Ive been a fan of Resident Evil games since they first became a thing in the mid 90's. I was enthralled by this very unique take on gaming and it was my first experience with "survival horror." I don't know if they invented that genre, but I am sure they were one of the firsts.
I truly enjoyed Biohazard which was also known as RE7, and I was aware of the existence of "Village" but I am not an early adopter of games especially when the launch price is around $70 or so.
I was pretty happy when this appeared for free on the PS-Plus pass and I decided to dive into the game the other day for a few hours.
I was unaware that this game was a continuation of "Biohazard" until a little while ago, but some aspects of it did seem a bit familiar. What can I say? I last played an RE game over a year ago.
I found the opening sequence where you are getting intentionally overwhelmed by baddies in the village to be very reminiscent of RE4, which was a game I first had on the Nintendo GameCube and really enjoyed how they shook up the way that game works and put you in a situation where you weren't actually supposed to win, you were just supposed to survive for a certain amount of time.
When you first enter the cold and spooky village, you are just waiting for a jump scare because well, I know enough about RE games to know that is what they love to do. It actually takes a while before you actually have to fight anything and since I am playing the game on Easy - Sorry, I don't have it in me to play a tough game at the moment - I pretty easily survived these first few encounters even though I didn't really have a good grasp on the controls. The game is very forgiving in this regard and I was having a good time.
I do kind of get irritated about how they frequently take control away from you to involve you in the modern equivalent of a QuickTime event though and I can only presume that this is going to continue for a lot of the rest of the game.
I am not stranger to puzzles and traps, this being a RE game afterall, but there is one trap very early on in the game that is so obscure about what the hell you are actually supposed to do that I already looked it up on YouTube because it is just a really difficult thing to see in the dark setting. I don't mind that this was tricky, but what I didn't like is when you did invariably get killed by the rolling spike trap, your respawn point was kind of a long ways from where the spike trap is. You have several minutes of running to get back to it only to probably have the same thing happen to you over and over again until you too end up looking it up online.
If this continues in this game to be this way I don't see myself playing it all the way through, even on "easy."
As you might expect with a RE game, it is heavy on the gore and heavy on the story. I suppose you could consider it to be typical of Resident Evil to do this but I did find myself getting a bit frustrated when my only actual involvement in gameplay was moving from one house to the next and picking up plants...and the rest of it was just cutscenes.
I'll likely give it another hour or so and if this doesn't change I will probably walk away on it or just watch someone else do it online.
I don't know exactly what I am looking for these days in gaming but I don't really want to watch a movie that I only on occasion have anything to do with what is actually happening on screen.
I'm yet to face a single boss but if they are anything like "Biohazard" they will not be a question of your own agility or quickness with the buttons, it will be figuring out something that isn't terribly related to your ability with the controls. I have mixed feeling about this but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it I guess.
So far the gameplay is pretty fun, well, the bits that I actually get to control. For the most part things are pretty intuitive on this and the only thing that is really annoying me is that I have a bit of a control stick drift on my one and only controller that makes accessing the map a bit of a pain in the butt. I suppose it is time for me to invest in another controller. how much are those these days anyway? like $50. sheesh.