I have been a fan of the franchise since the PSX days and I liked the last 2 action focused instalments a lot. The slower paced 2 Revelation games were fine too but the overall narrative of the franchise certainly took a dive since the borderline farcical RE 4. Bringing back the series to the pure horror roots wasn't something i necessarily "needed" but getting new writers certainly was. The Fear / Spec Ops guy (the 1st western writer) certainly delivered with 7, even if he stayed fairly close to his roots. Especially with the 3rd act. The game's fairly self-contained story ended up tying way deeper into the canon than I expected too and I like the ominous conclusion. The only problem here is that the DLC and a sequel will have to answer way more questions than anymore expected. The core experience itself is best decided as the Gamecube remake played from a 1st person perspective but the game isn't as scary as advertised. The fights against the main enemies aren't hard, or that frequent, and most regular enemies are borderline pushovers. These "mold people" should have been more varied too, especially due to the higher action focus in the surprise 3rd act. Even the game's somewhat mysterious protagonist (not an avatar btw.) ends up quickly becoming an action hero in the vein of the earlier protagonists, before the days of Matrix-Ballet and QTE rock bashing. The game can be beating in 1 night long sitting too. That's how I did it and the subsequent speed run took me 3 hours. What I am trying to say that this is a RE game though and though but the last 3 shooting focused main entries were all more "fun" to play. I thus don't view this RE 7 a 3rd start for the series. "Pure" horror games as this one and pure action entries should continue side by side instead, to avoid stagnation of both play styles. I lastly appreciated the return of real gore, as the series became way too toothless in that aspect since RE 5, but core gameplay modes shouldn't have been gated behind DLC. 8,5/10
Review of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard
