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Resident Evil 7: Biohazard
I finally managed to find the time in my schedule to play this and beat it over the course of about 10 days and I was pretty impressed with it. The new RE Engine is amazing for this kind of claustrophobic first person game, but it still looks great even in open environments. It's a fairly well optimized game, although I did have to turn down some things to keep a consistent 60 FPS, which is a little annoying as I have two 1070's and an i7, but I suspect future updates will improve the performance. I wish I could have adjusted the FOV a little bit more, but as this game is supposed to be the first real killer app for VR I can understand why they left it at 90 degrees, but it does make the larger gun models feel unrealistically huge.
I really liked how much of a Resident Evil game it was, because just going off of the Beginning Hour teaser it was really hard to see how this related at all to the franchise. Outside of a single picture of a helicopter with the Umbrella logo and a phone call from someone that may have been Ada Wong, it felt like a completely different series. Once the game gets going though, you're looking for keys for specific doors, solving puzzles, and fighting against bosses. Much like how
Resident Evil 4 breathed life back into the franchise by completely retooling the gameplay,
Resident Evil 7 does the same by eschewing the 3rd person over the shoulder combat based on encroachment, with 1st person combat based on encroachment. It's a small difference, but it certainly does make a difference in how you play.
The story is easily the best there has ever been in a Resident Evil game that didn't rely on self-parody and that might be because Capcom themselves didn't write it, but instead hired someone else, who happened to be a contributing writer for
Spec-Ops: The Line. It's a much tighter focus with only sprinklings of a greater intrigue, but never losing sight on the more immediate focus. The Baker family is great, with patriarch Jack Baker being one of the better Resident Evil antagonists. The weak links are unfortunately Ethan Winter, the protagonist who doesn't really seem to through an arc, and Zoe Baker, the sole sane individual in the Baker family, who I suspect was meant to have a greater story but it got cut down.
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As good as the game is, it's certainly not perfect. As much as it touts itself as "a return to survival horror", on the Normal difficulty setting you will get enough ammunition to deal with every threat in the game. The game also clearly takes inspiration from the more recent horror games like
Outlast and
Slender, placing you in situations where you are meant to hide from patrolling enemies, but the areas where that happens are incredibly small and the enemies follow very select paths. Then there are the Molded enemies who are a mixture of cannon fodder and mini-bosses, and it's unclear as to whether or not there are supposed to be a fixed amount based on the 20 or so missing persons the Baker family have captured, or if they are created by the main antagonist. The game seems to go in one direction at the beginning by having lists with the missing persons' names and their status, but as you go throughout the game you fight far more than just 20 or so. I feel the Molded would have worked better if they were fewer in numbers but more powerful, leading you have to decide if they are worth fighting or if you should just try and maneuver around them like in the older Resident Evil games. The final 3rd of the game is a bit of a slog in a very samey environment that was easy to get lost in, and the final boss was piss easy and kind of anticlimactic. Then there's the ending, which while not being terrible, left a lot of unanswered questions to later be explored in DLC, however given that the DLC is supposed to be free I can't begrudge it too much.
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard is the second revitalization the series has received, and while it is a welcome change to the series that has been a financial success, it does leave me with some concern with how Capcom will proceed with the series.
Resident Evil 4 irrevocably changed how the AAA industry viewed survival-horror and I can easily see how
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard can do the same. Part of what made RE4 so good was how it distanced itself from the main continuity of the larger RE canon which was a jumbled retarded mess of bad writing, but RE5 brought all of it back and tried turning the game into Call of Duty along the way. I really hope Capcom learned their lesson from the failures of RE5 and RE6, but I guess only time will tell. As it stands,
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard is a stellar example of the survival horror genre and is easily one of the best games of 2017.
