Resident Evil 3 Review

Resident Evil 3 is a game that was developed by Capcom and is a remake of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis which was first released in 1999. The game focuses on two main characters, Jill Valentine and Carlos Oliveira who are trying to survive a zombie outbreak. The game is available on the PS4, Xbox One and PC.

Resident Evil 3 was one of my most anticipated games of 2020. Having been a very large fan of last year’s Resident Evil 2, I was very excited when I started seeing the initial trailers, screenshots and other marketing reveals of the game as the release date drew closer. Now that I’ve finished the game and played it once through in full, I must say that I was definitely not disappointed and I had a great time with the game.

The Plot

Resident Evil 3 begins with the player experiencing Jill Valentine’s morning in which she wakes up in the midst of a pandemic and she is having nightmares about it all. It’s horrible really. She doesn’t sit in her apartment too long though because a monster known as Nemesis barges in through the wall and attacks poor Jill. It is from this point onward that Jill is on the run from the monster, she then ventures out into Raccoon city which is full of zombies, she must do everything she can to survive.

The story in itself is quite good and I found it interesting. Jill eventually will meet up with Carlos (the other playable character) who is mercenary and has a team. The two characters work together to survive the outbreak.

Playing a game about a pandemic which happened due to a major outbreak from a virus at a time when our world is currently dealing with the coronavirus outbreak was a little scary. There are certain moments in the game where you will explore a hospital and it is all messed up with blood everywhere, who knows what happened there. You can also read documents about staff trying to contain the spread, but they couldn’t and now it’s everywhere. Resident Evil 3 is not so scary by itself on its own, but I found because of all that’s going on right now outside of the game that it made what was happening in the game feel much more real. The game actually really did make me think quite a bit about viruses, vaccines and how viruses need to be contained early on. If a virus gets out and spreads to a dense area of people, it can spread so easily from one person to the next person and things will get bad very quickly. This is something very important to know about in our current world.

The Gameplay

There are many similarities between Resident Evil 2 and 3, but Resident Evil 3 gives players some new gameplay experiences. Generally I found the main difference between Resident Evil 2 and 3 was to do with the setting, which changed the gameplay up quite a bit. Resident Evil 2 took place mostly inside, in small confined rooms, in the police station, the player was always enclosed with not much space to move around. Resident Evil 2 was mostly focused on exploration, unlocking rooms and surviving close encounters with the infected. Resident Evil 3 on the other hand takes place in a city, in the streets and outside. The game is a lot more open, Jill has a lot more movement options and as a result of the larger level design, the player can shoot at the infected often from further away, with more time to aim (on easier difficulties) than they would have had in Resident Evil 2. On top of this, many of the encounters with Nemesis in Resident Evil 3, are action based boss fights. The player will actually have to defeat this boss over and over again. There will be a lot of ammunition use and a lot of dodging of attacks. In many ways Resident Evil 3 is at times more of an action game experience, full of shooting and explosions than the slow close encounter horror game that was Resident Evil 2.

The gameplay of Resident Evil 3 can be broken down into three separate activities.

The first activity is exploration. The play will be opening boxes, opening safes, unlocking secrets and finding items or weapons. This is actually my favourite part of the game. I always get some joy wandering about, looking around abandoned places and finding rare or valuable items. This is especially true if I find a new weapon that will be really useful or something like a lock pick which I can use to open all the locked things I had seen around the place in previous areas. Things are hidden in and around the different levels in the game and finding what you need isn’t always easy. There’s also a bunch of documents and notebooks the player will come across which are important to read because these all add context into what was happening either the level you are in, or for the plot of the game at the time. Quite a bit of the story of Resident Evil 3 is told through the many scattered books, which makes them interesting finds.

The second part of the gameplay experience is weapon based combat. There are a bunch of weapons the player will wield in the game, these include the combat knife, handgun, shotgun, machine gun and grenade launcher. The many weapons are all useful for taking down enemies and many of the weapons are upgradeable. Like with Resident Evil 2, ammunition is fairly scarce in the game, so it’s not like you can go crazy with the grenade launcher, but the game does arm you up frequently for boss fights. In fact, I could tell when a boss fight with Nemesis was coming because there was always a lot of ammunition in the areas nearby to arm you up before going in there.

The third activity in Resident Evil 3 is the boss fights with Nemesis. These are all a bunch of fun and the game designers allow you to either run away from him through some nice cinematic moments or they allow you to fight him yourself using you many weapons. The fights are fun, but the scale of Nemesis and the things he does to Jill during the fights is at times unrealistic.

(Spoilers about unlockable items in this paragraph, skip it if you don’t want to know) Resident Evil 3 took me about 7 hours to complete on my first play through and that was on the easiest difficulty. When you finish the game, you will unlock a ‘shop’ where you can spend in game currency to unlock items such as an alternate outfit for Jill, unlimited ammunition or health regeneration. These items can be used in game when you go to do a second playthrough of it next time. My complaint about the shop is that the items in there are all super expensive. All I could purchase after finishing my first playthrough was 1 health regeneration item which cost pretty much all the money I had earned. It says you can unlock more by completing more in game challenges, but this is quite time consuming and considering the prices of the items, I do wonder how may playthroughs it would take to unlock every single one there.

One thing I would like to mention is that on harder difficulties, enemies like the zombies seem to walk faster and need more ammunition to take them down. In the hardest mode in the game, the more open setting compared to Resident Evil 2 doesn’t feel as big because I didn’t have enough space to out run too many enemies. Zombies come at you more aggressively and it’s a lot tougher to beat the game on this mode. The harder difficulty settings are where veterans of Resident Evil should play through the game, they will get a lot of value from this mode.

Sound & Visuals

Resident Evil 3 is a good looking game, the graphics are amongst the best of 2020 and while it still looks quite similar to what we saw from Resident Evil 2 last year, both games are still very nice to play. I’ve played Resident Evil 3 both on PS4 (full game) and PC (demo). On PC of course you can max things out if you have the right hardware and the game is beautiful there, but on PS4 things also look very nice. You would do well with this game no matter which platform you chose to play it on, but for graphic obsessed people, the PC platform is probably the way to go.

Characters are well designed, the attention to detail on Jill is noticeably good. Her animations when she is walking, running or is hurt in the game are all great. Same with Carlos as well. It would have been nicer if there were more alternate outfits for the characters on second or third attempts of the game just to change things up, but this isn’t the biggest deal breaker. Some of the zombies are a little bit repetitive in their designs which is a shame. Nemesis is constantly changing and his character design is very interesting, he’s a very gruesome looking individual.

The sound in the game is well done. Resident Evil 3 is a game that is set mostly in very quiet environments. I was always on guard and listening for sounds of zombies, monsters or Nemesis, especially when my character’s health was low. Sounds are an important part in a horror game and they’re essential for keeping the player on edge, they were realistic and well done.

Overall

If you haven’t played Resident Evil 2 at all and are thinking that you aren’t going to get Resident Evil 3 because it might have spoilers for Resident Evil 2, don’t worry about it, you don’t need to play Resident Evil 2 before playing Resident Evil 3, but it would be a good idea to play it anyway if you can. There are strong action elements in Resident Evil 3 which are a bunch of fun, the game also has some enjoyable high pressure horror elements and exploration experiences. The story of the game is made a little scarier due to the pandemic setting and this being echoed with real world events at the moment. Both graphics and sound are excellent and shouldn’t disappoint many gamers out there. Happy to recommend adding Resident Evil 3 to your gaming collection this week.