The newly-released Resident Evil 3 is an underwhelmingly-bland remake that should have stayed dead.
The original game, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, came out on Sept. 22, 1999.
The basic premise of the game is to play the role of Jill Valentine, the main protagonist, who’s trying to escape hellish Raccoon City where a mysterious virus plagues civilians, turning them into mindless zombies.
The first half of the story takes place about 24 hours before the events of Resident Evil 2, while the second half takes place two to three days after the events of RE2.
Capcom released the remake of RE2 in 2019 because fans clamored to have the original games remastered for new generations to be introduced to the franchise.
RE2 was met with overwhelming success and high ratings from game review websites IGN and Polygon. The company behind the Resident Evil franchise, Capcom, went ahead with the RE3 remake.
Unlike its predecessor, RE3 is a straightforward story that has players switch between the main character, police officer Valentine, who works in the fictional police department of Raccoon City, and mercenary Carlos Oliveira who works with the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Service.
Valentine knows who is responsible for the outbreak. With the help of Oliveira, she’s doing everything she can while dealing with an unstoppable monster hellbent on killing not only her, but some of her colleagues in the police department.
RE2 had tons of replay value, and allowed players to play two different characters to see how they perceive events during their campaign, but with RE3, there was none of that.
It was disappointing gameplay-wise as it doesn’t give players much reason to go back and play through again to see what they may have missed the first time around.
Despite its failures, the game succeeds in some aspects.
RE3 uses the same graphical engine that the RE2 remake used which made the game look astonishingly beautiful to look at and play.
Expanding upon the gameplay of RE2, RE3 uses a new mechanic which introduces dodging and parrying a zombie before it grabs you. If you time it correctly with the appropriate button prompt, you can punch and knock the zombie down.
Another aspect that was revitalized in RE3 was the unstoppable force called Nemesis, a biomutant monster that is tasked with hunting down the main character.
With the RE2 remake, Mr. X, a biomutant monster that’s unkillable until the player reaches a scripted point in the story, terrorizes players as they progress.
But with the RE3 remake, players can meet Nemesis as early as the first ten minutes of the game, which gives the player a welcome early glimpse of what they are up against.
As for the storyline, RE3 has major changes to it, such as not having multiple endings like the classic did, while sidelining some minor characters.
It’s a good thing that Capcom decided to ditch those story elements from the classic game in order to focus more on Valentine and Oliveira for the remake. The classic title didn’t really bring anything new to the table regarding gameplay and storyline back in 1999 for players that went from RE2 to RE3: Nemesis.
That said, the gameplay for the original game is much better since there are options such as having multiple endings to the game.
Although the RE3 story is good, it can only do so much to hold the attention of casual gamers or fans of the franchise since the gameplay is lacking as only a few aspects were expanded upon in the sequel.
