I’m always on the lookout for new survival horror games to play, but I put off Code Veronica for a long time. It was the most divisive entry in the franchise until Resident Evil 6, and to this day, it’s the black sheep of the mainline entries. When I finally started it up, I was a little confused by all this negativity. It’s still pretty moody, there are some fun puzzles, and the upgraded tech smoothed out the movement and camera control. All the boxes for a next-gen Resident Evil experience were ticked, so I was gearing up to be one Code Veronica’s ardent defenders, but the cracks slowly started to appear. The story begins well enough, but the characters you meet start getting a little… eccentric. One of the main villains, Alfred Ashford, might have the worst voice acting in the series, which is a legendarily high bar. Your companion character Steve doesn’t fare much better, and he has the disadvantage of being a depressed teenager. Even if a character like that is executed properly, he’s going to annoy a lot of people. The enemies you encounter later in the game are notoriously obnoxious, attacking you from above where you can’t shoot, or from long distances you can’t avoid. Just for the cherry on top, the campaign switches characters halfway through, and any weapons and items you’re carrying at the moment of the switch will be unavailable for the entire second half of the game. There’s a couple shorter character switches near the end too, so this happens multiple times. You’re never warned beforehand, and the limited save system means you’ll probably have to repeat a good amount of content or a difficult boss if you want to fix your file.

If you really think about those issues though, they really aren’t game breaking on a moment to moment basis. It’s not like the balance is broken, it’s not buggy, and if you know when the characters switch, there's no problem. That's why Code Veronica is divisive rather than reviled, if you know what you're doing, you can still have a good time with it. Resident Evil games are known for their replayability and speedrunning potential, so from that angle, I totally understand the people who defend it. However, if you’re playing this for the first time and not using a guide, it feels silly and a little unfair in a lot of ways. You could do worse with a survival horror game, but you could also do a lot better.