We're starting the year off incredibly strong! I'm glad I finally got around to playing this one. I didn't really have much of a desire to play it until recently when Resident Evil 9 was announced, and then I figured that I should probably get the connecting piece of the story. I was in for a treat.

The graphics are absolutely stunning, the game ran really smoothly for the vast majority of the time, and the story was really intriguing and well paced!

The story did remind me a lot of Silent Hill, honestly, since it involves a dad trying to find his daughter who is being used for a ritual to be reborn. It has a bit of a twist to it but it still is pretty reminiscent of Silent Hill at that core story element. All the different characters popping up was pretty cool though, I enjoyed how they all had their own "dungeon" to go through and different abilities that those areas reflected well. I can tell a lot of thought went into all of it. I really liked how much of the story tied back to not just RE7 but other RE games as well. It's not as simple as a random Chris cameo, rest assured. There was one part in particular that I was kind of fanboying over, not gonna' lie.

The gameplay was decent enough, but there were some annoyances here and there. There were a lot of areas that had infinitely respawning enemies where you had to just through them and it was never clear that was what you were supposed to do exactly. It seems like a weird hold over from a bygone era of gaming and there is a reason why games don't tend to do that anymore. A lot of the enemies just seemed to take way more hits than they should as well, even on the regular difficulty. I only died a few times, but if I had to play the game again for the first time I would pick the easy difficulty just to make combat go a little bit faster. It isn't deep enough to warrant how drawn out the encounters can feel, even in the boss battles. Enemies just feel really bullet sponge-y. I shouldn't have to dump 5 or 6 shotgun rounds into a basic zombie lol.

Oddly enough, I think I may have actually preferred to play the game in 3rd person. People said to not do that for a first playthrough because it does obviously change the vibe of the game and it makes it a lot easier, but gameplay-wise I think third person would fit WAY more for what they were going for. Compare that to RE7 which was designed very intrinsically for first person since it was a VR game (and one of the best, mind you). The combat here felt more like a traditional RE game that they just decided to make first person, so I think 3rd would have been better in that regard. However, you'd kind of lose the immersion and some of the cool cutscenes that result from playing in first person, so it would be a bit of a trade off for sure. Maybe one day I'll do a NG+ run in third person and see how it compares.

Anyway, overall, really good game that I had a good time with. About 18 hours (12 IGT) for my completion. Give it a try if you haven't already and are a fan of the other RE games, especially 7!

#beardgamereview