Review of Resident Evil: Village - an excellent continuation of the series

In recent years, Capcom can bring itself to its asset: the company managed to save and direct the seemingly misguided Resident Evil franchise. It all started with a soft reboot of Resident Evil 7 and continued with the release of RE2 and RE3 remakes. The company tried to develop its success in Resident Evil: Village, choosing a completely obvious solution - to collect all the best and most successful from previous games in the series, diluting it with new mechanics and more modern functionality.

Completed the game on PC. Special thanks to the Russian publisher "SoftKlab" for the key.

You can buy the game from Steam , PS Store and Microsoft Store .

Resident Evil Village is a direct sequel to the seventh installment. The game will continue the story of Ethan Winters, who will find himself in a new place - a fictional Romanian village. On the one hand, the developers have retained the first-person perspective that has successfully taken root in Resident Evil 7. On the other hand, Village feels like a remix of Resident Evil 4 and gameplay taken from RE2 or Code Veronica. Village is much bigger and fancier than its predecessor , huh?? while the game does not turn into a full-fledged action movie, as it was in the fifth and sixth parts. The foundations of survival horror were laid in RE7, and in the eighth part, Capcom successfully develops them.

More about the plot

Fate again played a cruel joke with Ethan Winters. Let's remember the events of RE7 (by the way, you can watch a video dedicated to them in the game): trying to save his wife, our hero finds himself in the swampy area of Louisiana, where the distraught Baker family presses him with all his might. Village is somewhat similar to its predecessor: the measured life of Ethan and Mia, who are raising their daughter Rosa, is destroyed in a matter of moments when Chris Redfield bursts into the house and, without explaining any reasons, sticks a dozen remotes into Mia's body and head, and then kidnaps Rosa. Ethan passes out. After several visions, he comes to his senses, determined to find out what happened and be sure to save his daughter.

Ethan has matured a little: his version from the Village resembles a cross between the clueless Ethan from the seventh part and professionals in their field like Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine.

Our hero will quickly find a gun and a knife. And this is very handy, because, like in RE4, hordes of monsters literally immediately begin to pursue you in the Village. And if in the fourth part they were zombified villagers, then here the locals turned into werewolves - much morevisible and living beings.

The connection to Resident Evil 4 doesn't end there. In the fourth part, Leon Kennedy opposed the Los Illuminados cult, led by the madman Saddler, who was assisted by Ramon Salazar. The couple took refuge in an old estate resembling a castle. And you had to fight your way through the location to save the president's daughter.

In the eighth part, the village is the hub of the game, connecting the five regions that are covered by the cult of Mother Miranda. The environments of four of the five regions reflect the local lord under Miranda:

• Overgrown Countess Dimitrescu guarding a Victorian castle
• Hunched freak, once-scientist Salvatore Moro hides in a reservoir plunged into mold
• Dollmaker Donna Beneviento lives in a house of the same name filled with dolls and illusions.
• Mutated engineer Karl Heisenberg uses his factory to create cyborg zombies

Lords give color to their regions, as did members of the Baker family from RE7. Each region is unique in its own way. The factory transmits gothicThe cue is industrial in style and teeming with enhanced monsters, similar to the monsters of The Evil Within, while the Beneviento house is a real horror without a hint of action.

However, at some points there is a sense of disproportion as three regions are much shorter than the other two. In fact, one of the regions is a monster horde fight followed by a boss fight. And unlike Far Cry 4, where you could eliminate the crazy Joseph family in any order (yes, I remember that in different regions there were different levels of enemies), RE8 forces you to go through everything in a strictly specified order. Therefore, short segments are striking, which are overshadowed by more meaty content. Despite this, the lords make the locations of the Village unique, and the whole game - the most diverse, which could not be said about RE7.

About gameplay

The gameplay of the Village is almost identical to Resident Evil 7. As you explore the game world, you get a set of standard weapons that will allow you to protect yourself from formidable monsters. Each region has different puzzles that boil down to finding keys and opening doors. Sometimes found keys allow you to unlock doors in previously completed locations, thanks to which the game encourages you to return and explore the previous one.ie areas.

The game map is your main tool, which will display unlocked or blocked doors (in blue and red colors, respectively), save locations, corridors, rooms, and halls that have been fully or not fully explored. Special icons will also appear, indicating doors or objects to which you need to apply a certain item. For example, locked lockers will be marked with a “master key”. There are rare cases when you simply will not understand where to go next. When you receive a new plot item, you either know in advance where to apply it, or open the map and look for the corresponding mark.

Survival mechanics are built into Resident Evil Village. In certain places, Ethan can move shelving and other items, locking doors behind him. You can still create medicines and ammo using gunpowder, herbs, reagents, but a new cooking mechanic is added in the Duke's kitchen. Each dish (of the six available) will allow you to permanently increase certain parameters of Ethan. The latter system appears in the later stages of the game, so it seems kind of belated. On normal difficulty, it did not affect the passage of the game in any way, but, perhaps, on higher difficulty levels, these improvements are indispensable. But the fact remains: even in Monster Hunter Rise from the same Capcom, such improvements were most in demanddata and up-to-date.

Buying and selling items or upgrading weapons is done through the shop of the Duke - a fellow merchant from RE4. The duke will buy back treasures, including crystal fragments and crystal gizmos dropped from monsters, and in exchange give the local currency - lei. You can then use lei to purchase upgrades for the available weapons.

Unfortunately, weapon upgrades are expensive, and upgrades don't carry over to weapons of the same type. For example, for the entire game, you can get two pistols, a submachine gun, and as many as three shotguns! But each of these unique items will have its own upgrade bar. You can sell improved weapons to the Duke, but the money you get for them is only a small part of the funds spent on upgrading. This makes it less likely that you will want to upgrade the weapon every time, since you won't know when a new one will appear. As for me, a good and well-thought-out weapon upgrade system should never call into question the need for another upgrade!

Resident Evil Village is still a game where you have to value the resources available. You will constantly create new ammunition, look for materials for them, and so on. And the game simply will not allow you to relax and "score"but this process. Whenever it seems to you that you have collected enough ammo, a crowd of werewolves or risen dead will suddenly fly out from around the corner. And now you are again forced to wander around the village with 2-3 rounds in a shotgun and a couple of clips for a pistol ...

Summarizing

If you liked the seventh part, Village is a sequel that should not be missed in any case. Capcom has cleverly combined a soft reboot of the series with the iconic Resident Evil 4, which is considered one of the best games in the franchise. The result is a survival horror game with the biggest visual and narrative shifts in the history of the series. Some aspects of survival could be tightened up a little, to think over the proportionality of locations, but all these shortcomings simply fade against the general background of the game.