My favorite horror game and possibly my favorite game period.
The atmosphere and visuals are unmatched. Visually, the colors are muted and depressing. The sound design is genius. You are pretty much left alone with your thoughts and the sounds around you.
The backgrounds of each room are extremely detailed, not a single thing left without thought put into it. Little objects on shelves even have detail. Each area of the game is well developed and distinct. Each have a part in the game that can't be traded out or forgotten.
The story is simple yet interesting and is a good set up for the series. It isn't really story heavy, it's moreso a game that focuses on scaring the shit out of you, but what little story there is suits it well.
The gameplay, although a learning curve for modern gamers, becomes fun once you get the hang of it and can become addicting. Just don't play RE0 thinking it's going to be similar lol.
It's a cold and unforgiving game that you have to fight your way through to finish, with good visuals and scary monsters that will make you shit yourself. Need i say more

This game is so-so.
The story is absolutely vacant for the most part. You can definitely tell more sections were more developed than others. You can tell this game was an afterthought to tie things up. I like Rebecca and Billy's dynamic as an unlikely partnership. I like the outline of this story a lot, but none of what fills the gaps. Reading a summary of the story, I think it's good, but playing it, I can see why people hate this game.
Gameplay wise, the biggest frustration for me is no item boxes. I do like the fact that we can drop things on the floor now, yay, but they could've kept the item boxes as well. Both of those together would've been peak. But no, they tried to be different and it ruined the whole game for me. I think half of my time playing was me dropping shit and running around so that's great.
2 and a half stars because rebecca cute

Everyone hates this game, but I love it.
Of course, the problem with this is that its a major step away from horror which only gets worse further down the line with 6. I love horror, my favorite game is RE1 2002. But I don't just ONLY like horror, so I liked the other elements present in the game.
I love cheesy lines and characters so I really enjoyed all the villains in this game. Wesker is a comic book supervillain and I'm not mad at it. I live for the drama and cliches present in this game, and I recognize that's probably just a me thing. It feels like a super dramatic anime crossed with a superhero plot and its very cheesy, campy, cliche, and action-packed, with probably 20% of horror.
The inventory is definitely a learning curve but once you get the hang of it it's actually very simple. Do not give up.
I forgot to add, but obviously CO-OP makes this experience better, even though I played 30-40% of the campaign solo.
The replayability of this game is really high too. I'm not big on replaying games, I usually only play a game once and then move on and maybe come back to it in 5 years. But this game, I immediately hopped online to play with other people on their campaigns. Also, the mercenaries in this game is really addicting too. I also like the graphics, designs, and animations in this game.