Resident evil 7 not that amazing!

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Today I'm going to be looking in depth at Resident Evil 7, a game which I played through and completed albeit not in VR -- which I'll remind you is currently exclusive to PS4, but that's okay because if you own a VR headset you're probably either a game reviewer or a Youtube celebrity.

Reviews have generally been very positive, but being a professional reviewer is now anything but a sign of intelligence and being awarded the title of professional game critic should carry the same stigma as the Mark of Cain.

Let's start this from the beginning.

Our protagonist, Ethan Mars, journeys to a guest house on the Baker estate in the Bayou at the behest of his sort-of annoying, sort-of charming, possibly dead girlfriend, Mia. Predictably, after finding video evidence of murder and swimming past a corpse, Ethan is captured by the Baker family.

Alright, so you shuffle your way through the Baker estate in a linear pattern. There is very little substantial backtracking; you simply move through a series of hallways and rooms, either shooting monsters or avoiding them, respectively.

Each of the three main buildings in the Baker estate feels to be the same size as one floor of one wing of the Spencer Mansion. I have no problem with the short length of the game (6.5 hours on my first play), but its design took no advantage of the possibilities of using one large interconnected environment. Instead, they resort to a lazy trick, designing areas in short loops, allowing you the occasional option of travelling to your destination through either a hallway or a room.

Each of these buildings contains one exit to the courtyard, and one of them links to a smaller building. The level design is objectively less complex than the original Resident Evil and gives you very few options and only one possible objective at any time. Oh, and enemy spawns are refreshed every ten minutes or so anyway, when a story event happens. Ammo is plentiful; in my first playthrough I didn't run out or feel particularly strained at any point.

You know what? This isn't the spiritual successor to the classic Resident Evil formula that reviewers are making it out to be; in fact, it jettisons the survival aspect and plays more like Resident Evil 4 without the depth or variation of that game. Let's take the comparison further: this is a rubbish knockoff of Resident Evil: Revelations, itself a low-rate derivative of the Resident Evil 4 formula. These two games have the same director: Koshi Nakanishi, whose only other billing as director was for... Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D? I don't know. But, well, the monsters in Revelations are almost the same as those in Resident Evil 7, except they were white goop rather than black goop.

One particular point that drives the comparison to the Resident Evil 4 formula is the enemy reactions to being shot. Headshots generally cause enemies to stagger, and limb shots can dismember enemies. In Resident Evil 4, this would perhaps work. Unfortunately, in a game short on fights against multiple enemies, environmental props or even the most basic of environmental variation, things that RE4 was heavy on, it's too simple to stand as an action game.

Oh, and I can't finish this section without pointing out something that I can't BELIEVE is in the game. Not only can normal enemies not pass through doors, but they will actually despawn if you simply back out of the room and close the door, often permanently. Half of the time they even despawn the moment you're on the other side of the doorframe! This is bad enough on normal difficulty, but in madhouse mode, this is the optimal tactic for dealing with monsters. I'd like to reiterate that I am NOT JOKING. Even if they don't always despawn permanently, monsters will take long enough to goop into existence that you can easily pass them and close a door behind yourself before they have a chance to attack.

So what is this? If it's not a survival game or an action game, then it's surely a horror game. That's an awfully nebulous descriptor though, isn't it? Horror isn't a genre of game, it's a style of presentation. I didn't find this game scary, especially when compared to the masterful Alien Isolation - a game which outclasses this drivel with panache - but the horror qualities of the game are more subjective than the mechanics. I can't deny that this game, as an overall experience, would be more meaningful if played in VR, but that's neither here nor there.

Why am I making this my first review? In short, mainstream critical reviews of this thing have been misleading. Reviewers, caught up either in hype or favours, gush over the game while failing to describe the actual mechanics in any detail. They froth with adjectives while describing superficial trappings, over and over and over, the vagueness feeding the hype and expectations of the gullible consumer. Regardless of their individual intentions, these are representatives of the industry, not serious critics.