Rushing by Racoon City — An Analysis of Resident Evil 3
After long months of delay, I return to the blog to continue my series of reviews on the Resident Evil saga. Before we begin, I would like to apologize to the small number of readers who have been following, through my reviews, this long and terrifying journey.
With the recent release of Nier Replicant see. 1.2247, I ended up wasting more time than I should (review on the way!? don’t know) and, along with this, added to the fact that the current Brazilian head of state has been striving to assassinate the entire population, I completely lost the focus and patience to write on any subject.
But since you didn’t visit this site to read about my problems, let’s turn our attention to the game subject. Continuing from the point where we left off at RE 2 and Code Veronica, we will analyze, in this article, Resident Evil 3, developed and published by Capcom in April 2020.
Before we begin, some warnings: This text deals exclusively with the remake of the original game released in 1999, for the late Playstation, that is, the direct continuation of the remake of RE 2, released in 2019. As many aspects of the game, such as gameplay, sound design, and graphics remained the same, neither worse nor better, I will not waste much time analyzing them, for more details, I suggest this previous article.
Plot
After the events of the first game, the former S.T.A.R.S. member Jill Valentine went on to look for a way to frame Umbrella Corporation for the development and misuse of T-virus. A few days from leaving Raccoon City, Jill finds herself in a new horror scene, as upon awakening, she discovers that the city is completely taken over by zombies.
To make things worse, Jill is also being pursued by Nemesis, an extremely tough and powerful creature developed to exterminate the Members of the S.T.A.R.S. who survived the events at Spencer Mansion. In a city ravaged by the undead and with a biological weapon on its tail, Jill wanders the streets of Raccoon City in search of a way out.
Throughout her escape, the protagonist meets with some members of Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Services (UBSC), mercenaries hired by Umbrella itself to eliminate any sign of the company’s involvement with the recent disaster. Among this elite group stands out Carlos Oliveira, a member of the Alpha squad, who ends up saving Jill in one of his encounters with Nemesis. Besides him, they are worth being mentioned: Mikhail Victor, the platoon commander; Tyrell Patrick and Nicholai Ginovae, a greedy and unbearable Russian who does everything to disrupt the protagonist’s plans.
The whole story takes place in the year 1998, that is, at the same time as the events seen in RE 2, lived by Claire and Leon. The difference is that some passages, in this game, occur before and others after, which justifies the presence of areas that we explore during the campaign — but
let’s talk about this subject later.
A good game, a bad remake
Before I start detailing the most problematic parts of the game, I think it’s important to emphasize its qualities, even if few.
Just like RE 2 Remake, this sequence was also made in the RE Engine graphics engine, as result, the graphics are as good as previously seen. The character models and scenarios are extremely well-made and detailed, and the reimagining of some designs was also very positive.
Another similarity that can be seen is in the gameplay, which also remained great, having, as the only differential, the addition of a dodge button, which helps the player escape from more dangerous situations.
Unfortunately, these cannot be considered merits of the RE 3 Remake itself, since all these qualities are the result of the development of its predecessor. That said, let’s talk about the problems.
Unlike its predecessor, RE 3 is an EXTREMELY linear and short game, even exploring every corner of each scenario, it took me just over 4 hours to complete the campaign. To make this sense of linearity even worse, the game also has several scripted scenes (non-interactive scenes, in which the player only moves the character through certain scenarios), especially in the first hours.
In addition, the maps are quite small and a little diverse. Here we have only four, the city itself, the police station (the same seen in RE 2), the sewers, a hospital, and a laboratory. And I know that the RE saga is not known for its wide variety of scenarios, but try to understand that even the mansion of the first game manages to be larger and richer in detail than any of the locations mentioned earlier. And even the good and old backtracking, used in previous titles to further enrich the player’s exploration, is not well used in this remake — there are very few areas where Jill needs to collect certain items to unlock passages, weapons, or objects.
The arsenal and enemies are few varied, the boss battles very repetitive, the ammunition too plentiful and the save rooms are positioned very close to each other (in a way as clumsy as seen in Dark Souls 3). The replay factor is also a problem. Even though there are still small bonuses that can be unlocked upon the campaign completion, such as new clothes and weapons with infinite ammo, nothing is done to encourage the player to venture into the game more times.
Final Conclusions
My experience with RE 3 Remake was not the best, not that the game is bad, it is so simple, but I feel that lacked a certain affection in its development, especially in the rhythm and the plot unfolding subject. The lack of these two elements, taking only these as an example, made this title looks much more like a sequence made just to raise money (in the best FIFA or COD style) than like a sequence worth of the highly regarded resident evil name.
It is obvious that some of the decisions made by the development team were made with the best of intentions, at least that’s what we expect, but some of them are so questionable and so strange that it’s almost impossible to not complain. With this wasted potential, it is only left to the fans to re-play or, as in my case, play the original released in 1999.
Well, that’s it, a short review for a short game. I hope to come back here, still in June, to analyze Resident Evil 4, then until the next.
Did you like the article? Want to opine on the game or about some point raised during the text? So be sure to share your ideas with me here in the comments.
[Some images used in this article were taken from Google or from game community profiles on Steam]
