What I did like:

- Team Skull.
- Some of the environment designs were cool.

What I didn't like:

- Pretty much everything else. This game continues the trend of the X and Y curse. It's far too easy, Z-moves aren't very exciting once you've used them more than once, mega evolutions aren't obtainable until the end of the game, and the story is boring. Even with the inclusion of worm-hole travel, a city in another dimension and space pokemon!

For all its flaws I love the Resident Evil series as a whole. Its camp, almost old-Hollywood approach to storytelling, still in 2022 has both the ability to comedic AND terrifying, and the move to first person was welcome in VII.

What I did like:
- More places to explore and different themes within the places. The game may be fairly linear on a first playthrough but it's got a solid structure and it knows where it's going.
- Usually I slate games for this, but I was a huge fan of Resident Evil 4 and it is very clear how much inspiration Village takes from it.
- AND the level that takes CLEAR influence from the PT Demo. That was some good spook.
- The map system and the encouragement to find treasures and solve puzzles in your own time.
- Enemy combat on PC is very rewarding when you start mastering headshots.
- The bosses. Well, mainly Mommy Dimitrescu.

What I didn't like:
- The difficulty. I started this game on Hard mode but as a veteran of the series I went through this game pretty easily. I'm not saying I want Dark Souls frequency of deaths, just a little bit more to make me sweat. (EXCEPT of course that opening with the lycans, on hard mode first playthrough I died about 15 times)
- Ethan Winters. It's not that he's unlikeable or anything, in fact it's just that, there's nothing about him. He's boring. He gets thrown around like a ragdoll and still comes out just fine. I get the story reasons, I just really don't care for him or Mia or Chris. In fact, the characters I care about the most are the villains and the duke, show me more of that Capcom!
- Some bizarre bugs where you can't obtain certain treasures etc. if you progress further than one particular mission, for example.

Overall worth playing and I will be playing again on Village of Shadows.

This is such a frustrating game to review. It's one of those games that sets the blueprint down for what could eventually end up as a masterpiece but at the same time, it's so flawed by that pokemon 'not enough refinement' plague that the series has been suffering from since Black & White 2.

What I liked:
The gameplay. God damn is it fun to sneak up on Pokemon real-time and throw a pokeball at them. Battling is so much more fluid and fun. Pokemon attack you. Alpha Pokemon are awesome. You can fly / surf / ride in real-time.

What I didn't like:
Holy crap, the story. How did they end up having a concept like this and still manage to write such a vapid story?! And why can Xenoblade Chronicles have voice acting on the Wii, but we can't have voice acting on pokemon switch games?! It just felt like they spent all the hours on the gameplay and then realised they were 3 days away from release and hadn't written anything else down.