This game is a difficult ask for $30, if you are subscribed to a PS Plus Extra feel free to try it out. It starts out amazing, but later mechanics can be very frustrating and too trial-and-error. The game is lacking a lot of QoL features, and the soundtrack is super hit or miss too.

Mechanics
The big advertised aspects that made me try the game, leading infinite streams of people through fun puzzle platforming challenges in real-time, get sidelined in later chapters, and I didn't find a lot of the new stuff as enjoyable. There's far less platforming, which was my favorite aspect of the game.

The game starts out with puzzles, but later on, it often turns into trial-and-error when combat starts to be involved. Sometimes, enemy movements even happen during the middle of the stage, and there's not enough warning when it happens. Other times, it feels like RNG whether or not you win a combat, and some missions are extremely unforgiving, making you fail the level or lose access to Goldies if you lose even one human.

In many levels, time is stopped while you place commands, then you start time and see if it works out. These stages become more tedious than hard when enemies are involved. Instead of discovering the solution to a tricky puzzle, you're retrying over and over, adjusting your commands tile by tile until you find the exact setting that either avoids or defeats the enemy, and then reaches the exit.

In some time stop stages, you can position some humans before starting time. However, these starting positions of humans are not saved, so you have to re-do them each time you retry.

Goldies
Goldies start out as bonus humans that you have to safely guide to the exit without letting them fall. This mechanic starts out super fun, and you're often sending something so valuable flying through the sky and hoping they make it. Some of them are very challenging to collect and bring to the exit, especially in real-time, and it was great fun in early chapters.

But later on, Goldies become required to unlock the exit to complete many stages, defeating the purpose. It's not bonus anymore. Some required story stages only have 1 Goldy, and you must get it to clear the stage.

Some later stages have extremely trivial Goldies, directly on your path or right next to it. I've even found one that was placed a couple tiles in front of the exit. It was just... free.

Other Problems
You can see how the enemy humans will move. They have arrows and stuff just like the ones you place, but in black. However, you cannot see these arrows unless time is moving. You need to start time, and then you must enter free camera mode. Otherwise, you can't see the enemy arrows. I went through the entire game not realizing that this information was available because of this issue.

During time stop stages, the start button is a physical location you have to run to. When you retry, you get teleported back to the starting position and then have to walk back to where your error was, fix your error... and then walk back to the start button. This should've been streamlined somehow.

Soundtrack is very hit or miss, and the music selector is bugged; when you retry a stage, the music resets back to default.

Some combat or physics RNG can cause you to randomly win or fail a stage without changing anything. If a Goldy enters an intersection between two streams of humans, it might get diverted into the other path. It might not. It's random which way it goes, and I've had to restart stages until I get the desired outcome.

HUMANITY is not a bad game, but it's just very rough around the edges.

Boring open world. Some mediocre Dark Souls level design.

2024:
Better than the first time around. Still, all the trappings of a kind of pointless open world, where fast travel gets in the way of actual explorarion + repeated elements all over. More the sort of game you play if life is stressing you out too much and you just want to be a dot on the screen that moves around while the game says: "+1 coolness stat" every once in a while.
Hoarah Loux is cool.

Don’t like it quite as much as the original but still a fantastic remake. Gameplay manages to feel just like classic RE despite all the changes, which is pretty impressive. This is mostly due to resource and enemy balancing which is spot on. Was a bit worried about the removal of ink ribbons on standard difficulty but this didn’t seem to make much of a difference in terms of tension or strategic gameplay.

Storytelling gets an upgrade in a lot of ways which makes this feel less like a schlocky b movie and more like a James Cameron film. I still enjoyed the story and appreciated the game going for a different tone but I imagine this might be a turn off to some.

Overall enjoyed it a lot and think it’s really cool capcom was able to largely replicate the gameplay experience of the original despite changing so much.

Actually enjoyed this way more than I thought I would having been aware of this games less than stellar reputation going in.

People sometimes refer to the original RE3 as an awkward cross between classic RE gameplay and action RE gameplay, which I definitely disagree with. RE3 (1999) despite having slightly more abundant resources than previous games along with the dodge mechanic always felt like OG Resident Evil and created the same tension and need for strategizing that the other classic games did. The same can’t be said for RE3R and the awkward in-between descriptor does fit it pretty well IMO. Combat mechanics and the scale of encounters are very similar to RE2R but now with very linear levels and significantly more action oriented resource balancing - you will be truly flush with ammo and healing items for your whole playthrough on standard. It seems truly impossible to run out even if you decide to fight every enemy the game throws at you. This is a far cry from classic RE games and even from RE2R, which has at times very strict resource balancing (I actually fully ran out of resources and had to reload because of the jail segment on my second scenario playthrough as Leon - something that’s come close to happening but has never actually happened to me in any other RE title.) All of these design choices make RE3R feel more like the post-game 4th Survivor mode in RE2R (a linear enemy gauntlet) than a modern take on classic RE gameplay.

That said I did enjoy my time with this game - it just definitely wasn’t what I (and apparently most fans) wanted from an RE3 remake. Some of the positives - this game like RE2R fleshes out the story with lots more character dialogue and adopts a similar James Cameron-esque action movie tone. This all works pretty well. I enjoyed Jill and Carlos’s relationship and the way they were characterized. Was also just glad to see Jill Valentine get more characterization and dialogue than in the original game since she’s probably my favorite RE protagonist. Side note this is for the dumbest reason ever: her outfit in the REmake with its beret and goofy shoulder pads was so charming to me that she instantly became my favorite RE protagonist. Very glad they put that outfit in this game and I switched over to it as soon as possible. On a somewhat related note I’m glad they changed Jill’s default outfit in this game to something less ridiculous. It fits the more serious tone of the game well, and the original one always struck me as a kind of annoying attempt at giving gamers that good ol’ low poly PS1 T&A, which I always find distracting and condescending to the audience when it doesn’t fit the tone of the game - which I didn’t think it did in the original.

I was a little disappointed by the lack of any post-game bonus modes, which is a staple of the Resident Evil series and something I always appreciate. The only game I can think of that doesn’t have any sort of bonus mode is the RE (2002). Most versions of the 1996 original didn’t have any bonus modes although the sega saturn release did have a post-game battle mode. The original RE3 was actually the origin of the beloved mercenaries mode, so it was disappointing to not see anything like that here. There technically is the bundled in online game Resident Evil Resistance, but I don’t really consider this to be the same thing as a bonus mode since it’s a totally separate piece of software from the main game. The devs apparently included this in lieu of bonus modes due to RE3R having less content than most RE games (take that justification with a grain of salt given the presence of micro-transactions in Resistance), but I definitely would have preferred a mercenaries or survivors mode instead.

Well anyway: I enjoyed this game far more than I expected. Was a short and fun romp that’s held up by the excellent combat mechanics of RE2R but now utilized in an action setting which is overall successful. I of course wish the devs had gone the pure survival horror route with this game, but what we got isn’t half bad.

This game is an absolute mess but an incredibly charming, glorious mess in all its self-indulgence, bombast, and wild over-ambition. I pretty much always love media that meets these criteria even if that makes it by definition a failure - favorites of mine for those curious are the films Mother and Under the Silverlake (dying to see the original 3 hour cut that got booed at Cannes).

This is a game with a lot of really great ideas and one of the most stylish and creative combat systems I’ve ever seen in a shooter but it’s also a game that’s incredibly frustrating and dull at times - especially as the game weakly stumbles across the finish line with Ada’s campaign. There are so many bullshit and incongruous design choices in this game that it almost seems like it’s trying annoy and confuse the player. The constant QTEs, the linear cover shooting arenas that are totally at odds with the games combat mechanics, the AI partners that can seemingly defeat bosses all by themselves, and that fucking hidden ladder in Leon’s story. All of it makes playing this game a frustrating slog about 50% of the time.

As for the story: RE6 has the most ambitious story in any Resident Evil game and goes full on Fast and Furious in terms of absolutely outrageous action set pieces, indestructible main characters, and unabashed sentimentality. I will fight anyone who compares this to Michael Bay due to the fact that his films are deeply misanthropic, which is the opposite of what this game is. RE6 is relentlessly life affirming and brazenly, at times embarrassingly sentimental. Resident Evil stories have always been dumb fun and I can’t think of a better, more heartening tone for the biggest and dumbest Resident Evil story to take. It’s one of the main reasons I find this game so charming despite being more often than not frustrated and bored while playing.

This is a legitimately mediocre, at times bad game but one where I find its problems so charming and lovable that I’m honestly glad it’s such a mess. Every time I got dragged into another tedious and pace breaking QTE where a character survives multiple unsurvivable injuries in quick succession I felt annoyed but I also had a big dumb smile on my face. I have a great deal of affection for this game but also definitely never want to play it again.

Mixed feelings and wasted potential is really the name of the game for these mainline releases post RE4 for me. Has episodic structure like Revelations 1 but does this in a way that doesn’t break the flow of the story with constant and unexpected character switching. The two different narratives and playable characters actually make the story more engaging, which I don’t want to explain further lest I spoil the game.

Gameplay is some of the most fluid feeling of any of the 3rd person action RE games. Game can be surprisingly challenging at times both due to enemy balancing and lack of resources, which is certainly welcome. Controls and movement are good enough that you always feel capable of tackling these challenges.

Joint narratives are also nice with Barry’s characterization as a gruff but loving father being a standout despite being a bit cliched. Claire Redfield felt underutilized from a character perspective and also didn’t feel like she had even close to the same personality as she does in the other games.

Biggest problem with this game is that it seems to severely lack any identity. This makes it hard for me to have any affection for this game despite thinking that it’s pretty solid experience. It borrows heavily from The Last of Us with the abandoned and overgrown soviet factory town you’re exploring, the stealth mechanics, the crafting mechanics, and Barry’s storyline where he has to take care of a surrogate daughter figure. Revelations makes a pretty decent game out of these borrowed ideas but one that doesn’t feel particularly memorable or impressive despite being a quality experience. Definitely easy to like but hard to love. I can imagine almost any Resident Evil game - even 6 and Rev 1 - being someone’s favorite in the series since they all bring something unique to the table. Most people dislike RE6 but it’s indisputably a very unique game with a lot of personality and ambition behind it. For anything that distinctive there’s always going to be people who love it. I have a very hard time imagining anyone loving this game.