Lady Dimitrescu and kin deserve a better game than Resident Evil: Village

Title Lady Dimitrescu and kin deserve a better game than Resident Evil: The Village
Author Tom Chick
Posted in Game reviews
When May 14, 2021

Remember that time when Resident Evil tried something new and different? Resident Evil 5 cast horror in a new light. Africa's equatorial sun blew the usual cobwebs out of the series in favor of something different and even controversial..

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Tom our very own @Jason_McMaster has played this game like a dozen times to completion. It must be amazing. :)

Did he reach the scary parts?
Am a wuss who’s mighty scared at the first sight of a phasmophobia stream, but I confess watching now and then a few hours of Jay Jay playing, the game’s way of playing its cards felt more unwillingly comical than anything else.

“a confidence balance”

I was really sad when I got out of the castle and Lady D’s part of the game was over. I don’t feel the game ever got as good again.

lichen/lychen

Should that second word be “lycan”?

Huh. “Uninspired” is the label I would have applied to RE5. It took away all the perfect tongue in cheek tones of 4 and replaced it with dead serious Call of Duty vibes and turret sequences, obstruent co-op, and a total lack of pacing.

Although I never played 6, so 5 could have been brilliant by comparison. All I know is me and my friend got bored and stopped playing 5 about half way through.

I never felt Resident Evil was the series to go immersive first person. Feels like it’s trying to go Outlast, but plays like it’s just 4/5 with a first person mod.

I really should get around to replaying Resident Evil 5, just so I can sort out how much of my recollection is based on how much better it was than the previous games, as opposed to how well it stood on its own, and particularly how it compares to games since then. As for Resident Evil 4, there were some cool things in there, but overall, it was still too mired in the Old Ways for me. I feel like there was a kind of RE Reformation in Resident Evil 5 that made so much of it click for me.

But 2009? Yikes, that was lifetimes ago. Will modern computers still even run RE5?

-Tom

I thought it was a huge downgrade from 4 in terms of cleverness and variety. Just trying to emulate it without understanding what made it work. Especially late in the game. Ugh. Sheva was cool, and although the African setting brought in some questionable decisions re: racial stereotyping I’d have liked it as a change of pace if the game were better overall, but…eh.

For my tastes 7 is the best of the series so far and I was kinda hoping it was going to signal a new direction but it hasn’t sounded like 8 really runs with that torch much. But I mean, I’ve never been a huge fan of the series. I kind of enjoy how dumb it is and it’s sometimes very pretty, and 4 does a lot of interesting and tricky gameplay things, but when I want survival horror I turn to early Silent Hill, Fatal Frame, etc. Stuff that understands how to be unsettling and tense rather than just full of zombies and jump scares. (Which 7 did, for a while.)

Resident Evil 4 on Wii is The Only Good Resident Evil because of how it handled shooting. Can you imagine playing a Resident Evil game without being able to aim a light gun at the screen? Gosh, that would be terrible. I’m glad there are no other Resident Evil games.

I enjoyed the review but I don’t get the “covered in weird Final Fantasy era hair effects” line. Is there a specific era you’re meaning, e.g. PS1-style spiky hair pixels, or just that bad hairdos a staple of the long-running series? I wouldn’t disagree with the latter. In-game, the lycans’ appearance looked like they had been blow-dried. Next-gen hair must be a nightmare to pull off. Square’s Tomb Raider games had a technical feature, which I think was locked behind certain graphic card manufacturers (could be mistaken), that made Lara’s hair endlessly undulate. It was very distracting.

It looks like FFXV hair to me.

Heh, that’s a great way to put it! I’m probably thinking of the Final Fantasy movie, where you can see a ton of effort put into individual strands, but it still looks like individual strands instead of any sort of collective hair.

But I definitely don’t mean anime spikey hair. With my very very limited knowledge of anime, I would probably call that Dragonball Z hair.

Also, I just found out today the game is actually called Resident Evil: Village instead of Resident Evil: The Village. Which just goes to show how little I know about any given game when I first start playing. I can’t even get the titles right!

-Tom

Ha ha. You watched the Final Fantasy movie.

I really enjoyed Village, and 7 before it. After 5 and 6 I almost gave up on the series altogether. I think this game is the first in the entire series to make me cry by the end of it. I do agree that they rely on a lot of the old characters to carry the series forward when none of those characters have ever been particularly interesting. I liked that Ethan had some real stake in what was happening beyond just being trapped in a bad place and trying to get away. I liked that Miranda had a motive beyond the usual unlimited power and world domination bit of Weskers past. Moreau was sad and pathetic and just wanted to be appreciated, Heisenberg hated his situation and wanted his own twisted justice and Dimitrescu was probably the more traditional villain. Duke was amazing, I went from complete mistrust to greeting him like my very best friend. I really enjoyed Village and I’m excited to see where they go from here.

I like RE4 a lot and it was campy in a good way. Is this one not as over the top?

I’m about 30-45% of the way into RE8 and I am sadly leaning towards Tom’s assessment here. It’s fine, but I was expecting something a little better. However, great characters, voice acting, and wonderful atmosphere/sound design.

The gunplay just doesn’t feel good to me and so far this seems mostly like an on-rails ride through a horror themed Disney attraction with a tiny bit of exploration.

In my personal opinion, the Evil Within series has far surpassed Resident Evil mechanically and gameplay-wise. I just reinstalled the PC Game Pass version of Evil Within since I want to experience the several upgrades and first-person view that Microsoft/Bethesda added to it recently.

The Resident Evil series still resides in a soft spot in my heart and I will probably finish this but this installment hasn’t quite matched my hope for it. I just checked the Steam reviews and it is Overwhelmingly Positive so my assessment certainly seems to be in the minority.

The mercenaries was introduced in Resident Evil 4 through.

And the cathartic revenge approach to multiple playthroughs discussed in the podcast wasn’t introduced in 5 either, but has always been a part of the series. But let them be fans!

Young people these days. Thinking nothing existed before they were born.

I think the vernacular they would understand is “Go off, king!”

(However, I must object to exalting “the gunplay” in Resident Evil 5 when literally the objectively best gunplay is BY DEFINITION Resident Evil 4 on Wii, and I’m not even kidding this time. It’s how these games were meant to be played. When you play Resident Evil 4 on Wii you’re like “Oh, I see, this is how this is supposed to work. How crazy that we were playing these games with the equivalent of caveman tools like rocks and sticks.” Then Resident Evil 5 came out and it was like here’s your rocks again, good luck with that. It’s truly a shame that only one RE got Wii’d.)