Hello everybody, and welcome to my Random Game Reviews blog, where I'll make a review for whatever game I happen to be playing.
Now then, where to start? How about at the start of the game? Seems logical. After selecting New Game you can pick one of two stories: Chris Redfield's story (which is basically hard-mode and the story I'd personally recommend for those that are playing RE for the first time),
and Jill Valentine's story (of which is much easier than Chris' story).
Depending on which story you picked you'll either have a helping hand (Jill), or you won't (Chris), but this review will mostly be following Chris' story because it's less of a hassle. After doing a few things, you're left with a knife, a pistol, and a few clips for said pistol. And that's it. Your goal is to find your missing team-mates and escape from this hell-hole. The game drops you into a hostile environment and you have to use your wits and whatever you can find to escape. I really like this. It sets the mood for horror, alone with not much in the way of artillery. Now, time to talk about the elements of this game.
Starting off with something small, the graphics are pretty good with pre-rendered backgrounds. The voice acting is... well it's pretty laughable, it's so bad that I poke fun at it whenever I notice something that's way off. The soundtrack is very good, it keeps you on your toes, making you tense no matter what room you're in. The controls will probably take a little getting used to, as they didn't have analog sticks back then.
The camera is static in this game, there's no way to control it. This can be horrifying when you don't know what's around the next corner.
The gameplay keeps itself interesting by giving you new environments with new puzzles and new enemies. Though, I have a problem with how they presented one of the enemies. The Hunters. You get an FMV with the view of one of these Hunters and it is shown that it can open doors when, in fact, it cannot do so in-game. I understand that they wanted to make the player even more tense by showing this, but the fact remains that they can't open doors, which means they're lying to the player to make them more scared. This is really the only problem I have with the enemies though.
If you haven't heard already, ammo in this game is scarce. But they give you just enough to survive, providing you don't waste too much of it. This is also another tactic to make you tenser, you don't want to waste too much ammo because you don't know what's out there.
Another way they made the game scarier is by the storytelling from a certain file. The file on Plant 42. Just before you go down to the basement of the dormitory, they give you this file, and from the words in this file, you begin to imagine what horrors await you in the basement a horror trope known to be bad. I think this is genius, giving the player enough information to make them afraid of an area that could have nothing scary at all.
All in all there's only one thing that bothers me in this game: The inconsistencies between Chris and Jill's stories. In Chris' story, you encounter Rebecca, the only surviving member of the S.T.A.R.S. Bravo team. In Jill's story, you have Barry from the S.T.A.R.S. Alpha team. If you get the best ending in either story you see your companion, Rebecca or Barry, in the helicopter with Chris and Jill. Yet, you don't see them both. This makes me confused, which one is cannon? Not only that, but Chris and Jill pick up the same pistol, shotgun and revolver. How does that happen? They seem like two separate stories that occur at different times in the mansion, but in reality, they're nearly the same, only a few things are different. They even fight the exact same bosses. They just copied one story, added a few differences to it and called it a new story.
Besides that though, this is a really great game. A classic even. I definitely recommend this game to anyone who loves horror!
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