3/10
RE:R1 Is one of the most uninspired games I have ever played. I have a feeling that nobody even remotely responsible for the final product gave a f*ck about it. Everything is terrible. The story really hopes you aren't paying attention because as soon as you start taking a closer look at things, everything starts to crumble as you begin to notice how little sense everything makes. The gameplay mechanics are a catastrophe, and in some cases so poorly explained that you might not even realise they are there in the first place. The voice acting and the dialogue are laughably bad, it feels like 3rd graders wrote the dialogue and had no idea how to guide the actors properly, leading to a lot of disconnect between the emotions of the charactes. Game design is on such a rookie level, that I genuinely wonder who gave the thumbs up and decided to release this, let alone as a mainline RE game. Speaking of game design, someone at Capcom though it would be a great idea to make your in-game partner practically nonexistent, as they will never get targeted by enemies, and the bullets they shoot are just for show as their weapons don't do any damage. The only reason I'm giving it a three out of ten is because it genuinely got a few good laughs out of me by being so bad, poor, shallow, amateurish and nonsensical.

I’ve seen people online being quite kind to this game, and I understand why: it’s a spin-off, and it was originally developed for the 3DS, so expectations were lower than for mainline entries. On top of that, it was released during the franchise’s weakest period, which makes it seem better in comparison.

The problem is that, if you judge it outside of those redeeming factors, the game is very flawed:

- Probably due to its portable origins, the campaign reuses the same environments repeatedly, not only through backtracking, but also by having you replay sections multiple times with different characters. It feels redundant and cheap. Even with this method of padding the runtime, the game is still quite short (around 8 hours).
- Exploration feels off. Even with all the backtracking, there’s little to discover outside of your current objective, so the game ends up feeling quite linear. This is a shame, because the cruise ship is a perfect setup for a Resident Evil game, almost like a Spencer Mansion at sea, but it never fully takes advantage of that potential.
- The game’s only original mechanic, the Genesis device (used to find hidden items and farm healing items by scanning enemies), feels like a chore. In my opinion, the game would have been better off without it.
- Both the gameplay (mostly derived from RE5) and character progression are extremely basic. A dodge mechanic was added, but it feels unreliable since it doesn’t have a dedicated button.
- The story is forgettable. It leans more toward political intrigue, but some events are too far-fetched to fit the tone. It also presents key events in a way that feels too detached from the player, making it hard to care about them. At the beginning of the game, I assumed the events of Terragrigia must have been covered in another spin-off or animated film, because they are introduced so matter-of-factly and with such detachment that it feels like we’re expected to already know them. The story also seems unsure about how it wants to treat certain plot points.
For example, Parker has a stereotypical death scene but then randomly survives.
- The original characters created for this game feel cartoonish. There are two completely superfluous joke characters that you actually have to play as, during a couple of short segments. Chris’s partner also looks like a supermodel, which feels extremely out of place.
- Boss battles are underwhelming.
The mutated girl is framed as an important fight, but we never actually get a proper final showdown with her. The final boss also comes out of nowhere.

In the end, after having played all the numbered Resident Evil titles and considering myself a fan of the series, the only game I would rank lower than this one is RE6, which says a lot. In my opinion, for someone who doesn’t care much about the series, this game is likely to be even less enjoyable, so I can’t really recommend it.

just unlocked the gay ass sailor chris costume 10/10 game