By Sam Coles:
We had a good start to the year for Resident Evil with the
excellent Resident Evil 7, but Capcom hasn’t stopped their as they have
re-released Resident Evil Revelations in glorious HD and 60 frames per second.
Resident Evil Revelations originally released all the way back in 2012 on the
Nintendo 3DS; it was show case of what he handheld could do. This is decent
entry in the series but has a few issues that stop it from being truly
excellent.
Resident Evil Revelations takes place in between the events
of Resident Evil 4 and 5, where you swap between two protagonists Chris
Redfield and Jill Valentine. You mainly play as Jill exploring a creepy
abandoned ship that is in the middle of the ocean, which has been reported to
have some biological weapons on board. They find out that ship has been taken
over by oceanic like zombies and they must find out who is behind the
infection. The story has never been the strong point of the Resident Evil
series, well not until 7 where they got someone else to write it, because
generally the dialogue is poorly written with questionable voice acting. Now
I’m not talking Resident Evil 1-3 levels of voice acting where the voice work
was hilariously bad, but it’s still a bit awkward in some scenes. Does the
gameplay save it? Yes and no.
Gameplay tries to balance both survival horror from Resident
Evil 4 and action from Resident Evil 6; however it doesn’t work in the game’s
favour. The game has a strong and tense opening when you board the abandoned
ship, but then it cuts to a different location where they throw waves upon
waves of enemies at you. The issue with this is that the game doesn’t give you
enough ammo to compensate for the situation, I found myself out of bullets
during boss fights because the bosses take too many hits. This is artificial
difficulty where they crank up the enemy’s health and it arduous at best.
A unique aspect of the game is that you’re equipped with a
scanner, what this can do is scan enemies which if you can reach a hundred percent
you’ll gain a recovery item. This is not the only use for it, there may be
rooms that appear empty, but if you scan round you can find hidden items
whether they are important to the story or not. This is a good idea in theory,
but it is rather annoying because I found myself in the scanning mode for most
of the game trying to gain health items and ammunition for my weapons, it
became a chore by the end of it.
You can really tell that this is a port of a 3DS game as the
textures have not been smoothed out; they look blurry and unattractive to look
at. However the game does look really good during the pre-rendered scenes with
fantastic animations from characters and environmental effects. Facial animation
is lacking during the non-pre-rendered scenes as their mouths look like upside
down pedal bin lids every time they speak, I’ve seen muppets with better lip
syncing than this.
Resident Evil Revelations is neither the best or worst
Resident Evil game, it seems to be an unfocused mess with good creepy elements,
where they then proceed to throw you in action set pieces that don’t mesh
together, as it has little ammo in those moments. It has its moments but just
falls short, with lack lustre visuals, gameplay and content as the campaign is
extremely short.
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