not as groundbreaking or clever in design as the first game, nor interconnected and charming as the second game, but I really really enjoyed the new look at Raccoon before its fall, and the very spread out area maps and sense of exploration you get to enjoy while being chased by a freaky mutant. Starsssssss....
The new big bag, Nemesis, is the big talking point of this game. He is definitely terrifying when he shows up and is clearly a response to two big 'weakness' in the first two games - once you clear up an area of enemies, you essentially have free run of the place until a certain small handful of story sections that will repopulate enemies (REmake 1 tried to fix this with Crimson Heads, who will reanimate later on in the game, presumably after you've taken down all the regular zombies) and even then, later in the game you tend to have a good amount of ammo so taking out a few extra enemies is pretty easy. How does Nemesis fix this? By chasing you through zones like a dog and not wanting to go down easy! Like RE2Remake, he goes down with a bunch of hits but not for very long. While Nemesis shows up in the first 30~ minutes and stays until the end of the game, there are plenty of long stretches where he doesn't show up at all for a while that serves fine in terms of breathing room, there's basically no section where the point is to get something complicated done while he is harassing you.
The story isn't bad, Jill has to work with a small mercenary company that may or may not be the bad guys (The Russian guy obviously is, the cute hispanic guy who flirts with Jill obviously isn't) and they have to work their way out of a zombie and puzzle infested city. The usual right? There's a neat twist in that when you get several hours in and it looks like the game might be ending.... BOOM! Nemesis has a rocket launcher and your ticket out of town goes down. What is more unfortunate about the story - the writing and voice acting is garbage. "They won't stop me this is my, last escape.." is a line you'll see a lot - and it was physically painful to read each time. Each document you find is written in Google-Translate level English straight from Japanese, obvious phrases and expressions included. Did they have no editors on this game? At all?! And the voice acting for basically everyone but Jill is horrendous, and even she is not great. Also the ending is a bit meh, we get no real closure on Nemesis, other than we learn he was probably a STARS member. It would've been better as a character we know, like the movies.
I can't believe I said something nice about the movies...
Not as groundbreaking or clever in design as the first game, nor interconnected and charming as the second game, but I really really enjoyed the new look at Raccoon before its fall, and the very spread out area maps and sense of exploration you get to enjoy while being chased by a freaky mutant. Starsssssss....