‘Resident Evil 3’ leaves me wanting more: Review

The Resident Evil 3 remake isn’t exactly satisfying, but it’s also not exactly disappointing.

One of the biggest issues with Resident Evil 3 is that it directly follows the Resident Evil 2 remake, one of the best games of 2019 and arguably one of the best games in the 24-year-old series. Resident Evil 2 felt like the pinnacle of the series. Resident Evil 3 feels like little more than a few DLC chapters tacked onto RE2 that you’d buy for $29.99 tops.

Yes, RE3 is just as gorgeous as RE2; yes, it uses light and oppressive darkness brilliantly; and yes, the characters are easy to fall in love with. But the game is small and doesn’t really bring anything new to the table.

Well, it actually does bring something new to the table: Resident Evil: Resistance, a multiplayer experience where four players try to make it through a series of rooms to survive while one other player, the mastermind, spawns zombies and sets traps to try to stop them. 

Unfortunately, I don’t find Resistance very entertaining. Playing as a survivor, it feels like a stripped-down version of the main game with an oppressive timer tacked onto the top of the screen. Playing as a mastermind, it doesn’t offer enough to be particularly engaging, at least not the level you’d expect from Resident Evil.

Maybe it’s just not for me. But the core story mode of Resident Evil 3 definitely should be for me — the Resident Evil series is one of my favorites — so it’s a bummer that it missed the mark.

What went well

Before examining the things that fall short in RE3, I want to take a moment to appreciate the things that I loved.

I adored most of the first half of this game. Starting in Raccoon City in the midst of the zombie outbreak, protagonist Jill Valentine, a former Special Tactics And Rescue Service (S.T.A.R.S.) member, almost instantly finds herself being chased by a giant, menacing hulk of flesh known as Nemesis. 

As she runs from this beast through streets and buildings choked with zombies, she meets up with Carlos Oliveira and some other folks involved with the private security force owned by the pharmaceutical company Umbrella, which kicked this whole thing off in the first place.

Raccoon City is fun to explore, with its twisting alleyways and neon signs illuminating groups of shambling zombies that move with those infuriating jerky motions that make headshots difficult to land. Running around and finding items in the opening of this game while shooting at zombies and running from Nemesis is classic Resident Evil fun.

It isn’t long before Nemesis becomes armed with a rocket launcher and then a flamethrower, amping up the intensity of the chases and revealing that this monster is more than simply a mass of muscles. It’s kinda smart.

One of my favorite parts of the game is stumbling upon an electrical substation that is covered in disgusting meatstuff and filled with big, nasty, bug-like creatures that shove babies down your throat. Jill has to head right into that mess to get the substation up and running so they can escape the city using the subway. Aesthetically, it’s great, a classic example of Resident Evil successfully mixing up the usual zombie action with something unique.

My other favorite unique thing near the beginning of the game is the gammas, which Jill runs into in the sewers. They’re massive mutated frogs with massive disgusting mouths that will crunch you in half in one bite. Just lovely.

There are fun set pieces and big explosions that hit when you least expect them. And when you switch to playing as Carlos, who finds himself at the Raccoon City Police Department right before the events of RE2, it’s a fun nod to the previous game but with the beefed up firepower of Carlos’s machine gun and superhuman punches.

Throughout the whole game, the music is killer, setting the mood perfectly in every moment and keeping the intensity and emotions high as you take on rooms full of zombies and other nasty creatures that want to claw you to pieces.

Feeling shorted

While that’s some good stuff, nothing much of note happens in the second half of the game. After leaving the starting section of Raccoon City on the subway, I realized that part of the game was small. Really small. I was out of there within a couple hours, never to return, and it didn’t give me that same feeling as other iconic RE environments.

It would have been nice to see RE3 branch out

Part of the issue with that section was Nemesis himself. Outside of the few scripted encounters and first big fight with him, he’s kind of a nuisance. Here I am trying to direct Jill around to find ammo and other important items, and meanwhile he jumps in out of nowhere and beats me to the ground. At first it has the desired effect of inciting fear, but after one or two appearances, it feels primarily annoying.

The following sections of the game leave a bit to be desired. They include a run through the RCPD as previously mentioned (which is just a partial copy from RE2), a short jaunt through some sewers (smaller and less exciting than RE2‘s sewers), a hospital section that has a great environment but lacks imagination (and you go through twice, first as Carlos and then Jill), and a mostly boring research facility to cap it all off.

It’s a shame because, as we’ve seen with previous RE games, there is so much room for creativity in these games. You see it a bit with the gammas and the electricity substation, but aside from that, it’s pretty much all regular hallways and rooms with little substantial variation.

In this instance, it would have been nice to see RE3 branch out from the original a bit and add some much-needed flavor to the experience. Even the boss battles with Nemesis, which should be spectacles, all end up feeling like the same fight over and over. The final fight with him is actually the easiest of them all.

Maybe I’ll have more fun running through the game using the special items you unlock after completing it — things like special guns and items that will heal you or make you more powerful.

But on its own, with a playtime of about six or seven hours, finishing the game felt like a letdown. I wanted more from this title, and jumping over to Resistance didn’t fulfill that at all.

RE3 made me want to play RE2 again, because I know I’ll get what I want from that game.

Resident Evil 3 is out now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.