SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
A fun concept but poorly executed, with numerous balancing issues, technical faults and frustrating design choices.
Having played it for several hours, the best thing I can say about Resident Evil Project Resistance is that it – technically – works. Make of that what you will. Where the remake of Resident Evil 2 had extra characters and extra runs, the remake of Resident Evil 3 has this as a wholly inadequate substitute. I’m genuinely perplexed how an idea that sounds pretty fun on paper has been transformed via poor design into the largely forgettable hot mess now vaguely attached to RE3’s punchy single-player campaign. I was hoping that by playing it more, it’d become easier to pinpoint exactly where things went wrong. Now I’ve done just that, I don’t even know where to begin.
Resistance is an asymmetrical 4v1 multiplayer game, similar to other well-known titles like Dead by Daylight and Left 4 Dead. Four survivors are tasked with escaping a level made up of three distinct stages by completing puzzles, while the game’s Mastermind attempts to stop them in their tracks by placing traps and deploying zombies and other monstrous bioweapons in their way. At this stage, it actually sounds like the makings of a fairly solid local multiplayer game: something to put on the TV when everyone’s gotten bored of playing Smash Bros.
But poor execution proves fatal. The awful balancing means that the scales are tipped in favour of the Mastermind, who has a practically endless array of tools at their disposal to mess with the Survivors. This ranges from spawning in zombies and other bioweapons to locking doors and switching off lights and even deploying a player-controllable Tyrant, in case you feel the urge to put a real spanner in the works. In one game, our entire party of Survivors was brutally killed in the first stage after the Mastermind deployed a horde of tough zombies in a single room and waited for us to spring the trap. By design, the game relies on the Survivors using good coordination and teamwork to outsmart the Mastermind: an indication that there’s a lack of understanding as to how random groups of strangers on the Internet usually play online games.
Playing as the Mastermind is only marginally more fun however. They can only see the level through security cameras placed strategically throughout, but the controls for these feel heavy and sluggish. The interface used to deploy all your nasty little tricks is part of this camera view, so it’s also fairly clunky and hard to operate. All this assumes that you’ve waited half an hour for the matchmaking to find four people willing to be your test subjects. The game has a practice mode of sorts, though it seems self-defeating since the AI-controlled Survivor bots don’t actually attempt to group up or escape. It’d only be effective if people online just stayed put and waited patiently for something to off them.
It’d be easier if the Survivors had well-defined roles to play, and to Capcom’s credit, each character does have a specific role to play. The ex-boxing star Samuel serves as a damage-dealing brawler, while the hacker January can hack cameras to blind the Mastermind for example. They also have Fever Skills: essentially an ultimate ability that can be deployed periodically. But as you might have guessed by now, playing as a Survivor is like picking the short straw. Aside from players with a tendency to just go in guns blazing while ignoring both their role and their skills, the game’s poor balancing makes itself obvious once again. Teams without someone playing as the support character Valerie are at a special disadvantage, since the responsibility for healing characters, buffing characters, buffing explosives, and marking all nearby items, objects and enemies largely falls to her. The game’s maps take on the claustrophobic feel of the single-player campaign’s levels, but with three other people and extra creatures, it’s downright crowded. The simple act of bashing down a door in a narrow corridor creates unnecessary chaos and plenty of awkward clipping.
It’s not even particularly easy to like the Survivors. Without exception, they feel like distillations of generic horror movie tropes with backstories that you probably don’t care much about. As each character and Mastermind has their own individual progression system, you might think that Resistance encourages you to pick mains. But the system itself soon becomes a pain, considering the fastest way to level up is to play Quick Matches online where other players might just pick the characters you like the most. It’s a small roster, with not much room to manoeuvre. Much like its characters, Resistance itself is devoid of personality, drawing on iconic series villains and monsters but ultimately failing to give them any real sense of presence. Whacking a zombie with a melee weapon has as much impact as a particularly vicious pillow fight. Whether that’s due to the ever-present lag or shoddy game design is unclear, though I suspect it’s probably some combination of both.
Over the course of these matches, you gradually earn RP, the game’s currency which you then use to buy loot crates that contain upgrades for your characters. It does feel a tad aggressive and it’s a reminder that this all might just be a quick way to get extra profits. But perhaps the lack of uproar highlights what I’ve suspected since this game was announced: it’s just that no one is that invested in playing this game, and rightly so.
I actually like the concept behind Resistance, but games don’t win many points from us just for sounding good on paper. This is a good idea done poorly, plain and simple. At the very least, it comes “free” with RE3, so fans interested in the single player can treat it as an optional distraction. However, it’s worth keeping in mind that until Resistance gets patched and reworked, it’s only a momentary diversion at best.
Our review for Resident Evil 3 is available here
Komentar