I think my all time favourite series (pre-RE4 at least) is back on form like never before.
At first I was skeptical, not because of the perspective shift, but because there have been a slew of first person horrors since Amnesia and it seemed like jumping on the band wagon rather than a bold change. I think I was quite wrong however, as this version of the formula has an altogether different feel that is much sharper in its horror media awareness than anything I have played before. The whole thing feels very "cinematic" in the best sense in that it is clearly inspired by classic horror movies such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the Evil Dead or the Romero Dead movies. It keeps the storytelling to a concise minimum, with no overwritten dialogue and more visual storytelling. Its setting will instantly remind you of a mixture of those movies and the ridiculous gorefest they result in. Even though its incredibly gorey it handles it not in a tongue in cheek silly way but grounds it by making it part of the very weird story that unfolds, making the acts of violent all the more effective, and what's more interesting is that it involves previous Resident Evil mechanics and lore, now displayed with a level of clarity I'd never even thought of. First Aid Sprays magically healed any and all wounds in previous games, right? Just seemed like a game mechanic to me, but now imagine a world where that was normal and a losing a limb, no matter how excruciating it may be, has no long term significance. It leads to bizarre and horrific scenes, that I can tell you, and makes what was once just a gameplay device something very intriguing.
RE7 includes a lot of nods to pervious games in meaningful ways rather than just fan service. Classic mechanics return such as the item box, low amount of inventory slots, smashable crates and even ammo crafting ala RE3, but all the more necessary thanks to the shortage, in no small part because of the overwhelming power of your enemies.
This is no hide and seek horror. You get guns here, pretty quickly, but they're simply not all that effective. This is a great change of pace from others in the genre, as you are still virtually helpless in the tight corridors you roam, but you don't have to run and hide in a cupboard for a couple of minutes until the danger passes. In fact there's really nowhere to hide at all. At first this felt rather counter intuitive, since you absolutely want to hide when one of the family is searching for you, but you just have to keep moving instead.
The game seems to switch between linear and more free form at least an hour or so in. I certainly welcome the latter, as the undirected exploration of the original games is one of the things I absolutely love about them and which was totally lost RE4 onwards. Here, it returns in slightly small ways but still very welcome. You reach points where you have lots of rooms to explore, lots of locked doors to open and no map markers telling you where to go. This is what RE's all about! It's like a first person classic Resident Evil with the slickness of more modern titles. Like an actually good Resident Evil Survivor. I will say the linear sections are still great however, as they are all basically brutal extended chase sequences that are fantastically well done, although I do wonder about the replayability of those sections compared to the others.
And I worry about replayability because I'd love to be playing this in another 10 years, just like I'm still playing earlier games. Time will tell. So far it's looking good, though.
As a small criticism though, it has performance issues when it comes to loading the next area. There are no loading screens, but you can tell when its loading by the sudden drop in frames from around a smooth 60 to 20fps or so. I hope they fix it, but its not a major issue, just pretty annoying.
Oh and another being bad lip syncing. It's not out of sync but the mouth animations are pretty bad. I've always thought you can define certain Capcom games as pre and post Dead Rising, because they seemed to use the engine and technologies developed around for a lot of their things, including the two Resident Evil CG animated movies, which clearly used Dead Rising animations and engine render style. Here the mouth animations look like the Dead Rising style, rather than bespoke motion captured or specifically animated, but it's a little thing.
After play complaints
So after completing the game I have a huge beef. The game went on WAY longer than it should have. Not that it was overall a particularly long game (took me about 8 hours play through first time on Normal (the hardest difficulty first time round)) but that it far outstayed its welcome by doing some absolute bullshit toward the end. It had a nice conclusion moment, where you fought a pretty fun, slightly too ridiculous but ok boss, had to make a tricky choice and seemingly escaped the chaos, and everything seemed nicely wrapped up. Not every story element, but this is a horror, and it's RE, it's never about the story. Mysteries are better left mysteries, what matters is we survived. Except fuck no, they decided to add 2 more hours of absolute crap that lacked all polish compared to the earlier stuff, had no tension or pacing and was all about the average gunplay RE has become infamous for. It felt like they just desperately tried to cater to every RE fan by cramming in location types from across the series and ending with ridiculous gunplay, stupidly over the top tentacle monsters and absolute classic RE lore drivel that didn't remotely add to the experience but made me seriously hate playing the excruciating last couple of hours. This is a massive contrast to the first 4 hours or so that were brilliant, and the middle 2 hours that were pretty good at wrapping it up. It really pisses me off. At hour 6 I was ready to replay the game on hard mode, now I can't be bothered ever playing that last portion again. Really, really, really disappointing last couple of hours. Holy hell.
And to add to that, it didn't even address the one question I had which was: where is Lucas? The guy just disappears. Which was interesting in that I was expecting to see him and that created tension, but instead they want off on a horrible "multiple endings" kind of slew of shit to say "hey, this is the 'RE universe', which nobody cares about". All I wanted was that good, RE gameplay. Not the secret agent crap.
Another is the lack of replayability. There doesn't seem to be a secondary mode of any kind, which is quite disappointing, especially considering the length of the game. Some kind of survival mode, or time trial mode would've been a great little addition. Something akin to the battle mode on Resident Evil 2 where you have to run through the world with limited equipment, trying to survive as far as you can with limited time. But there isn't. Another important thing IMO is random item placement. Even though that is rarely done in any game, I think it's so sorely missing. It would'nt have been particularly hard when you're designing a game like RE to have 2 or 3 spots where certain key items can appear and randomize them. This would greatly add replayability and is a feature I've wanted since the very first game, kind of got with arrange mode in RE2, but not really. I hope they do it for the RE2make. REmake 2. Whatever.
Also enemy design was pretty weak overall. I liked the mixing of "human" strong enemies with the family and the molded "zombie" enemies, but when the family got sidetracked, there was no progression in enemy types to keep it interesting. There was no moment like the switch from zombies to hunters in the original game, or zombies to lickers in RE2, or even a variation in speed like zombies vs dogs. This, especially during the last 2 hours, where it relied entirely on the 'molded' enemies, got very stale. But again, if they'd stopped when it was still great this would'nt have been the case.
Edited by OmegaBolt, 26 January 2017 - 10:58 PM.