I recently received a very kind comment, where someone said that they enjoyed my reviews in spite of the fact that I give all their favorite games two stars. That’s just an unfortunate side-effect of beating hundreds of games; the potential for a novel experience shrinks while the bar for excellence goes up. Also, I only write a review when I feel strongly about a game, which means it’s either something I love (rare for the aforementioned reasons) or something I’m particularly dissatisfied by. So, I hope no one takes it personally when I say that this game is slop.

I’m fine with remakes. In fact, I endlessly talk about how REmake might be my favorite game, and I even enjoyed the remake of 3, the one people don’t like. It has plenty of flaws, but at least I know why it exists. I can feel its thesis: it wanted to take a game designed to evoke Terminator, and cut down on all the parts which didn’t fit the explosive pacing. So, out goes the clock tower, in comes the rail gun. With this game though, I feel absolutely no thesis, since it doesn’t commit to either a new direction or general refinement. The main problem I had with the original was its pacing, with hours in the middle where there’s hardly any mechanical escalation. In the remake, this issue isn’t corrected, but doubled. Now you have asinine sidequests ranging from rat-stabbing to item fetching, randomly grinding the game to a screeching halt. The difficulty adjustment system from the original would elegantly tune supply levels for each area, and the new system tries to do it in the same way, but players can now craft ammo of any type at any time, trivializing challenges on demand. Knifing an enemy on the ground was perfectly simple, now it’s cluttered with contextual prompts. Even simply dodging an attack is cluttered, with a few scarce attacks requiring contextual dodges, which didn’t feel great in the original even when it was kept outside of core combat. People were ok with knife durability in RE2, so let’s just throw that in while we're at it, despite how the flow of combat was originally designed around its constant use. People didn’t like Ashley in the original, so let’s give her infinite health, making it beneficial when she gets hurt intercepting attacks. Let’s expand the treasure-combination system to the point where players have to futz with crafting every time they visit a merchant, because it’s a safe change we can sell as a new feature. The list goes on with complaints like how most encounters begin with enemies teleporting behind you, a hit-or-miss new script, and so on, but the point is that none of these changes are even in service of a greater goal. The core experience isn’t revolutionized even a tenth as much as the other modern remakes, it isn’t scarier or more action-packed, the mechanics are less elegant, and the problems were, at best, left untouched.

That’s why this game is just slop to me. It's a disinterested ladling of content onto the beige plastic lunchtray that is my psyche. It wasn’t created through passion, but to fulfill an obligation. Resident Evil remakes are safe investments, so Capcom felt obligated to rearrange a near-perfect formula, even without a creative vision for it. All it was intended to be is “more”, a version of Resident Evil 4 they could port to the next few generations of consoles for $70 instead of $20. Well, they certainly achieved THAT goal, but if their idea was truly to recreate the magic of Resident Evil 4, they didn’t even come close.