I'm going to cut to the chase; the game is pretty "meh" to good.
I hate with all my life that they give you so little ammo for so many fucking enemies.
Like, I understand the joke is to dodge the zombies, but it's horrible because there are times when you get 3 in the same room and not only do they have an absurd amount of HP (almost a whole loader per zombie), but on top of that they can respawn stronger if you don't burn them or if you don't kill them. Sure, I don't mind, but add to that the fact that you can only burn a small amount of them, plus the fact that you need to take up two inventory slots to do so and that they have charges on top of that.

RE1 is literally CBT for inventory management, because in the hypothetical case that you have the inventory full of non-consumable items, you're screwed because you can't throw anything away. I was trying to collect all the items in the first playthrough, and it was a pain to have to backtrack for 7 minutes just because I had to empty the inventory, because not only you have to have the key items/healing in the inv, but also the weapons and ammo, and when you get 4 key items in a single puzzle, so you bring another 4 because you didn't know when you were going to use them + weapon and ammo just in case, and the other character has even less slots and it's like wtf why would you do that?

I understand that it's part of the "fun" of the game, but maybe I would appreciate it more if there were more melee weapons, because the little knife is a pain in the ass.
not only it doesn't do any damage, but you have to be really close to a zombie to hit it, almost as if you were doing a parry and to make it worse, zombies attack faster than your reaction speed and turn 360 to hit you, so backstabs are not a viable strategy either.

In the end you are forced to use a crappy weapon because otherwise you have no slots, but it doesn't make much difference because firearms are worse than the knife, but safer so it becomes a chain of dodging enemies and cheesing everything that can be cheesed.

Also, all this while passing through 90 thousand giant corridors (but narrow, obviously) with 80 million locked doors so good luck knowing which key opens which door. To make it even worse, I was using a mod to "fix" some bug in the game, but in reality what that shitty mod did was to give me a chance of crashing the game every time I enter a room or load a save file, and as saves are limited, I lost hours of progress because of that shit. Fun stuff

The next time I play resident evil I'm going to use a guide, because I don't feel like constantly shooting myself in the first playthrough.
Something in favor I can give tho, is that the puzzles are more fun than silent hill, but it's absurd that I have gone from 15 hours of playtime to pass it in 2 hours and 20 minutes in the following playtroughs I did to get the achievements

edit: I originally wrote this review a years back, and I now recognize I was mainly frustrated at how unforgiving it is. The rest of the games are better and don't really need a guide, but in short; re1 is a harsh game.

At first I got really frustrated because I didn't understand how I was dying, and I said "ugh, I'm just going to play for a little while and that's it" and I played one after another after another after another after another and when I realized it, an hour and a half had already passed. The adrenaline rush this game gives you is like no other, enemies can hurt you the moment you see them on screen, so it's not a reflex thing, it's more about being prepared. It is a highly stressful experience but without being frustrating. Really recommended, it's a constant dry orgasm until you finish the game.

Wonderful.