Resident Evil 3 Remake is short.
My first run through lasted four hours and two minutes.
The reason I lead with that is because it seems to be the main topic of conversation
surrounding this game.
Read through reddit or twitter and you’ll see this singular topic dominate the discussion.
I find this interesting because I don’t think it’s the singular issue here.
RE3 has some real problems, and in this video we’re going to go through all of them; but
to surmise my overall opinion of this game I’d have to say that it felt as though it
was a DLC or expansion that was unjustifiably made into a full $60 release.
There's a real lack of original ideas here.
I'm glad that they're giving this game a Fresh coat of paint, and it is a beautiful coat
at that.
The animations are great, the graphics are great, the sound design is phenomenal, and
it really does seem that for some people on the development team this was a passion project.
However that doesn't change the fact that the offering here is pretty sparse.
When we compare Final Fantasy 7 remake to the Resident Evil 3 remake it's night and
day.
In Final Fantasy 7 remake it's technically only a part of the original.now to me, perception
is more important than reality.
It doesn't matter what the development team was trying to do, what matters is what the
players perceive them as trying to do.
I think it very possible and even likely that the development team behind Resident Evil
3 was trying to deliver a lien mean experience that was reminiscent of the original and brought
some modern-day graphics and flare to the presentation.
The problem is that to players it really does come off as a quick cash grab especially when
you consider the multiplayer.
You see, they added a multiplayer segment to the game to help justify the cost, but
I’m not sure this is enough; especially considering the fact that I’ve tried to
use this mode multiple times and every single attempt ends in crashing or such long matchmaking
times that it’s basically unplayable.
Concept is cool enough: 1 player Is The Mastermind and all of the other players are trying to
escape from a dungeon of sorts.
The Mastermind can add traps, spawn enemies, and more generally try to out smart the survivors.
These types of games can be really fun.
For instance I really enjoyed Friday the 13th, especially after all of the patches.
Don't get me wrong, they can get really old really quickly, even a game like Friday the
13th can only be played for a couple hours before it starts to get boring.
And good Lord if you happen to encounter a herd of 12 year olds that are trying to troll
you into a mental collapse, that 2 hours becomes 10 minutes.
I think my biggest problem with this multiplayer mode, however, is that it seems so lazily
done.
There's an eShop where you can purchase what are effectively loot boxes, using their own
proprietary currency.
These loot boxes include Cosmetics but also gameplay affecting perks tools and upgrades.
As of the time of the recording of this video you can't buy the currency outright, or at
least as far as I can find—which may at first seem like a good thing.
However, you are able to buy boosters with real money that greatly expedite the rate
at which you earned this in-game currency to purchase more of these loot boxes.
It's just a more roundabout way of having an in-game currency in loot boxes except that
they don't even do you the courtesy of allowing you to front the money and not waste all of
this time sitting in lobbies waiting for a game to start.
I mean seriously, I was trying to record footage to demonstrate this point but more specifically
to have b-roll of the multiplayer gameplay; however the match took so long to load and
to find other players that I eventually gave up.
Now, I could be wrong, and this multiplayer could be really good but the point is that
I haven’t even been able to try it adequately because practically no one uses . And this
isn’t where the technical issues end within resident evil three.
There were many times throughout my four hour run of the campaign where I was left confused
and sometimes thankful that the game glitched in the way that it did.
There’s this time when I was fighting with nemesis, racing through an alleyway trying
to get to safety.
After a very hectic Scramble I found myself at the door ready to enter however nemesis
was on my tail reaching for me.
I hit X to trigger the door animation so that I could enter but at this precise moment nemesis
grabbed me and it ended in what can only be described as a clunking and confusing display
of poorly optimized AI.
Either the game should’ve known that I was opening the door and nemesis should’ve been
on able to grab me.
Or, I shouldn’t have been able to open the door and instead have been grabbed by nemesis
at which point I likely would’ve seen a game over screen.
Regardless, it shouldn’t have ended the way that it did, where I got through the door
nemesis was Helpless and I was both thankful and frustrated that the game has allowed me
to escape so easily.
These things are especially important in a horror game where game over screens should,
in my opinion, be few and far between.
Every time you see one it pulls you out of the Immersive state you were hopefully in
prior to that and state.
A game that’s doing its job should make sure that all damage inflicted is fair and
immersion breaking screens are minimized.
Now don’t get me wrong, this has been an issue in what are now the last three resident
evil games that have released.
Resident evil two remake,resident evil seven, and now resident evil three.
All of these games feature clunky inventory systems which are designed to make the player
feel uncomfortable.
Furthermore they give the player weapons to defend themselves in the face of danger, however
they make sure that these weapons are extremely frustrating and difficult to use effectively.
While I like this design choice, and I think that it forces the player into a further stressed
state, I think it can often be a Laurel upon which the developers can rest resulting in
a poorly optimized and clunky game overall.
If your game feels disjointed and rough to put it simply, it better be for a damn good
reason.
Unfortunately, I don’t think resident evil three fixes any of these frustrations I’ve
held for the two titles previous.
The inventory management is still needlessly complicated and ceases to feel like a realistic
encumbrance, and rather more like an intentional ploy by the designers to lengthen game time.
If you’re playing normally, chances are you are not going to need to use the storage
in safe zones very much if at all.
However on the harder difficulties you’ll find yourself consistently and constantly
frustrated with how unfair the item drops and placement can be.
And I’m sure that this is partially my own predisposition towards games such as these.
Some people may not mind resident evil’s trademarked clunky delivery.
And like I said previously, I understand the design choice of using the grid based minimalistic
inventory.
It increases the player’s stress level in moments where such anxiety is key and fulfills
the purpose of a horror video game: to raise the player’s heart-rate and stress level.
However, there was one big change in Resident Evil 3 compared to RE7 that I despise: THE
GAME PAUSES WHEN YOU OPEN THE INVENTORY.
This completely defeats the purpose of the inventory system in the way it was designed.
This leads me to the conclusion that the designers of Resident Evil 3 Remake didn’t and don’t
understand the mechanisms they’re putting into the game.
I
like
horror games, I like scary movies, I even like horror novels, but I’m sure we’ve
all felt the frustration of unrealistic characters doing stupid things in the face of an impending
danger.
This is a constant problem within RE3, because Jill Valentine seems to take stupid decisions
as a challenge to outdo Darwin Award winners [CLIP] [WTF ARE YOU DOING].
This is made all the more hilarious when you consider how ‘ra ‘ra ‘muh feminist badass
they wanted Jill to be.
I don’t care who does stupid stuff like this; it’s stupid and makes me root for
the bad guys because the character’s stupidity is so utterly amazing that it begs the only
reward for which
it is worthy: failure.
Here’s the thing, RE3 is fun.
There are some cool sequences in the game.
The graphics are great.
But those are about the only positive things I can say about it.
The gameplay is clunky and unfun, the scripted sequences glitch and don’t work properly,
and even something as simple as the inventory is poorly designed and works in conflict with
the original concept behind Resident Evil going back over a decade.
It’s too bad, because Resident Evil 7 and 2 were both fantastic; but RE3 is painfully
disappointing.