Daymare is the ultimate Resident Evil tribute to date, but it's hard to overlook a number of issues.
The Good:
Plays a great game of Resident Evil, hitting all the right notes - Fun combat - Mostly creative puzzles - Valiant attempts at innovating ammo management - Good audiovisual presentation
The Bad:
Baffling safe room placement causes inventory woes - Magazine management is a pain - Limited enemy roster - A short list of irritating bugs - Awful characters and terrible, invasive story - Super zombies can be irritating - Excessive reliance on easter eggs isn't funny and overstays its welcome
-------------------
Ever since 2017's Resident Evil 7 has reinvigorated the franchise after the flop of 6, fans of the series have been spoiled and pampered with modern remakes for both Resident Evil 2 and 3, along with a well-received 8th entry and a remake of fan-favorite 4 in the works. In a climate such a this, a tribute game like Daymare 1998 feels somewhat redundant, as it would find far more fertile ground with the target audience without the aforementioned bounty of an offering. The differece lies in the history behind it: starting its life as a fan remake called Resident Evil 2 Reborn, it was praised but later shut down by Capcom, who in the meantime had begun work on their own official remake. As suggested by Capcom themselves, the small Italian team repurposed the game into their own original IP, with mixed results due more to inexperience with game design than lack of technical proficiency.
The game surely does look and sound the part: while character facial animations are quite poor, everything else looks very authentic. The city and zombies look suitably ravaged, and the lighting is excellent thanks to Unreal Engine 4 and flashlight casting dynamic shadows. It also runs very smoothly, without any kind of slowdown or other issues. While moving around you will hear flames burning away in the distance, electrical cables zapping in puddles, light fixtures flickering in and out, along with the growls and moans announcing the presence of the undead, which will keep you on your toes. You will often get scared by your own footsteps when turning in place, so much is the reliance on good sound design. The game even uses sound to locate secret areas, which is an added bonus as it keeps the player listening closely.
From a gameplay standpoint, Daymare plays exactly like a budget version of Resident Evil 3 Remake: it is in fact definitely more arcadey than the remake of 2, lacking the need for careful consideration as to which zombies to kill and which to avoid or cripple, allowing the player enough resources to easily dispatch every enemy in the game, at least on the normal setting (there are two more after that). The action is indubitably fun, at least playing on a mouse and keyboard, which allows for very precise aiming. Not so much turning, as the sensitivity for rotating in place is low even on the hightest setting, requiring a couple swipes of the mouse to perform the action. Luckily there is a quickturn button in case of necessity. The weapons all feel punchy and the zombies respond properly to being damaged, staggering and falling over as one would expect.
The game sees you play as three different characters, though one is only used in the introductory chapter, while the others get two each. The player finds different weapons depending on which character is being controlled, which highlights the first of many odd design decisions by the developers: the game features four weapons, consisting of pistol, shotgun, magnum handgun and MP5 submachinegun. While the two main characters get the former three, the MP5 is limited to the introductory character, and it's never seen again after his departure from the game. It would have perhaps been better to give that weapon to the player and present the choice of which ones to carry, like in the vast majority of games of this kind, but here it isn't so. Daymare reserves three dedicated inventory slots for pistol, shotgun and magnum respectively, meaning they will always be available and won't take up any inventory space, making their use much more readily accessible than having to retrieve them from a storage box in case of need. The tradeoff is knowing you will never find a fourth weapon, which is mildly disappointing.
Ammo management is one of the most original aspects of the game: while other games such as SWAT4, Insurgency, Ground Branch and the still upcoming Ready or Not feature separate physical magazines in place of simply magically refilling the gun like in most games, Daymare requires the player to manually fill a number of spare magazines in the inventory, by combining them with reserve ammunition boxes. These magazines can then be swapped between, even toggled between to choose which one to insert, in case of having filled one with a different ammo type. The interesting part is that the player can choose to hold down the reload button to perform a full reload, placing the spent magazine back in the inventory, or a short press, which will drop the currently inserted magazine and its contents on the ground and quickly insert a new one; in that case the dropped one will have to be manually collected later or will end up lost when leaving the area at the end of a chapter.
This is a creative feature that makes ample nods to realism and aids immersion and is definitely an initiative worthy of praise and which would benefit many games, especially in the military genre. Unfortunately it is ruined by a variety of design problems big and small, which make it a complete chore. For one, handgun magazines are a rare commodity and only contain ten rounds, bringing the total ammo stock of a fully loaded pistol to 11. That's fairly low, and tends to run out really quickly during intense combat encounters. This means that after each shooting segment the player will have to stop, very slowly open the inventory with its unnecessary animations, scroll to the ammo box, select it, scroll down to "combine", then go to the empty or half-empty magazine and confirm to top it up with ammunition, then repeat that for each one that needs it. Reloading the weapon directly is even more annoying, as it requires switching to another tab to do so, which isn't super responsive and requires a certain insistence.
If that weren't enough, this is the only method to reload a weapon if you don't have a spare magazine for it, which makes using the magnum a complete pain, since magazines for it are rarer than hen's teeth and very easily missable. Add to it that the menu does not pause the game (which is tense, but means you can't conceivably refill your magazines in the heat of combat) and that each magazine takes up a whole space in your very limited inventory, and you'll see how this system can become very aggravating very quickly. Fortunately, in a tacit admission, the game allows for a modern gameplay mode which removes the feature entirely. This can be selected when starting a new game and is recommended, since the magazine management is simply not fun at all.
Inventory woes are further compounded by the absolutely absurd placement of safe rooms. These are often hidden (you'll need to listen for a beeping sound and then press action on an unmarked, unprompted bit of wall) and once found are recognizable by the trademark placid tune, but often don't serve their intended purpose. You'll frequently find a secret wall and expect to head in and find the computer terminal needed to store and retrieve your items, but it simply won't be there. Sometimes these hidden rooms only contain some dispensable items and not what you really need, which is the storage container. As a result you will often find yourself in need of discarding items (not a tragedy since some of them are quite useless) that you'd rather store, and with the magazines taking up a large chunk of your inventory, this will happen more frequently than you'd like.
Enemy variety is also fairly lacking: you have your standard zombies, which come in many visual flavors depending on the location but are all functionally identical, barring for the super zombies, lifted straight from Resident Evil 2 Remake. These are completely indistinguishable from normal ones, but have four to five times the health pools, which means they will often tank a full magazine of standard ammunition and shamble towards you for a snack. These are particularly aggravating since they tend to be spawned in close quarters, typically as downside for going for a tantalizing ammo pickup. The only other non-boss enemy types aside from these are two special zombies: one which is very quick and very resistant to damage, and another which is slow but has a ranged attack in the form of an acid spit, and can tank an absurd amount of damage, making it advisable to avoid them when possible. There are no dogs, no licker or hunter equivalent, no birds, no spiders and no Nemesis-like stalker enemy: it's a bit barebones in that regard.
Even the bosses lack variety: this is a 10-12 hour game and it only contains two boss fights (three if we're being generous) and they recycle the enemy model without any variation, which betrays a certain lack of resources. Speaking of bosses, one of them has a second phase that is incredibly frustrating. Not only it's a chase sequence that instakills you if caught and requires to dodge the boss in close quarters at least twice, but it also entails not one but three quicktime events which, if you're a mouse and keyboard player, will have to be done following WASD prompts on screen, which is anything but intuitive. These were pretty much the only deaths in my run and they were absolutely aggravating, though the rest of the bosses are quite easy.
It wouldn't be a Resident Evil game without its share of puzzles, and Daymare definitely delivers, at the very least in quantity, if not always in quality. They range from sinple things like guessing the name of a greek god from a description or turning a few valves, or the obligatory pipemania section, to more complex ones like memorizing morse code or balancing the content of coolant vats, which requires a bit of maths. One puzzled bugged out for me, requiring a a load from a previous checkpoint to fix: in essence the solution was correct but the subsequent cutscene simply refused to play. Even after reloading it was still not working correctly at first, though your mileage may vary greatly on this. Ultimately puzzles are nothing special or original, but they are more than fit for purpose.
By far the weakest aspect of Daymare though are the story and characters. Without spoiling anything, it's practically impossible to care about any of these people. Not only two out of three playable characters work for the bad guys, which is established right away in a fairly creative use of a control tutorial, but the third character's motive is nothing but brutish lust for revenge, which is hard to relate to considering what he needs to go though in search for it, which would make anyone reconsider. This guy is, simply put, a complete idiot and everything from his stubborn honey badger-like fixation on vengeance to his dialogue reflects it. It doesn't help that both voice acting and writing are amateurish at the very best, with only one or two actors even attempting any kind of emotional delivery of the stilted, often poorly translated lines that the script is comprised of. To play devil's advocate, it can be argued that the hammy delivery is intentional in order to preserve the original feel of the PS1 classics, but Capcom had the right idea in not going down that road with its remakes, and so should have Daymare, even assuming it was deliberate in the first place, with lines such as "The Sacred Heart Hospital... he's going there... and then he'll be there..." casting serious doubts in that regard.
There is also so much to read in this game, and you won't care about any of it. Chances are that after the third 5 page document you will start simply glossing over them just to see if they contain a locker combination, and then ignore them. To add insult to injury, about half of the files are "encrypted", which simply means you will have to tab out of the game or get your phone, log on to a website and enter the code of the document to be able to read it. Not only this is an extra step just to access more boring copy about lore you likely don't care about, but odds are that website will go offline some years down the line, rendering much of the game's text entries inaccessible. It's another original yet bizarre decision that we'd all have been better off without.
Lastly, a word needs to be spent on the easter eggs. Nothing is more entertaining than a well-place humorous hidden reference, but Daymare clearly didn't know when enough is enough. You won't go ten steps without tripping into some (generally unfunny) reference, like a Die Hard parody poster titled "Die Soft", or "Dependence Week" instead of Independence Day, or yet again Full-Life 3, which you can easily guess what it is. There are dozens of these and it's just too much and very little of it lands as humor, which will make you wish the developer had shown a bit of restraint.
Criticism aside, Daymare 1998 is still a fine game because it nails the most important thing: the gameplay. You can forgive a lot to a game that's lacking in many areas, if only the gameplay is done correctly, and Daymare delivers where it counts. It isn't likely to disappoint and it even features replay value via hidden collectibles, higher difficulty settings and a mercenaries-style extra mode with multiple stages. Resident Evil fans have absolutely no reason not to give this game a go: it's made by fans for fans, and despite some problems it will please its intended audience.
The Good:
Plays a great game of Resident Evil, hitting all the right notes - Fun combat - Mostly creative puzzles - Valiant attempts at innovating ammo management - Good audiovisual presentation
The Bad:
Baffling safe room placement causes inventory woes - Magazine management is a pain - Limited enemy roster - A short list of irritating bugs - Awful characters and terrible, invasive story - Super zombies can be irritating - Excessive reliance on easter eggs isn't funny and overstays its welcome
-------------------
Ever since 2017's Resident Evil 7 has reinvigorated the franchise after the flop of 6, fans of the series have been spoiled and pampered with modern remakes for both Resident Evil 2 and 3, along with a well-received 8th entry and a remake of fan-favorite 4 in the works. In a climate such a this, a tribute game like Daymare 1998 feels somewhat redundant, as it would find far more fertile ground with the target audience without the aforementioned bounty of an offering. The differece lies in the history behind it: starting its life as a fan remake called Resident Evil 2 Reborn, it was praised but later shut down by Capcom, who in the meantime had begun work on their own official remake. As suggested by Capcom themselves, the small Italian team repurposed the game into their own original IP, with mixed results due more to inexperience with game design than lack of technical proficiency.
The game surely does look and sound the part: while character facial animations are quite poor, everything else looks very authentic. The city and zombies look suitably ravaged, and the lighting is excellent thanks to Unreal Engine 4 and flashlight casting dynamic shadows. It also runs very smoothly, without any kind of slowdown or other issues. While moving around you will hear flames burning away in the distance, electrical cables zapping in puddles, light fixtures flickering in and out, along with the growls and moans announcing the presence of the undead, which will keep you on your toes. You will often get scared by your own footsteps when turning in place, so much is the reliance on good sound design. The game even uses sound to locate secret areas, which is an added bonus as it keeps the player listening closely.
From a gameplay standpoint, Daymare plays exactly like a budget version of Resident Evil 3 Remake: it is in fact definitely more arcadey than the remake of 2, lacking the need for careful consideration as to which zombies to kill and which to avoid or cripple, allowing the player enough resources to easily dispatch every enemy in the game, at least on the normal setting (there are two more after that). The action is indubitably fun, at least playing on a mouse and keyboard, which allows for very precise aiming. Not so much turning, as the sensitivity for rotating in place is low even on the hightest setting, requiring a couple swipes of the mouse to perform the action. Luckily there is a quickturn button in case of necessity. The weapons all feel punchy and the zombies respond properly to being damaged, staggering and falling over as one would expect.
The game sees you play as three different characters, though one is only used in the introductory chapter, while the others get two each. The player finds different weapons depending on which character is being controlled, which highlights the first of many odd design decisions by the developers: the game features four weapons, consisting of pistol, shotgun, magnum handgun and MP5 submachinegun. While the two main characters get the former three, the MP5 is limited to the introductory character, and it's never seen again after his departure from the game. It would have perhaps been better to give that weapon to the player and present the choice of which ones to carry, like in the vast majority of games of this kind, but here it isn't so. Daymare reserves three dedicated inventory slots for pistol, shotgun and magnum respectively, meaning they will always be available and won't take up any inventory space, making their use much more readily accessible than having to retrieve them from a storage box in case of need. The tradeoff is knowing you will never find a fourth weapon, which is mildly disappointing.
Ammo management is one of the most original aspects of the game: while other games such as SWAT4, Insurgency, Ground Branch and the still upcoming Ready or Not feature separate physical magazines in place of simply magically refilling the gun like in most games, Daymare requires the player to manually fill a number of spare magazines in the inventory, by combining them with reserve ammunition boxes. These magazines can then be swapped between, even toggled between to choose which one to insert, in case of having filled one with a different ammo type. The interesting part is that the player can choose to hold down the reload button to perform a full reload, placing the spent magazine back in the inventory, or a short press, which will drop the currently inserted magazine and its contents on the ground and quickly insert a new one; in that case the dropped one will have to be manually collected later or will end up lost when leaving the area at the end of a chapter.
This is a creative feature that makes ample nods to realism and aids immersion and is definitely an initiative worthy of praise and which would benefit many games, especially in the military genre. Unfortunately it is ruined by a variety of design problems big and small, which make it a complete chore. For one, handgun magazines are a rare commodity and only contain ten rounds, bringing the total ammo stock of a fully loaded pistol to 11. That's fairly low, and tends to run out really quickly during intense combat encounters. This means that after each shooting segment the player will have to stop, very slowly open the inventory with its unnecessary animations, scroll to the ammo box, select it, scroll down to "combine", then go to the empty or half-empty magazine and confirm to top it up with ammunition, then repeat that for each one that needs it. Reloading the weapon directly is even more annoying, as it requires switching to another tab to do so, which isn't super responsive and requires a certain insistence.
If that weren't enough, this is the only method to reload a weapon if you don't have a spare magazine for it, which makes using the magnum a complete pain, since magazines for it are rarer than hen's teeth and very easily missable. Add to it that the menu does not pause the game (which is tense, but means you can't conceivably refill your magazines in the heat of combat) and that each magazine takes up a whole space in your very limited inventory, and you'll see how this system can become very aggravating very quickly. Fortunately, in a tacit admission, the game allows for a modern gameplay mode which removes the feature entirely. This can be selected when starting a new game and is recommended, since the magazine management is simply not fun at all.
Inventory woes are further compounded by the absolutely absurd placement of safe rooms. These are often hidden (you'll need to listen for a beeping sound and then press action on an unmarked, unprompted bit of wall) and once found are recognizable by the trademark placid tune, but often don't serve their intended purpose. You'll frequently find a secret wall and expect to head in and find the computer terminal needed to store and retrieve your items, but it simply won't be there. Sometimes these hidden rooms only contain some dispensable items and not what you really need, which is the storage container. As a result you will often find yourself in need of discarding items (not a tragedy since some of them are quite useless) that you'd rather store, and with the magazines taking up a large chunk of your inventory, this will happen more frequently than you'd like.
Enemy variety is also fairly lacking: you have your standard zombies, which come in many visual flavors depending on the location but are all functionally identical, barring for the super zombies, lifted straight from Resident Evil 2 Remake. These are completely indistinguishable from normal ones, but have four to five times the health pools, which means they will often tank a full magazine of standard ammunition and shamble towards you for a snack. These are particularly aggravating since they tend to be spawned in close quarters, typically as downside for going for a tantalizing ammo pickup. The only other non-boss enemy types aside from these are two special zombies: one which is very quick and very resistant to damage, and another which is slow but has a ranged attack in the form of an acid spit, and can tank an absurd amount of damage, making it advisable to avoid them when possible. There are no dogs, no licker or hunter equivalent, no birds, no spiders and no Nemesis-like stalker enemy: it's a bit barebones in that regard.
Even the bosses lack variety: this is a 10-12 hour game and it only contains two boss fights (three if we're being generous) and they recycle the enemy model without any variation, which betrays a certain lack of resources. Speaking of bosses, one of them has a second phase that is incredibly frustrating. Not only it's a chase sequence that instakills you if caught and requires to dodge the boss in close quarters at least twice, but it also entails not one but three quicktime events which, if you're a mouse and keyboard player, will have to be done following WASD prompts on screen, which is anything but intuitive. These were pretty much the only deaths in my run and they were absolutely aggravating, though the rest of the bosses are quite easy.
It wouldn't be a Resident Evil game without its share of puzzles, and Daymare definitely delivers, at the very least in quantity, if not always in quality. They range from sinple things like guessing the name of a greek god from a description or turning a few valves, or the obligatory pipemania section, to more complex ones like memorizing morse code or balancing the content of coolant vats, which requires a bit of maths. One puzzled bugged out for me, requiring a a load from a previous checkpoint to fix: in essence the solution was correct but the subsequent cutscene simply refused to play. Even after reloading it was still not working correctly at first, though your mileage may vary greatly on this. Ultimately puzzles are nothing special or original, but they are more than fit for purpose.
By far the weakest aspect of Daymare though are the story and characters. Without spoiling anything, it's practically impossible to care about any of these people. Not only two out of three playable characters work for the bad guys, which is established right away in a fairly creative use of a control tutorial, but the third character's motive is nothing but brutish lust for revenge, which is hard to relate to considering what he needs to go though in search for it, which would make anyone reconsider. This guy is, simply put, a complete idiot and everything from his stubborn honey badger-like fixation on vengeance to his dialogue reflects it. It doesn't help that both voice acting and writing are amateurish at the very best, with only one or two actors even attempting any kind of emotional delivery of the stilted, often poorly translated lines that the script is comprised of. To play devil's advocate, it can be argued that the hammy delivery is intentional in order to preserve the original feel of the PS1 classics, but Capcom had the right idea in not going down that road with its remakes, and so should have Daymare, even assuming it was deliberate in the first place, with lines such as "The Sacred Heart Hospital... he's going there... and then he'll be there..." casting serious doubts in that regard.
There is also so much to read in this game, and you won't care about any of it. Chances are that after the third 5 page document you will start simply glossing over them just to see if they contain a locker combination, and then ignore them. To add insult to injury, about half of the files are "encrypted", which simply means you will have to tab out of the game or get your phone, log on to a website and enter the code of the document to be able to read it. Not only this is an extra step just to access more boring copy about lore you likely don't care about, but odds are that website will go offline some years down the line, rendering much of the game's text entries inaccessible. It's another original yet bizarre decision that we'd all have been better off without.
Lastly, a word needs to be spent on the easter eggs. Nothing is more entertaining than a well-place humorous hidden reference, but Daymare clearly didn't know when enough is enough. You won't go ten steps without tripping into some (generally unfunny) reference, like a Die Hard parody poster titled "Die Soft", or "Dependence Week" instead of Independence Day, or yet again Full-Life 3, which you can easily guess what it is. There are dozens of these and it's just too much and very little of it lands as humor, which will make you wish the developer had shown a bit of restraint.
Criticism aside, Daymare 1998 is still a fine game because it nails the most important thing: the gameplay. You can forgive a lot to a game that's lacking in many areas, if only the gameplay is done correctly, and Daymare delivers where it counts. It isn't likely to disappoint and it even features replay value via hidden collectibles, higher difficulty settings and a mercenaries-style extra mode with multiple stages. Resident Evil fans have absolutely no reason not to give this game a go: it's made by fans for fans, and despite some problems it will please its intended audience.