Recent reviews by Frog

Oh, Capcom... why must you play with my heart? It was easy to assume that R3make would be another great title, following two of the best titles in the history of the series and made on the same engine - but alas. All Capcom had to do was remake the game the same way they made RE2, but instead, they chose the route of a 'reimagining'. Indeed, this is less a remake of RE3 and more of a mis-marketed standalone expansion for RE2, loosely based on a few of RE3's concepts. A lot of what you'd expect is missing here - ink ribbons, limited ammo, mercenaries mode, zombie physics, dismemberment gore, diverging plot points, defensive weapons, most of the original locations, and most of the puzzles are all absent. In their place is a mostly linear action-oriented game which feels like a compromise between the RE2 remake and the action-oriented approach of RE4. Like the original RE3, this was released just a year after RE2 - but since AAA games in 2020 require a bit more development time than they did back in 1999, this edition feels like even more more of a rushed cash-in. This title is the first casualty of Capcom's newly planned yearly release schedule for Resident Evil, and it likely won't be the last.

One of the the things RE2 did incredibly well was expand the original campaign without affecting the pacing, but the opposite happened here - the campaign was reduced and sped up. The original RE3 had 5 overarching areas - the city, a return to RPD, a clock tower, a hospital, and city outskirts. Of the 4 areas that are unique to RE3, the outskirts (park & factory) have been cut entirely in this remake, as has the indoor section of the clock tower - only the boss fight in front of it is represented here, albeit unrecognizably. The city areas are heavily cut and hardly resemble their original counterparts. The cut areas have been replaced by scripted chase sequences and new segments which allowed for more asset recycling from RE2 (more sewers, more NEST). And the recycling doesn't end there - for instance, music is reprised from (the original) RE2 and the item boxes from RE7 return here without any alteration. Other details feel unfinished, like the laser reticule - a red dot which looks like it came straight out of MS Paint. New enemies sometimes show up in only a single section of the game, never to be seen again. All of this adds up to an experience which feels oddly budget in spite of its AAA production values.

All of this could have been forgivable if the game still provided the wonderfully tense feeling that I seek from Resident Evil, but the only time I felt it in my first playthrough (on Hardcore difficulty) was in an optional item-gathering sequence at the end of the hospital, following on the heels of a pale imitation of RE4's house seige. Otherwise, the game is designed like an on-rails shooter that just happens to retain a few design elements from RE2, and this is reflected by the game's perfunctory plot pacing. Everything happens a lot faster right off the bat, with Nemesis being introduced almost immediately and Jill meeting the Umbrella team less than 10 minutes in. By contrast, the original game built up to the first Nemesis encounter, and Jill spent a bit of time in the city on her own before encountering the Umbrella team. The game breezes through the heavily cut city areas, which is a shame, because they're the only part remake which feel true to the spirit of the original.

It's hard not to imagine the missed potential here. The city could have been the game's main selling point - a big, open area, filled with puzzles and vastly expanded from its original scope - but instead, it was abridged. Relative to RE2, this makes little sense - how does it take longer to explore one floor of a police station than it does to scrounge through several city blocks? Granted, RE3 was always about running more than getting to know a space intimately, and they've dialed that up here, but in practice that just means that most areas in the game feel underutilized and underdeveloped. This change in focus is reflected in the abundance of ammo and the focus on combat. There's a new dodge mechanic (that's thankfully a lot easier to use than in the original title), and quite a lot of emphasis is put on dodging and rolling here - special retaliatory moves are hidden behind perfectly timed dodges. Defensive weapons have been replaced by a quicktime event used to reduce zombie damage. In essence, the moodiness of RE2 has been replaced with RE6's incessant floor-rolling.

The star of the show here is, of course, Nemesis, whose redesign looks rather... unfortunate, to my eyes. His face his covered with a trashbag at the start in order to later provide a dramatic face reveal, but said reveal ends up providing a sinking feeling instead of the intended fear. Replacing his facial scars and stitches with a nose makes him look significantly goofier and less menacing than his 1999 counterpart, and his Alien3-inspired 2nd stage is far more cliche and uninspired than his original transformations (more angry dog than intelligent stalker). Looks aside, only the brief city portion has him stalk you like Mr. X - in the rest of the game, he is relegated to scripted chase sequences and boss battles (providing more of what was arguably the weakest part of RE2's remake). Even in the city, he ends up being more of an annoyance than a terror, chasing you at high speeds, jumping in front of you, and knocking you over with his tentacle. Despite how overpowered and scary this may sound, it feels like the developers had no idea how to make this a fair fight, and instead opted to artificially reduce the difficulty. For instance, he never attacks you after knocking you over, and instead lets you recover for a moment and get up before attacking you again. I never expected Nemesis to be so principled and considerate!

On the note of surprisingly friendly things, hardcore mode is considerably less hardcore here than it was in RE2. The game frequently autosaves (allowing you to easily get away with saving less than 5x) and there's practically a typewriter and item box in every other room. The frequency of safe rooms removes the need for most of the inventory management and also makes it quite easy to retreat to safety. There are 2 unlockable difficulty modes after Hardcore - Nightmare and Inferno - but they still autosave, lack ink ribbons, and feature frequent safe rooms. Enemy placement is different in these higher difficulties, and the pacing of the city area actually works a lot better in Nightmare - provided you skip the brash cutscenes, this is the closest this game comes to providing a classic Resident Evil experience. The feeling is short lived, as nothing much can fix the game's lackluster back half. By the time I reached the final boss in Nightmare and discovered that the only way to defeat it was by mastering perfect dodge, I was ready to call it quits.

These difficulty modes provide all of the game's replayability. To incentivize replaying, completing challenges gives you points which can be used to purchase things like stat boosting items, new weapons, and weapons with infinite ammo. Many of the challenges involve killing large numbers of zombies, often with a specific weapon. This grinding is yet another way I was reminded of RE6.

This game would have been disappointing even if it had been sold as a $30 expansion for RE2. The weird compromise between the design of RE2's remake and the shooter dark days of the series feels a lot like the first Revelations title - a linear shooter with just enough hints of classic survival horror gameplay to make you mad at the missed potential. RE3 isn't as bad as Revelations, but the fact that this game appeared in what seemed to be an era of renewed focus for Capcom makes all of this sting that much worse. RE3 remade in the style of RE2 could have been a glorious thing to behold, but thanks to this game, we'll never get to find out.

I guess Capcom got tired of the series having two different titles in Japan and America so they combined the two names into one. Unimaginative name aside, this game is a return to form - Capcom recognized their mistake in turning the series into co-cop action games and returned to a single player horror experience, this time with a fresh first person camera perspective. While this is easily the third best game in the series after REmake and RE4, it's also one of the most frustrating entries thanks to some unfulfilled potential.

In a break from RE tradition, this game introduces a new main character, Ethan Winters. The basic setup is very similar to Silent Hill 2 - he receives a message from his wife who has been missing for 3 years, summoning him to meet up with her - but it quickly diverges from that template. This message brings him yet another mansion, only this time the mansion is a run down estate in Louisiana owned by the Bakers, a truly deranged southern family. They spend the first 2/3 of the game stalking you through the estate's many houses and outbuildings, the scope of which silently conjures a familial history of slave ownership.

The opening sequence in the guest house immediately shows you how serious they were about returning to horror here - this is BY FAR the scariest game in the series. I didn't this the RE series would ever go this far - this may be the first time a horror game has ever had me freaked out in the daytime. The claustrophobia induced by the odd camera angles from the early games has been wonderfully updated in first person with tight spaces and a flashlight which gives you a tiny field of view. The house is downright disgusting, and a lot of what you have to do to traverse it is quite nauseating (naturally including draining a mold-filled bathtub in a tribute to the original). The visuals are wonderful, and the music is used sply but effectively. The monster designs are great, and while there are a few reprised ideas, they feel more like a cute nod to previous entries than lazy recycling.

Mechanically, this game is a return to the core principles of old RE. Magically interconnected item boxes are back. Typewriter save spots are back in the form of cassette recorders (though you only get a limited number of saves in the form of cassettes in the 'Madhouse' hard mode that's unlocked after beating the game - otherwise it works like the RE4 typewriters). The core of the game is once again a key hunt in a big house. It's difficult even on normal, and you will run out of ammo frequently, putting you in hairy situations. Health and ammo crafting systems have been combined and streamlined - you can combine a green herb, gunpowder or solid fuel with a chem pack or strong chem pack to craft 6 different items. This isn't quite as much of a return to old-school design as the teaser implied - it holds your hand a bit more in the form of frequent autosaves and an objective list - but it feels like a nice compromise between the cruelty of those old games and the excessive handholding of modern ones. It hits a nice sweet spot.

Most of the game feels like it could have been a new IP or offshoot, thanks to a much more intimate story with a new main character, a new camera perspective, and a very different kind of horror. Unfortunately, it becomes much more uninspired once it starts trying to be a Resident Evil game again in the final act. Several plot twists feel like forced attempts to tie this unrelated story into the main series, transforming the story into an addled and incoherent mess of smashed-together tropes. This is primarily frustrating because for the first time ever, the plot of a Resident Evil game was almost good. It was probably silly of me to expect it to remain that way.

To make matters worse. the gameplay also declines in the final act. The Bakers aren't the only enemies in the game - there are also new zombielike creatures called the Molded. These creatures are quite scary and hard to defeat early on in the game, but once the game forgets about the Bakers and gives you stronger firepower, it devolves into another dull zombie shooter. Granted, it doesn't swarm you with enemies in a fast-paced manner filled with quicktime events (of which there are close to none), so it's still a step above the previous entries, but it's a big step down for this game. It doesn't help that the environments become rather mundane once you leave the estate - the salt mines in the final stage are particularly dull.

After the lengthy action trilogy, this game returned to being brief and tight - my clear time was around 7.5hrs. I feel like this is an optimal length for a horror game (though it seems a bit scant if you're paying full price, as there are no extra modes), but seeing as even this brief game had filler towards the end once they ran out of ideas, I would have preferred that it was even shorter and they'd just made the Bakers the entire focus. I can only imagine what the game would have been like if they'd brought in the history of the deep south a bit more. I haven't bought any of the DLC, so I can't comment on that, but not all of it has been released yet anyway.

The PC port is great - I can't remember the last time I could get away with running a new game on native resolution, let alone without turning everything down! It took quite a bit of tweaking to get to that point, but my GPU isn't supposed to be powerful enough to run this game at all and I managed to run it on high settings - while the initial release evidently had some optimization issues, they seem to have cleared them up incredibly well with patches.

This game begins with great promise, hinting at a game which recaptures the spirit of the original Resident Evil with the over-the-shoulder camera of Resident Evil 4. It sets everything up perfectly - a bioterror attack leads the protagonsits of the original game to investigate a derelict cruise ship. Early on, these cruise ship segments are fantastic and a lot like the original RE mansion - an isolated and claustrophobic setting, a big key hunt, a large environment to roam around and slowly piece things together, narrowly dodging enemies instead of trying to fight them, and lots of atmosphere (complete with odd camera angles - the rocking ship replaces the fixed framing). There's even a moment where you can drain water from a dirty bathtub - what better tribute could there be?

But it seems the devs didn't want to make the excellent game they were hinting at with this early crusie ship sequences. They were seemingly trying to strike a balance between appeasing fans of the classic RE games and fans of modern 3rd person action games. These deeply atmospheric cruise ship segments are constantly interrupted by generic and bland linear 3rd person shooter segments at other locations, preventing the atmosphere from ever fully taking over. Unfortunately,this is the side of the game that ends up winning - before long, even the cruise ship segments become brief, linear snippets where you're running away during a countdown, or quickly swimming through flooded areas, with constant cutscene interruptions - any atmosphere the game had early on is completely eradicated. What hinted at becoming a one of a kind game becomes a dime-a-dozen generic action shooter. And if all of that doesn't kil the mood, the awful generic hollywood action soundtrack certainly will (don't let the rather nice title theme get your hopes yp about the music).

Part of the problem is their experiment with the game's format - it's divided into 12 episodes, each lasting a mere 20-30 minutes, leading to a very short game (my final clear time was a mere 5hr40min). It has more of a story than any RE which preceded it, which is nice on one level, but it also means you can never really get immersed in the setting as you're constantly getting pulled out of the game by cutscenes and scene changes (and every scene is so brief - they rarely exceed 15min). The story is classic RE and quite enjoyable (of course involving a secret lab, though it doesn't have an appearance by Wesker this time), which makes it all the more frustrating that they chose to deliver it in such a cinematic and fragmented way. Every episode is also preceded by a recap, which would have been fine if there wasn't a pointless recap every 20-30min, futher pulling you out of the game. Having the protagonists from the original game doesn't help much, as they're hardly recognizable here.

On the plus side, the PC port is excellent. Unlike REmake, RE0 or RE4, I was able to run this at native resolution (1440p) without a single slowdown - quite surprising as this game is much newer and the graphics are much better than those titles. Many have complained about the controls, but I didn't have a single issue with them, which is a first for Resident Evil on PC. It's too bad the best RE port I've experienced so far was wasted on the worst title.

Shinji Mikami's final Resident Evil title is a winner and has stood the test of time. Definitely recommended.

After several attempts at developing this game that were either transformed into a new IP or aborted, Shinji Mikami finally returned to direct another Resident Evil game. Unsurprisingly, said game ended up turning out to be the second best in the series. Mikami recognized that the formula was becoming stale and the horror was no longer working, so he decided to switch things up and make a fully 3D 3rd person action game with an over the shoulder camera.

RE2’s Leon is the star of this game, and he is now working for the American Special Forces. He’s been tasked with saving the president’s daughter, who has been kidnapped and taken to a remote village in Spain. When he arrives in this village, it turns out all the villagers have been infected with a parasite they call Las Plagas.

The whole affairs is a fun commentary on the ruling class - we have the masses living in squalor, literally mind controlled by a religious leader (through Las Plagas). An aristocrat living in an enormously extravagant castle who thinks he's on top but is really just another pawn. Despite taking place in Spain, it seems like the whole thing is a jab against America to me, with a douchey American action hero who has no interest in saving anyone but the president's daughter (despite the massive number of people affected, who he blows straight to hell without a second thought instead of making the slightest attempt to help them).

While the switch of genre to a 3rd person shooter isn't really to my taste, this game is simply so well made and so much fun that I can't argue with it. While it never gets anywhere near as anxiety inducing as 0 or 1, it does manage to evoke a terrific sort of frantic tension. It's much easier to marathon that the earlier games, as it never gets too frustrating or anxiety inducing. It’s all a bit more linear than its predecessors, but structured similarly, with locked doors and key hunts. Item boxes are still gone here - you can drop items, but your inventory is much bigger now, so you’ll almost never need to. They also introduced a merchant to the game, so you can buy a larger inventory case and upgrade your weapons. The first 4 chapters (the village and castle) are particularly well put together and have a ton of atmosphere.

Unfortunately, the game becomes very unfocused in its fifth and final chapter, which constantly changes setting and style in a highly jarring manner. It begins on an island, which already feels like it belongs in a Tomb Raider game instead of Resident Evil, but then we’re quickly taken through a secret lab (of course), a few tomb ruins, a waste disposal plant, a hilarious Call of Duty style war zone setpiece (complete with barbed wire and a helicopter assault), and an oil rig. It's really hard to know what to make of that last chapter when it jarringly changes tone from horror to action or past to present styles so frequently. This leads to really strange things like guys dressed as mercenaries carrying flails and crossbows, or destructible wooden barrels sitting in the middle of an urban waste dump. A brief moment of a creepy prison (literally just for one hallway) followed by a jetski escaping a wave then riding into the sunset.

The monster design in this game is truly excellent - it reaches the logical endpoint of the body horror aesthetic introduced in RE2. It’s quite satisfying to blow off someone’s head and see some sort of bizarre mixture of insects and innards pop out of the neck. The boss designs are also very cool along this front - there are two in particular which involve some awesome bodily transformation. The music is a mixed bag- some of it is very nice, and some of it is annoying.

This is the longest game in the series thus far - my cleared save file was 15hrs. I also died far less, as, once again, hard mode is not available from the start. This game is the opposite of RE0 in terms of difficulty - it’s hard to die multiple times in a row, as the game actually adjusts the difficulty and makes sections you die in easier each time. Not my favorite feature, but I understand that’s not the case in hard mode.

As in RE2, there are segments where you play as the main supporting character. In this case, that’s the president’s daughter, Ashley. As with Sherry from RE2, she is largely defenseless, and all she can do is throw lamps at people, so these sections involve a bit of stealth - a welcome addition.

Ada Wong (the main supporting character from Leon’s parts of RE2) returns in this game, and there are extra modes where you can play through segments of the game from her perspective, RE2 style. While I think this is better executed than RE2’s scenario split, it still involves a lot of repetition from the main game, and there’s only one new section (though it’s decently large). I wasn’t thrilled with these modes. There’s also a Mercenaries mode (kill as many zombies as you can on a timer), which is great fun if you’re into arcade modes.

As for the PC port, this is the Ultimate HD edition, which, from what I understand, is an entirely new port, separate from the oft-maligned original Sourcenext PC version. It has proper widescreen and mouse support, and is quite playable. The performance could be better, though - I should be able to run any game from 2005 at 1440p, but I experienced occasional slowdowns in certain sections even at 1080p. Compared to the much newer and shinier RE Revelations, which I was able to run at native resolution without a hitch, this leaves a bit to be desired on the performance front.

I played this game immediately after REmake, which is a truly stellar game that has stood the test of time. It doesn't provide the incredible artistic experience of Silent Hill (in fact, the writing is laughableb-movie hilarity), but the gameplay and level design embody survival horror better than any other game I've played. It's deeply atmospheric and very punishing.

My main complaint with the REmake was that it gets too easy in the 2nd half on the highest difficulty. Then RE0 came along and had me begging for that. This game is for masochists only. The early RE formula is already unfair - tension is created through fixed camera angles, claustrophobic hallways, a scarcity of ammo and medical supplies, fixed save points where you have to use save items... this game compounds that by having 2 characters you have to keep alive and some nearly indestructible enemies (even after you get the heavy weaponry that made the first game easier).

I very nearly didn't play the rest of the game after experiencing the opening sequence. Many here have stated that the train is the best part of the game, but to me it's the exact opposite. Yes, it's the most novel environment, but that whole sequence is marred by frequent incredibly cheesy cutscenes which ruin any sense of atmosphere, largely thanks to the banter between the two insufferable main characters.

Thankfully, after you escape the train, the cutscenes become far less frequent. Don't expect to gain any insight into the later RE titles from this prequel, as the story is mercifully very scant - it only exists to justify the game's existence, and it barely accomplishes that. Don't think about it too hard, and don't expect it to make sense.

The environments from here on out are basically a re-imagining of the original games, but with higher difficulty and two characters. The bulk of the game is a training facility which looks a whole lot like a mansion, which is followed by an underground lab which mostly looks nothing like a lab (though I hear the lab in this game is actually modelled after the lab from RE2, which I haven't played). Tack on an extra section at the end for novelty and good measure....

The mansion is much smaller than that of the original game (though the basement is larger), and frankly it's a bit of a pale imitation - while the graphics look flashier than REmake overall, the camera angles aren't as artistic and it never feels quite as isolated and distubing as the original while controlling two characters (which require a somewhat wider field of view to fit, eliminating some of that claustrophobia).

But the gameplay more than makes up for that by being much harder. It took me exactly 20hrs to beat this game, which is the same amount of time it took to beat REmake - only my final in-game time on REmake was nearly 10hrs, while this one didn't even reach 6hrs 40min. I spent 2/3 of my time in this game dying and retrying. This game will make you feel very intense anxiety, even beyond the original, and it never gets all that much easier (the final boss is quite difficult this time, as it's even quite resistent to the Magnum - I used up all my ammo and had to carefully run around and take it down with a pistol).

The scarcity of healing items is even more punishing this time around, since you have two characters to keep alive. At any given time, one of them will be dying. Ammo for the shotgun and grenade launcher is even more scarce than in the original, meaning you're basically going to be trying to survive with a pistol (as ammo for that is quite scarce). Except you basically can't kill the game's hardest enemies (abominations, leech zombies) with a pistol without getting killed.

Ink ribbons (for saving the game) are much more common this time around, but I didn't find myself using them more often - mainly because saving would involve backtracking through dangerous areas. The one attempt to make things easier didn't end up helping.

Many have complained about the inventory system, but it didn't strike me as being much worse. Let's be honest - not being able to drop things and having magically interconnected boxes was goofy. I only found myself backtracking marginally more here, and I'm sure it doesn't compare to playing the original on Survival Mode (where boxes are not interconnected). Perhaps this is because I was playing on hard, so there were less items available period. Yes, this frequently turns into 'inventory management: the game' just in terms of figuring out which character needs which item, but the inventory isn't much worse than the standard early RE fare. Heck, you even have twice the space with two characters!

Many have also complained that you can send the wrong character to the wrong place and die. Yes, this game is all about trial and error, and if you keep enough backup saves (which is essential in early RE games anyway), you'll be fine. There's never a point at which you can lose toooo much progress if you save regularly enough and don't always overwrite your saves.

Despite disputing those complaints, I still can't recommend this game to anyone except masochistic completionists who wish the already difficult original game was harder. Objectively, this game is poorly written, the story makes no sense and the main villain is cheesy and random, the environments are recycled, the enemies are unfairly difficult (bat boss fight where it's impossible to aim at the boss thanks to a swarm of tiny bats anyone?), and the mechanics make it that you'll spend half the time in this game moving items back and forth between the two characters, watching door animations, and dying. I enjoyed my time in it quite a lot, to be honest, but I uninstalled it as quickly as I could when I was finished and will certainly never be revisiting it again - it's simply too cruel. If you really want more REmake, just play it again and then wait for REmake2.

The extra modes don't add much - Leech Hunter is basically a survival mode where you try to collect 100 items in the mansion without dying (so, virtually impossible - don't even bother), while Wesker mode is basically a humorous god mode - I can't really see a reason to play the full game with it, though it's moderately entertaining for a few minutes.