I went into this marathon of mine knowing that the series had a bit of a downturn and, you know, I think Resident Evil: Revelations might be where they jumped the shark.
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| I played the PS4 port of this on my PS5. |
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| The FBC uses their death ray (???) to melt Terragrigia before the events of the game |
Umbrella and Wesker were campy but at least there was a simplicity to their plots. I guess my issue with this is that it's about on par with most of the other spinoffs I've played story-wise, but it has the production value of a mainline game so it's harder to ignore or write off.
As for the gameplay, it's pretty solid. It's clearly an evolution of what RE4 and 5 were already doing. I had the option to play it with tank controls but I chose to play with "traditional" shooter controls, i.e. dual-stick controls and shooting/moving, and I had a good time. The game feels a bit more fast-paced than those two mainline entries and, as such, tank controls were a bit of a hassle to deal with. There's a new enemy scanning mechanic (that I think may be a thing from the Metroid Prime games?) that they've added as a way to consistently get health items and I found it pretty interesting. Sort of like how modern DOOM rewards you with health and ammo for engaging with all of its combat systems, this scanning encourages you to get close to enemies before killing them, thus making the fights more tense than they maybe would have otherwise been.
You've got almost no inventory to speak of, healing has been considerably simplified and weapon upgrades have similarly been stripped down to their bare essentials. You can definitely tell this was originally a 3DS game. It's surprisingly well adapted for modern consoles, but every once in a while there'll be a low-res texture or mechanic that'll draw attention to the original hardware. The scanning, too, probably also made use of the dual-screens in a fun way (if I had to guess).
The game is set on a cruise ship (weird that this is the third spinoff to do that, right?) and despite following the mission-based structure of RE4/5 it manages to kind of feel like the Spencer mansion again. I loved going back through familiar locations with a new keycard or Trident key (or whatever) to pick up items and open doors I couldn't before. There isn't a whole lot of backtracking required, but it's nice that the largely-fixed location allowed them to still make parts of this play like classic Resident Evil.
There are a lot of characters in this and most of them are new. The game has multiple playable protagonists, such as Jill and Chris, as well as Parker, who fills the role of new-sidekick-who'll-never-show-up-again (alongside Carlos and Sheva and so many others), and Grinder, a new caricature of a character who'll almost certainly also never show up again. It was cool to see a return to multiple playable characters, even if Jill's story was clearly the main focus, and it made the BSAA feel a bit more like an organization instead of just a couple of lone wolves (though, again, Jill and Chris are the ones doing most of the heavy lifting here). Each of these protagonists also has an AI buddy with them at all times, like RE5, though without co-op it's a bit of a curious decision.
I've included my clear screen below, it looks like I died quite often but nearly all of those were instant deaths that didn't feel particularly deserved so I don't feel any shame in that number.
I realize I sound pretty negative about this game, but I had a good time and still largely enjoyed it. It's just that it's become clear I've entered a bit of a lull for the series and it has me a bit wary about the next few entries I've got ahead of me. The story's kind of gone off the deep end and I know it won't get simplified and back on track until RE7, which is a ways away for me.
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