More Revelations?

Despite considering myself to be a fan of the Resident Evil series as a whole, I can recognise that they often tend to take two steps forward and one step back in new iterations. One example that comes to mind is Resident Evil Zero where they finally allowed you to exchange items when your inventory was full but removed the impossibly linked storage containers and still left you with a tiny inventory, forcing you to traipse around the game just as much to try and remember where you left important items. By comparison Resident Evil 4's sprint forward while barely looking back should perhaps have obviously been difficult to replicate.

So I approached Resident Evil: Revelations with some caution, given that I haven't actually played RE5 yet as the description of a useless AI partner who would eat all your ammo and get killed repeatedly put me off. So I was happy to find that they had reworked this setup in Revelations, with your AI partner having unlimited ammo and being generally invincible (although it did start to get comical watching Parker getting molested by ooze zombies for minutes at a time). I didn't really have anything to complain about for quite a while, the way the game was set out seemed to have been really well tailored for a hand held release, with each episode being of a reasonable length for a quick session (often before bed, perhaps not the best way to get to sleep). If you did end up getting killed in a section that would usually be a good indicator to me that I should give it a rest for that day, rather than being a particularly frustrating experience. This had the added bonus of allowing me to get through most missions without suffering any recorded deaths - good tip for any S-Rank hunters out there.

3D wise I found that the game worked pretty well and after a little time to adjust I played most of it on the very strong setting with the 3D slider also at maximum. When there were few other distractions this seemed to really draw you into the game and perhaps even helped you to overlook some of the less detailed areas of the graphics. I still had problems with images bleeding between both eyes but that is more of an issue with the 3DS than how the game is implemented. Almost any 3D system has trouble with areas of high contrast and in a horror game this is likely to occur a lot when you have mostly dark areas highlighted by a single light source. I did eventually find that I could improve the bleeding by changing my vertical viewing angle as well as the horizontal but it's still difficult to always remain in the perfect viewing zone.

Sadly I did find a dumb 3D problem that is entirely the fault of the game, which was the fact that the sniper scope was still shown in 3D. I'd previously read people talking about the 3DS version of Metal Gear Solid 3 and while people initially thought that the game went into 2D mode because Snake wears an eye patch, they eventually realised that it was only 2D when looking through a sniper scope and was 3D when looking through binoculars. While this may seem like an over the top bit of detail, Revelations sadly shows that a 2D sniper scope is absolutely essential as you can't focus on the scope target which is close to you and your distant target at the same time. Through some experimentation I discovered that looking through only your left or right eye would make the crosshair appear to be to the left or right of where the bullet would actually hit. In the end if I did want to use the sniper rifle over any amount of distance I had to knock the 3D slider off while I took the shot and then remember to put it back up afterwards, which is what I believe the game should have done for you automatically. I don't know if it is possible to patch 3DS games but I would really like to see it fixed if I want to play it more in future.

Though I initially thought that the difficulty level of the game was pitched perfectly, I did eventually come across a very frustrating boss section. Without spoiling anything it involves chasing an enemy that can move through air ducts, which takes a huge amount of damage to put down. I was stuck here for a long time and while the start of this chase usually wasn't too difficult I would repeatedly struggle near the end and had no option to save when I'd done the first part particularly well. I might have found it difficult to keep playing if there wasn't the distraction of playing a couple of Raid mode missions beforehand to try and get into the right frame of mind to try it again. With hindsight it's not a particularly long section but at the time I was screaming out for a save point, even wondering whether I didn't actually have enough ammunition to complete it and if the game's auto-save system had screwed me without an earlier backup save. This section probably had my most recorded deaths as when I finally managed it, it still felt like a fluke and I wasn't prepared to restart it to try and do it perfectly.

My overriding complaint after finishing the whole game is that the pacing of it really went off the rails. It felt like about half way though it starts the traditional end-game sequence and then tries to continue this pace for the rest of the game. What was initially exciting just started to feel like "Oh God, is this ever going to end?". By comparison Resident Evil 4 is a much longer game but managed to feel fresh all the way through by making permanent moves to new locations and balancing the peaks and troughs of the action. Revelations just had too many sections that were "Run! No time to kill enemies or explore!" and having this approach before you'd even found the last keycard made it seem like all those locked areas near the start of the game were pointless as you weren't going to get the freedom to go and unlock them. This felt like a conflict with the fact that this seemed to be partially following the general pattern of the older Resident Evil games, but in those you would almost have free reign of the map before you entered the final 'secret lab' area.

This relentless pace then takes a nosedive at the end, with the most boring final boss I've seen in a long time. You spend what feels like 10 minutes chipping away at its health and avoiding predictable attack patterns, before it goes mental and uses almost unavoidable attacks that are bound to kill you on your first attempt. I eventually scraped through this section by sheer firepower and careful herb usage, I still don't really know how to knock him out of his last attack pattern quick enough. While this section may have wrapped up some story issues, I think the battle before this would have made for a more satisfying conclusion in an all out action kind of way.

As for the story, I was a little disappointed in it but unlike Assassin's Creed it does at least have some kind of revelations to it, even if they are mostly about this self contained story. I guess it just didn't especially seem like it fills in any really important gaps between RE4 and 5 but I cannot say for sure until I play 5. From what I understand, the events that directly lead to RE5 are already covered in the Lost in Nightmares DLC so I guess I will have to bite the bullet and pick up the gold edition, even if I only play it on the easiest difficulty setting or something. I feel like I have maybe had enough of the series cheesy B-movie dialogue too, which is funny considering that used to be part of its appeal. I guess it's always been the same but it's just starting to feel like fear and tension punctuated with lame one liners is a bit of a strange mix...