We played about 5 hours at Resident Evil 3 Remake, the Capcom title that will arrive on April 3 on PC, PS4 and Xbox One and we bring you our impressions.
Koch Media invites us to play Resident Evil 3 Remake for 5 hours, the Capcom title that will bring Jill Valentine, Nemésis and the other classic characters back to the current generation. In the game time we had available we could enjoy about 2 hours of the main campaign and an extensive session at Resident Evil Resistance, the multiplayer / cooperative mode that brings the Remake as a novelty. Then we tell you everything in detail to discover all the news that the title will bring in relation to the original Resident Evil 3.
A remake up to expectations
Resident Evil 2 Remake was one of the best rated titles of the past 2019. He managed to capture the essence of the original and transport it to the current generation with a very careful graphic engine (RE Engine), well-polished mechanics and enough novelties to surprise even veteran players of the saga. After our game session, we can affirm that all these keys seem to apply also in Resident Evil 3 Remake.
The story is the same as in the original 1999 title: we belong to the police special forces, S.T.A.R.S, and we must investigate the T virus (developed by Umbrella Corporation) and the extent of the evil it has caused in Raccoon City. Specifically, our game starts half an hour after the game starts. Jill Valentine is alone in the streets of the city and has the mission of restoring the energy of the station, as long as she and the rest of the survivors (Carlos Oliveira, Mikhail Victor and others) can escape the many dangers that await in the city full of Zombies infected by Virus T and other nightmare beings.
Even so, it will not be as easy as finding the electric station, pressing a button and riding the train. Due to the chaotic state of the city, the streets are full of burning cars, obstacles, dead bodies … and others not so dead. Therefore, we must sweep the area that we have available to explore in order to find such necessary items as ammunition (and gunpowder to crack our own bullets) and healing herbs (green, red and blue) in addition to essential tools such as the pick ( no lock resists us) and pliers (to open doors closed by chains).
Getting these tools adds a backtracking point to the game, which will force us to be alert at all times to the stage to remember those closed doors that we can open once we have the right tool. Of course, it will be necessary to assess whether it is worth going back and passing through all those Zombies that already cost us to dodge on our way to the current point. We already anticipate that it is always worth it, since in those rooms, lockers and closed boxes is where the optional weapons (such as the shotgun or the grenade launcher) are usually, the weapons thrown as grenades, the improvements for these weapons, the increases in the capacity of our inventory and other items of interest.
Gameplay loaded with frenetism and action
Having so many buildings to explore enlarges the scenarios and their possibilities but reduces tension to the action. Unlike in Resident Evil 2 Remake, where we feel a sense of tension and greater claustrophobia for presenting fewer but more complete scenarios, in RE3 everything is more focused on action. This idea is reinforced by the fact that the occasion will be rare when we run out of ammunition.
The boxes that we find in the safe rooms, and in which we can leave our equipment stored, share their content among them. Therefore, if we leave a key item in a box at the other end of the map it will not be necessary to go back there, but we can look for another box in a place closer to our position. At the moment we do not know if this is something that changes depending on the level of difficulty. Our game session was set at the “Normal” level, so we could only test the title under this parameter.
As for the enemies, we find several among which are the normal Zombies, spiders that can poison us with “parasites” (and we must hurry to take a red grass to reverse the effect in time), some special Zombies of which no We can talk in detail, the Hunter Gamma (resistant and with the ability to kill us in a bite, in the area of the sewers) and of course the Nemesis itself.
New look of the fearsome Hunter Gamma
His role in Resident Evil 3 closely resembles that of Mr. X (Tyrant) in the previous installment. Unlike the original, where the functions of the mutated biological weapon were punctual and in certain scenes, in the remake we will find it much more often. Nemesis can appear almost at any time to scare us and make things difficult for us. In addition, it has the ability to move quickly, jump in front of us and attack us with a tentacle-whip. Due to its hard mutated skin, conventional weapons do not usually work to kill it, so it is advisable to flee and dodge it.
Another novelty of the remake is Jill's ability to avoid enemies through a very useful rapid movement in those moments when the number of enemies surpasses us and it is best to follow a safe strategy to take refuge in a nearby building. Thanks to this, we were able to live one of the most frantic and key moments of our game session. Because despite having various weapons and a lot of ammunition, against Nemesis there is little to do and the best thing is to dodge it as best we can and escape.
When we could face it at ease against him it is in the final scene of the demo, at which time Jill must fight 1 vs 1 against Nemesis on the roof of a building. Our adversary carries a flamethrower that he will not hesitate to use to try to singe us. What Valentine carries depends entirely on our previous search skills through the scenarios. If we have struggled to explore, in the sewers we can find the grenade launcher (with explosive, flaming, acid and even mine munitions). It is an optional but very useful weapon against the great enemy, which we can defeat with perseverance, effective elusions and many shots in key areas that we can discover thanks to our ingenuity.
Resident Evil Resistance: a multiplayer mode in which Mastermind takes advantage
Once we finished playing the demo of the main story we put ourselves at the helm of Resistance, the asymmetric multiplayer mode of Resident Evil 3. To begin, we choose one of the various available maps and take the role of one of the 4 survivors. Each of them has some special and particular skills that will be important to combine in order to overcome the three phases of the game and beat the Mastermind (we already advance that it is very difficult to achieve). For example, Valerie has an area healing ability that can help regain her own health and that of her peers, while January can hack the cameras through which the Mastermind executes its traps.
When the game begins we have a chest in which to buy extra weapons, grenades, healing herbs and others, but it is best not to spend too much time in that room, since the timer does not stop and we will be giving away every extra minute to Mastermind to prepare his traps. As we have indicated, each item consists of three phases. In the first one we must find three key objects to place on a wall and open a door to advance to the next area. Its location changes in each game, so we will have to walk through the different rooms and coordinate with the rest of the partners to discover where those keys are.
In the second phase we have to find the enemy that carries the access card and, once we finish it, use it in three terminals to open the next door. Finally, the third phase (and more complicated) proposes to destroy a series of generators. The difficulty comes when we can see its location but we do not know which one is active until we get there, so it will be time to coordinate and carry shotguns or powerful weapons to destroy them before the number of Mastermind traps is unsurpassed and the time It finishes.
As you can imagine, if we control this Master Mind and go against the survivors we have some advantage. We move through the surveillance cameras and have an “energy” that is recharged and we can use it to place explosive, poisonous traps, zombies of various types (walkers, dogs, reinforced, etc.), protective barriers ( to avoid hacking cameras) and more.
At the moment we could see up to four Masterminds in action and each of them has a different type of special attack and a “secret weapon”. That of one of them, for example, is Mr. X himself, whom we can control directly in order to go for first-person survivors. This is a very interesting addition, which makes the Resistance mode a perfect opportunity to go to the side of the bad guys and be able to enter the minds of some of the most hated (or beloved, in their own way) villains of the Resident Evil saga.
Definitely…
Resident Evil 3 Remake aims high to become one of the best titles of this 2020. It is early to affirm it, but after our game session it has become clear to us that since Capcom they are keeping the bar high, as they have accustomed us For a while now. The remake of the numbered third part of the most famous Zombies saga of video games promises to maintain the essence of the original but add an even greater dose of action and frenetism, something that we can affirm by remembering the multiple scenes in which Nemesis appears on the screen .
As for Resistance, it is an interesting addition that replaces the Mercenary mode of the original. It could be considered a mix between slasher genre titles (like Friday the 13th) and Five Nights at Freddy’s (for the key element of the Mastermind cameras), for example. Even so, we must wait for the final launch to see if they add any extra function or reward for playing that avoids the feeling of repetition that we can have after playing several games and exploring all the possibilities of Resistance.
From April 3 we will leave doubts, at which time the game will become available for PC, PS4 and Xbox One. Once again, Jill Valentine needs our help to get out alive from Raccoon City and get to beat Nemesis, a creature seemingly unstoppable that will make things difficult for us in Resident Evil 3 Remake.
