Resident Evil HD Review - Reviving Survival Horror

Resident Evil is a gaming juggernaut – one of the few gaming properties to make it into Hollywood and stay there for more than a single movie, a franchise that has instilled fear and horror in thousands of gamers. It probably peaked at Resident Evil 4, still one of the best games of the last three console generations, although later installments suffered a noticeable drop in quality. Now Capcom is trying to go back to its roots, which includes remaking the beloved Resident Evil remake for Gamecube to be displayed in HD, at 60FPS with brand new textures and a new control scheme. But are these improvements worth buying again for? Eh, I’m undecided.

To start with, Resident Evil HD’s new textures look fantastic – which is most noticeable on the game’s doors. As a product of its time, Resident Evil still uses door opening animations to mask loading screens, which means that you’ll be seeing many doors before the end of the game and these are now so detailed  that the grain of the wood is truly noticeable. In other areas, new textures clearly make the entire game look “nicer”, but the fixed camera angles mean you rarely see them up close. Yes, everything is crisper, better looking than ever before, it is just a shame that this is most obvious when staring at a door. Regardless, updated lighting and textures do give the Spencer Mansion a more realistic feel than ever before which I cannot praise enough.

Fixed camera angles clash with another new addition, the revised control scheme. The new control scheme makes so much sense in the modern gaming scene, as all you do is move the control stick in a direction and your character begins walking in that direction. It’s so simple but it is a huge change to Resident Evil, especially when all players have ever had to work with previously are the series’ infamous “tank controls”. Moving with the new control scheme is intuitive but contrasts with the fixed camera angles. This worked well back on PS1 and Gamecube, when static backgrounds were the order of the day, but now with full 3D backgrounds the camera angle seems absurd and hampers the new control scheme.

 

Visualise this: You’re running down a corridor, holding the stick forward when suddenly the camera angle changes. Instead of the target being ahead of you it is now to the left of the camera. If you never let go of the stick and continued holding forward you would continue moving in the correct direction, but let go of the stick after the camera angle changes for a single moment and suddenly the direction you must push yourself in has changed. Now you must press left on the control stick to continue moving towards your goal. It’s such a small issue with the new control scheme but after hours of play can become a tad frustrating.

Gameplay goes entirely unchanged, aside from the addition of an easier difficulty mode. Puzzles still have a tendency to be obtuse and ultimately the game is more about exploring and understanding the layout of the mansion than it is fighting off a zombie hoard. Changes that were made to the Gamecube remake are intact – zombies still infinitely revive themselves unless doused in petrol and set alight. If you’ve ever played Resident Evil before then you’ll feel right at home instantly running to find maps, ammo, Ink Ribbons and keys.

For those not versed with Resident Evil though, you should know now that the game is old-school. If you pick up a note of some kind to read then you should read it – it’ll likely tell you the solution to some absurdly specific puzzle.

 

One infamous part of the game requires you to find a key, which is resting in plain sight but requires a fake to take its place, the fake being hidden in the collar of a dog, which can only be summoned by standing on a specific balcony and using a dog whistle you find on the other side of the mansion. This specific chain of events is mostly explained to you, but only if you’re paying attention to the notes found around the mansion. In many recent games, readable pieces of exposition do nothing but expand lore and storylines, but in Resident Evil they’re entirely necessary to find out what to do next – there’s no map objective icons here, only your own ingenuity. That’s old-school.

Characters and cutscenes haven’t been changed much in Resident Evil HD Remaster, with the dialogue being identical to the Gamecube release; even the introductory CGI cutscene is exactly the same, just blurred to hide the ancient resolution used in the GC release. Having said that, it’s interesting to note that the CGI still looks serviceable even more than a decade later.