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Resident Evil review

Game: Resident Evil
Platform: GameCube
Genre: Action Adventure (Survival Horror)
Developer: Capcom
AKA: BioHazard (JP)

Staff review by Lewis Denby

January 21, 2009

The problem with creating a Resident Evil remake is that you're remaking Resident Evil.

Let's remove those pink specs and be absolutely honest here: it hasn't aged well. One of the survival horror genre's grandfathers it may be, but its moronic dialogue, obtuse controls and stupid, stupid camera don't exactly hold their own by modern standards. Taking the original game's premise and pouring it into a new mould, reconstructing it into something exciting and relevant, could well have proved mightily successful. Piecing it back together, practically scene-by-scene, in a new engine? That's not quite what I had in mind.

Developers are moving away from traditional survival horror for a reason: it's rubbish. It was supposed to be a tentative genre, a transitional period: game design experiments in bringing a cinematic horror atmosphere to a fast-growing interactive medium. It was exciting because it was novel. Now, it isn't, and it doesn't work.

Why? Well, the entire group of games was based around the transparently inaccurate notion that cinema and videogame creation function in a comparable manner. They don't. In film, you can pull the camera in awkward directions, unnerving the viewer in a moment of visual confusion. It's an old trick, but it's an industry standard because it achieves its aims. Film is passive, and exclusively audiovisual. But games add another hugely important element: control. If you can't control your avatar in any worthwhile manner, a vast portion of the game has failed. It doesn't matter if it's because the camera's doing something a bit scary. It doesn't matter if it's because the analogue stick decides to randomly invert, in that truly hateful survival-horror fashion. It still doesn't work. It's tantamount to expecting the star of your film to perform blindfolded, while the producer shouts arbitrary directions at her.

The other problem with trying to mimic cinema is that videogames invariably have inferior writing teams. There are noteworthy exceptions, and I'll love them until the very end of time, but to make a sweeping generalisation: mainstream videogame scripts are awful. And Resident Evil's is among the worst of the horrible bunch.

It's basically unchanged from the original. Whether it's lost something in its translation from Japanese, I don’t know, but it sounds like it's been written by infants, with little to no understanding of how conversation actually functions. What normal human being, for example, finds it necessary to kneel down, wipe his finger in a crimson puddle, then sniff it, before feeling it safe to declare that "it's blood"? Or, in the heat of panic, stuck in an underground laboratory complex and surrounded by horrifying former-humans, has the composure to calmly say "I'll stay here and guard our escape route, in case something bad happens"? It's nonsense. Complete nonsense that wouldn't pass in any other narrative medium, and it won't do. Not one bit.

Hats off to Capcom for re-recording the inexcusably bad voice work. Hats very firmly back on for their recurrent inability to make it sound in any way convincing. In fact, if anything, the vocals of this 'improved' Resident Evil manage to detract from the experience. At least the acting in the original was so hilariously inept that it provided for some decent laugh-out-loud moments of ridiculousness. Here, it's just crap. It sounds suspiciously like a group of bored artists reading directly from their scripts on their lunch breaks, probably in different rooms or even different cities to their fellow actors. The Inexplicable Failure Award goes inexorably to Resident Evil for managing to make the line "a second later, and you'd have been a Jill sandwich" sound even worse than before, delivered as it is with the sort of mock-sincerity that makes me want to spend the next ten minutes vomiting blood.

Sigh. Calm. Evaluate.

It looks nice. It bloody should do, as well, because it's still pre-rendered, with 3D figures dancing eerily over the top of a static background. And if you can muster up the ability to forget about the unapproachably awful gameplay mechanics, and let yourself become absorbed by the somewhat revamped story, there's a bit of narrative indulgence to be found there. It's still B-movie silliness, but I suppose that's what the franchise has always been going for. Nay, the genre.

Which is stupid in itself, when you think about it. In 1999, System Shock 2 showed the world that it's possible to craft an unspeakably brilliant and always-chilling tale, complete with horrifying characters and a relentlessly anxious and unfriendly atmosphere. It also proved that survival horror in its truest sense - a focus on the conservation of resources in a harrowing, otherworldly situation - doesn't have to be restricted by godawful movement and an errant camera, and certainly that tension doesn't have to be ramped up by not being able to see where you're going. Why, when we have a wonderful benchmark like that, are we still lapping up rubbish like this?

Resident Evil is proof of a dying genre. Put it out of its misery, and bury it beneath the cold, wet soil.

Or die trying because you can't look in the right direction.

More Reviews by Lewis Denby
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	To the Moon (PC) Its retro graphics look beautiful. The original soundtrack is utterly stunning. Its story is one of the most confident and grown-up that our medium has ever see...
	Unreal (PC) As a first-person shooter, it’s incredibly competent. Quake 2 might have had the tempo, and Half-Life the suspenseful pacing, but Unreal ha...

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