Eventually i came around to playing through Resident evil 3 , though my memory of the original is shady, I remember renting the original back in the day and finding it way to scary/hard/challenging so i couldn't get very far.
In resident evil 3 remake it follows in the footsteps of the previous games, so much so that a siginficant chunk of the game is rehashed locations and levels. You go through bits of the Police station again, the underground lab, many locations you find yourself thinking "Ive been here before" which is both equally entertianing, but also feels rehashed. The two main characters you play as switching back and forth as the story progresses is Jill and Carlos. Unlike other games where you choose characters, in this its mandatory to play as both as the game progresses. Jill is more nimble, but I think has less health and uses shotguns, pistols, grenade launchers, while Carlos is more bulky, and his dodge attack instead is a punch attack, and he always comes equipped with an assault rifle which is very effective.
RE3 has many throwback and iconic moments, like early in the game you get chased by the hulking trenchcoat guy from RE2, but that doesn't last long, you stop being chased by him after the first quarter. Instead, youre being chased by a giant biological mutant known as Nemesis.
You go in and out between city streets, to hospitals, to underground labs, looking for vaccines to cure Jill after shes been inflicted, or to cure the virus once and for all. The plot is basic, and its got some subtle undertone of romance or something going on between Jill and Carlos, its corny but also entertaining enough plot to follow it does the job.
The graphics and zombies are top notch, the animations in particular are stellar and super creepy. Especially the zombies are so unpredictable they often dont just seem like AI but realistic unpredictable movements and animations feel very immersive and intense. You can never quite tell when the zombies are dead or are going to stand back up and grab you which adds an extra layer of immersion and suspense.
Guns feel great with heavy recoil that makes it feel like every shot has a lot of impact and importance, as should be in a survival horror game. While the gun selection isn't varied, the few you get your hands on feel good. Jill has heavy emphesis on Grenade launcher and grenade types which I didn't really enjoy and would prefer more weapons to play with, for example you come across all sorts of grenade ammo variations like Fire, Acid, explosives but youre never really sure when its worth it to use these and you kind of just end up saving them right before boss fights to switch to which feels kinda stupid and like a waste of the mechanic for the whole game. Other than that theres a few enemies where its obvious you wanna use the grenade launcher like in the sewers with these weird giant dinosaur enemies that get one hit to fire rounds and other sorts like that.
I played on Normal difficulty and the game wasnt hard at all, so maybe I should have bumped it up. Theres plenty of ammo and you never feel like youre going scarce, health is abundant, its a pretty easy casual game on the default difficulty, which isn't nessesarily bad it was a enjoyable playthru but at times found myself thinking this isn't the classic challenging engaging Resident evil thats known for.
There is a button mashing mechanic whenever you get grabbed by a enemy to mash A but it doesnt give you any indiication or visual feedback of what it actually does it so the mechanic doesnt feel that great youre not really sure if spamming A is even doing anything, but apparently it makes you take less damage so theres that.
Again like RE2 its got a great new feature where on the minimap it tells you if you fully explored and got all the items in an area so it helps a lot to encourage exploration and backtracking for missed items which I enjoyed. Though a few times you switch characters and can choose to backtrack through an entire location (like hospital as jill) but all you get for your effort is some ammo or something.
Classic enemies make a return here and there like the big hulking lizard guys that chase you around, that are mostly vulnerable to explosives, and the dinosaur monsters that eat you, but other than those there arent really that much enemy variety. You have standard zombies, those monsters, then the big bosses and thats about it. Theres a section with some spiders in a maze, and towards the end of the game you have more labratory experiment type zombies that seem invincibile, but I think there could have maybe been more variety.
The two biggest gripes I have are
-Reused levels and areas from RE2, this game came out under 2 years after RE2 and I guess this is why. Theres entire sections and levels that are just copy pasted from the previous game, I dont know it felt like a bit of a cop out.
- Boss fights were mostly kind of terrible
Why are boss fights bad?
Because you cant just shoot at them like you'd think. Its like theres scripted segments and you have to wait for a specific scripted event to happen , THEN you can do damage to the boss. So you can frequently enter a boss fight, have no idea if you can even do damage, if youre even wasting your ammo or not, and basically what happens is the first instance of a boss fight is the 'test phase' where you purposefully waste all your ammo and try to figure out where the "do damage here' script is, then you reload your previous save.
Also, the fights are a bit trivial too in the sense that like other RE games, you save all your explosive and best ammo until boss fight, and then as soon as you enter the boss area you can quickly reload your last save and get all the best stuff. Its not that big of a gripe but it feels a little cheap that this is so easy to do, and even encouraged. I don't know, Resident evil boss fights always seemed a bit shit and out of place in a survival horror game to sudenly be put into a closed off arena wasting all your ammo, its both good and bad, i'm conflicted about it.
The loot isn't that complex or diverse, standard ammo and you can combine ammos, theres surprisingly weapon attachments you can find but they dont make a massive difference. Typical things like locked off areas or chests until you find a key/lockpick/bolt cutters etc
Like one of the bosses you apparently cant do any damage until the boss runs away from you, sprints around on the walls, and you shoot mines onto the walls so the boss runs into the mine then falls on the floor, THEN you can damage it? And you can even run out of mines and by that point you just have to die or load previous save, the boss fights kinda suck.
I think the remake is missing a lot of content from the original game but my memory of the original game is fuzzy.
It's also weird that the remake doesn't even have Ink ribbons at all even on hardest difficulty
I played on Normal difficulty it was honestly really easy, I should of put it on hardest.
The best things about the game are the graphics and controls, the graphics are up there with the best I've ever seen, super polished and tripple A quality.
Though there is something to be said that with these modern RE titles the easy controls and third person camera does take away some of the horror and challenge of the fixed camera angles. I think I do prefer the unique style of fixed camera of the classic games.
Not much more i can say about RE3 remake, it feels like a quickly made followup of RE2 , just like the original I guess, but I don't know maybe they could have done more with it , I know the original Re3 rehashed some locations too, but maybe in the remake it could have been a bit expanded or differenciated or something. The boss fights were the worst part, visiually they look nice but mechanically obtuse and stupid. It's also missing quite a few enemies of the original RE3 I think
I liked the story and travelling through the streets and into hospitals and underground labs, to find/create a vaccine and stuff, classic stuff.
I dont remember if the original RE3 you swapped back and forth between characters or not, I think I prefer when games dont do stuff like that and just have one cohesive character the whole time, but it wasnt bad. This new character, I forget his name, shaggy hair guy, pretty meh and generic personality. Forgettable.
Overall a polished and enjoyable modern RE title, albeit a bit rehashed and lacking around the edges. It's also super short at 4-5 hours long, I'd feel bad if I paid full price for this, luckily I didn't, so theres that.
7/10
No comments:
Post a Comment