Resident Evil 3 Review

A year after the gaming world fell in love with the Resident Evil 2 Remake, the Resident Evil 3 Remake is finally here. Does the hype train keep rolling with this release, or does this REmake grind things to a halt? Check out our review and find out.

Resident Evil 3 Review

Resident Evil 3 starts in Raccoon City before the zombie outbreak. You play as former S.T.A.R.S. member Jill Valentine, a survivor of the events of Resident Evil 1. At the start of the game, you get a brief glimpse into how she has been doing since the mansion incident. She is doing just about as well as you’d expect, suffering from sleeping issues and nightmares. Having been kicked off the R.P.D., she plans to leave the city in three days. Unfortunately for her, Umbrella has other plans for the town and its residents.

Before Jill can even grasp that something is going on, a new bio-weapon crashes through her wall to finish her off. After a rather intense escape sequence, you find out two things: this creature is powerful and it is hunting down S.T.A.R.S. members. On the streets, you realize just how bad things have gotten. Zombies are roaming everywhere, and the only option left is to escape. Meeting up with Umbrella mercenary Carlos Oliveira, she agrees to help them get the train working to escape the madness. The game will run you roughly five hours when all is said and done.

Players of Resident Evil 2 immediately notice that this is a more action-packed game. There is a dodge button, the knife no longer breaks, and there is a lot more ammo scattered around. Zombies are still durable, taking multiple headshots to bring down, and their legs break less frequently if you target that area. They rarely seem to break through doors in this game; other enemies will, but zombies reset instead of coming through doorways. There are also explosives littered throughout the city and generators you can use to stun enemies. Overall it is easier on its Normal difficulty than it was in Resident Evil 2.

There is a caveat to this, and that is Nemesis. Like Mr. X in Resident Evil 2, Nemesis can attack you almost anywhere, outside of saving rooms. He can quite literally fly to you when you are in the streets, like some sort of nightmarish Spider-Man. He is hyper-aggressive and will beat you down in a couple of hits. Dodging works wonders if you time it right. I was super intimidated by him at first…until I brought him down, and he fell to his knees and stayed down for a bit. He got up, brought him down again, and he was down again. I played on Normal, and that was meant to be the game’s biggest threat and he turned into a pushover.

He doesn’t go down that quick when in boss fights, just in regular pursuit during the early parts of the city. His boss fights are much more tank-like, and they give you a ton of extra ammo and heals for this as well. One thing that makes it more difficult overall is the amount of one-hit kills that are present. One wrong step in certain areas, and a monster eats you alive or cuts your throat before you know what happens. With the knife not breaking, you lose your defense items in the game. You can equip the knife and grenades, but if you get caught by an enemy, you can’t use it to fight them off. That is probably why I ran into more one-hit kills in this game.

There are some other significant differences between Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3. For one, this title is a bit less intimate. You move forward more often in this game, so the city feels like a blur. However, in the previous entry, you knew the R.P.D. building because of all the backtracking you had to do. When you got a key in Resident Evil 2, you were excited because it gave you access to a new part of the building. Here you backtrack early on, but that changes after about an hour or so. There are also only about three puzzles that I can remember. Again, the game is more action-packed and quick, as puzzles slow things down.

I mentioned earlier that the AI zombies hardly break through doors in this game. You can use this to exploit them, sitting in a doorway while you shoot them. They will sit there and take it. I am not sure where the AI change came from, but this was an unfortunate oversight. With the extra ammo, and ability to exploit the zombie AI, the intensity of the game drops. When I say extra ammo, I mean a ton of spare ammo. I had about 40 shotgun shells, 100 pistol bullets, multiple gun powders, extra grenades for my launcher, and about six full heals near the end of the game. If you are looking for a more survival based experience, play the game on Hard.

With the removal of Mercenaries mode from Resident Evil 3, we get Resident Evil: Resistance. This mode has four players facing off with one mastermind player. The survivors have to complete objectives and escape while the mastermind tosses down zombies, traps, and other baddies to kill the survivors. The gameplay is stiff and unpolished, unlike Resident Evil 3. You will often go through enemies when you try to attack with zombies, and the AI is abysmal at hunting players down. For the players aiming and fighting feels foreign to the base game. Everything is slower and feels like it takes more effort.

The survivors all have their own skills that help alleviate some of the frustrations when playing on that side. They can disable cameras, heal allies, mark items on the map, or punch when they have no weapon. At the moment, the game feels more skewed towards survivor victory than the masterminds. You can kill a survivor early, and they come back, only losing time, which is quickly gained back. Placing zombies and traps with the mastermind is slow and frequently frustrating. The games I played had the survivors mostly running through the enemies because the AI goes brain dead after they exit the room. In short, it is not a mode I will be going back to and a poor replacement for the widely enjoyed mercenaries mode.

While Resident Evil 2 Remake is the better game, Resident Evil 3 still makes for a good time. For those looking to pay a trip to Raccoon City and face off with Nemesis, give it a go.

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