Resident Evil Revelations review/incoherent rant

Having only been a Resident Evil fan for little over a year there’s very little insider knowledge I have over the entire franchise, and I certainly can’t claim to have played every title. The Gun Survivor series I doubt I’ll ever play because I’ve heard of their reputation, although that being said I did give Resident Evil 6 a chance, as much of a mistake that was. Anyway, the point I was making is that I haven’t played every game in the franchise yet, and probably at this point never will. But one highly respected entry to the series I’ve only recently gotten around to trying is Resident Evil: Revelations on the 3DS.

I mentioned in my Luigi’s Mansion review that the only reason I got a 3DS in the first place was to play RE: Revelations, because it’s sometimes treated as a main entrance in the series, or at least one of those weird entries that aren’t quite main line games, but are by no means a spin-off either, like Resident Evil Zero come to think of it, another game that I’ve never bothered playing. On top of that I’ve only really ever heard good things about it, like how it’s set in a claustrophobic environment just like the original games with which it also shares the gameplay style of slowly making your way through the ship room by room; collecting items, such as ammo and keys to unlock further rooms; solving simple puzzles to acquire more items or even just a bit of plot. RE: Revelations has always been referred to as a really good Resident Evil game that brings the series back to its roots while also mainlining some of the best aspects of Resident Evils 4 and 5.

Now that I’ve played RE: Revelations, I find that the people saying those things are either deluded or lying. RE: Revelations is a terrible game. While the Spencer Mansion and the RPD Station maybe claustrophobic environments full of rooms and corridors to navigate, you can always be bothered to back-track to the other side of the map and search all previous rooms again in case you’ve missed something and also know where the fuck you are actually going when you do this due to the comprehensive map system. RE: Revelations doesn’t do this. I was totally lost throughout my entire time with the game and with the lack of a sprint button (or at least one that I never found) backtracking even just through a single large room or area can be incredibly tedious. I found at one boss fight that there was a lot of shotgun ammo lying around leading me to believe that I had somehow missed out on picking a shotgun up, but the thought of backtracking to double check felt like a far worse option than just not having a shotgun at all. Dwell on that while I think about the next thing that I hate.

Oh, yeah, the camera. This is more of a fault with the 3DS itself, but then handheld was always more suited to simpler 2D games, but when you don’t even bother to put a second joystick on a handheld console, 3D games are always going to be awkward to control, unless you have a fixed camera. The camera in RE: Revelations is not fixed, in fact the game is a full third-person, over the shoulder shooter, but camera control is done entirely through the use of a pathetically useful rubber thing that Nintendo decided to add to the 3DS instead of an actual thumbstick. Granted, camera control wasn’t impossible, or even that hard, but it did make it awkward when using something as simple as a thumbstick on, for example, a normal gamepad would have made the game a lot easier and less awkward to control.

Controls and gameplay are simplified when using herbs to heal, which has been downgraded to simply using a single button to use a green herb. No red herbs or blue herbs anymore, now it’s entirely green herbs, so the herb mixing from most Resident Evil games, such as the original as this game is supposed to be like, is just dropped. On top of that, there is nothing on either screen to indicate whether or not you even have any green herbs on you, so while playing you have absolutely no grasp on how careful you need to be playing.

The last gripe I have with this game is its retarded structure. Do you remember in the original Resident Evil games, or even Resident Evil 4 when the atmosphere that had been building up to that point was torn away for the player to do something else as someone else in somewhere else for 20 minutes? No, of course you don’t, because that would have been really fucking stupid as it is in this game. In every episode of this game (oh, yeah, the episodes, I’ll come back to that), you are constantly pulled out of the creepy abandoned cruise liner to go and do something else for a while, playing as some fuck who you don’t care about, doing something that may or may not be related to the main plot, because who the fuck knows at this point, which completely destroys the creepy atmosphere of the main plot on the cruise liner. I say “main plot”, but I’m not even sure if Jill on the cruise liner even is the main plot because I can’t seem to remember much stuff happening during that time. I remember I guy in a gas mask turning up at one point and promptly disappearing forever. And I remember another guy who looked as if he’s stood on a few too many rakes in his time doing... actually I have no idea what he was doing.

There was certainly plenty of stuff happening in the cutaways though; it’s just a shame I had no idea whether they had anything to do with what I’ll continue calling the main plot for now. And it really didn’t help that the game told you when to stop playing when it came to the end of an episode. Okay, it didn’t literally tell you to stop playing but why even have an episodic structure if it wanted you to carry on playing? To give us the choice of when to stop playing? Well, no, because I can choose to stop playing whenever I like, just like any other game. I wouldn’t start a game of Resident Evil 4 and only come off 20 hours later when I’ve completed the game (actually that’s a bad example).

As I said at the start, I’ve always heard people say that RE: Revelations is like the older games with its claustrophobic atmosphere, set in an abandoned setting. But this game was released between Resident Evil 5 and Resident Evil 6 and it fucking shows. It could have been a game where Jill and whatever-her-partner’s-name-was board an abandoned ship, find it full of monsters, uncover a secret lab, and then blow it up; but instead, like Resident Evil’s 5 and 6, it felt as if it needed to have far too much plot to keep it interesting, and as a result it became a real tedious chore to get through... which is why I gave up after episode 5 of 12. Despite the problems I was having on the ship sections of the game, all I really wanted to do was stay there and explore, preferably with some better controls (maybe the PS4 port would have been the better choice after all), but no; the game didn’t seem to care about what was happening on the ship, because it kept pulling me away from it to some other less interesting location to play as someone I didn’t care about, doing something that was either incredibly boring, or over-the-top-action, neither or which make a good survival horror game.