Resident Evil Revelations (Xbox One) Review - Almost Resident Evil, but not quite.

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.