Story and Characters
-The story for the game is quite simple, a group of special forces police officers are essentially trapped in a mansion and must figure out what is going on and why there are monsters and zombies everywhere. The game is older and the story is fairly minimal and cliched at this point. There are no dramatic story moments really and the story will rarely ever surprise you.
-The characters are all very basic and the voice acting isn’t great. None of the characters are developed in any meaningful ways and the characters often make choices that don’t make a lot of sense. For example, at one point a character tries to betray you and pulls a gun on you. You stop him and then fight a monster together and after that, you are totally fine with one another.
-The villain reveal is very obvious and also kind of pointless. Their motivations are not interesting at all and it isn’t really clear what their end goal is.
-Overall, pretty weak story and characters, but the game is from 1996, so I don’t think someone can judge it as harshly as they could if it was a game released in 2023.
Gameplay
-The gameplay is mainly oriented around exploration, solving puzzles and fighting monsters, with some boss fights in there as well. The puzzles can be fun sometimes although there are certain puzzles that feel overly complicated and unclear how you are supposed to solve them. Also, the inventory in the game is atrocious as you only get 8 slots including quest items. This means you are constantly backtracking to your stash so you can get whatever item you may need for a puzzle. But because the puzzles can sometimes be rather vague, you are having to carry a lot of puzzle items just in case you find one that works. This makes the game very frustrating and annoying at times.
-The combat is very basic and just consists of aiming and shooting, but because of the controls and camera angles, you cannot hit any head shots really and it can be very hard to avoid getting hit, especially by enemies like the dogs.
-There are loading screens every time you open a door which is very annoying and gets old quickly. It would make sense for the major areas, but they are there for every single door that you go through. This makes back tracking even more annoying.
-The boss fights are super basic and often very easy and forgettable. There isn’t any sort of dodge mechanic so you just have to run around and hope you don’t get hit while you try to shoot the enemies.
-The game only saves when you manually save at a typewriter station and use an ink ribbon. This would be more okay if it wasn’t for the fact that you die at random times because the game will occasionally throw enemies at you that you are not expecting. For example, there are areas where 2 or 3 dogs will rush to attack you and there is no way to really avoid being hit by them unless you have a shotgun and can hit them fast enough. This usually leads to you dying and then you lose a bunch of progress and have to do it all over again.
Side Content
-The game is quite linear so there is not any side content really. There are bits of lore you can find in the world, but there is no real side content. This is not a negative though because the game is more linear and is not open world, so it really doesn’t need any side content.
World/Level Design
-This is actually a strength of the game as the mansion with weird experiments going on underground and the surrounding forest make for a good location for a resident evil game. It is a cool, creepy atmosphere that is fun to explore even if the game is quite dated at this point.
Graphics, Music and Glitches
-The game is obviously quite old as the remake was released in 2002, but the game still looks decent. The faces and animations are obviously very dated, but the environments and different rooms in the mansion all look quite good.
-The music was good and helped build on the creepy atmosphere.
-I did not encounter any glitches really when I was playing which is always good.
Main Positives of the Game
-The mansion is a cool setting and the game has a creepy atmosphere that really works.
-It is cool to see how the gameplay would go on to be continued into even the modern Resident Evil games. Finding keys, solving puzzles, fighting enemies and running away from monsters are all key aspects of the series that started with this very first title.
Main Negatives of the Game
-The different camera angles in the game make walking around and fighting far more frustrating as you often will not go where you want to.
-The game has terrible inventory management that forces you to constantly be going back to your stash for different items. This would be fine if they made it so the quest items didn’t actually take up slots, just the health items, weapons and ammo, but this is not the case.
-The story, characters and voice acting are all pretty weak. It is an older game so it is hard to judge too harshly, but the game definitely struggles in those departments.
-You lose a lot of progress to deaths unless you are frequently saving which is annoying to do and you only get limited saves.
-Some of the puzzles are annoying and the solutions to solve them are not clear enough. This is even more annoying because again, you don’t have the inventory space to carry anywhere close to all of your items.
Overall Score: 5/10
-The story for the game is quite simple, a group of special forces police officers are essentially trapped in a mansion and must figure out what is going on and why there are monsters and zombies everywhere. The game is older and the story is fairly minimal and cliched at this point. There are no dramatic story moments really and the story will rarely ever surprise you.
-The characters are all very basic and the voice acting isn’t great. None of the characters are developed in any meaningful ways and the characters often make choices that don’t make a lot of sense. For example, at one point a character tries to betray you and pulls a gun on you. You stop him and then fight a monster together and after that, you are totally fine with one another.
-The villain reveal is very obvious and also kind of pointless. Their motivations are not interesting at all and it isn’t really clear what their end goal is.
-Overall, pretty weak story and characters, but the game is from 1996, so I don’t think someone can judge it as harshly as they could if it was a game released in 2023.
Gameplay
-The gameplay is mainly oriented around exploration, solving puzzles and fighting monsters, with some boss fights in there as well. The puzzles can be fun sometimes although there are certain puzzles that feel overly complicated and unclear how you are supposed to solve them. Also, the inventory in the game is atrocious as you only get 8 slots including quest items. This means you are constantly backtracking to your stash so you can get whatever item you may need for a puzzle. But because the puzzles can sometimes be rather vague, you are having to carry a lot of puzzle items just in case you find one that works. This makes the game very frustrating and annoying at times.
-The combat is very basic and just consists of aiming and shooting, but because of the controls and camera angles, you cannot hit any head shots really and it can be very hard to avoid getting hit, especially by enemies like the dogs.
-There are loading screens every time you open a door which is very annoying and gets old quickly. It would make sense for the major areas, but they are there for every single door that you go through. This makes back tracking even more annoying.
-The boss fights are super basic and often very easy and forgettable. There isn’t any sort of dodge mechanic so you just have to run around and hope you don’t get hit while you try to shoot the enemies.
-The game only saves when you manually save at a typewriter station and use an ink ribbon. This would be more okay if it wasn’t for the fact that you die at random times because the game will occasionally throw enemies at you that you are not expecting. For example, there are areas where 2 or 3 dogs will rush to attack you and there is no way to really avoid being hit by them unless you have a shotgun and can hit them fast enough. This usually leads to you dying and then you lose a bunch of progress and have to do it all over again.
Side Content
-The game is quite linear so there is not any side content really. There are bits of lore you can find in the world, but there is no real side content. This is not a negative though because the game is more linear and is not open world, so it really doesn’t need any side content.
World/Level Design
-This is actually a strength of the game as the mansion with weird experiments going on underground and the surrounding forest make for a good location for a resident evil game. It is a cool, creepy atmosphere that is fun to explore even if the game is quite dated at this point.
Graphics, Music and Glitches
-The game is obviously quite old as the remake was released in 2002, but the game still looks decent. The faces and animations are obviously very dated, but the environments and different rooms in the mansion all look quite good.
-The music was good and helped build on the creepy atmosphere.
-I did not encounter any glitches really when I was playing which is always good.
Main Positives of the Game
-The mansion is a cool setting and the game has a creepy atmosphere that really works.
-It is cool to see how the gameplay would go on to be continued into even the modern Resident Evil games. Finding keys, solving puzzles, fighting enemies and running away from monsters are all key aspects of the series that started with this very first title.
Main Negatives of the Game
-The different camera angles in the game make walking around and fighting far more frustrating as you often will not go where you want to.
-The game has terrible inventory management that forces you to constantly be going back to your stash for different items. This would be fine if they made it so the quest items didn’t actually take up slots, just the health items, weapons and ammo, but this is not the case.
-The story, characters and voice acting are all pretty weak. It is an older game so it is hard to judge too harshly, but the game definitely struggles in those departments.
-You lose a lot of progress to deaths unless you are frequently saving which is annoying to do and you only get limited saves.
-Some of the puzzles are annoying and the solutions to solve them are not clear enough. This is even more annoying because again, you don’t have the inventory space to carry anywhere close to all of your items.
Overall Score: 5/10