Resident Evil 3 Review: Be My Valentine

It’s quiet outside, but it won’t be for long. You’re being pursued by Hunters, lethal human-animal hybrids created as living weapons and there are countless zombies between you and the next objective. What’s more, you’re pretty sure that a hulking, sentient tumour called Nemesis is about to turn the corner right in front of you. Such is the experience of being Jill Valentine, and, indeed, of playing Resident Evil 3.

A bit of a black sheep in the Resident Evil series, the third game got a cooler reception than its predecessors, and has generally been seen as a bit of a backwards step after the claustrophobic terror of Resident Evil 2. Yet this remake? While it doesn’t hit the highest highs of the RE2 remake, it comes close at points. The game follows Jill, a survivor of the mansion incident in the original game, as she proves that sometimes lightning does strike twice. You see at the start of the game, while all may be quiet in her apartment, Raccoon City is already suffering from a full-fledged zombie outbreak. Outside, hordes of zombies are secured off from the rest of the population by chainlink fences, presumably a stunning metaphor for government bidding processes. If you can possibly imagine it, these fences are about to break. Before that happens, though, Nemesis smashes into your apartment like the shittiest Kool-Aid Man around and starts pursuing you through the narrow corridors of your apartment with a massive chunk of masonry. Nemesis is an enemy that will trouble you throughout the game, almost like an...arch-enemy of some kind. Like Mr X in RE2, Nemesis wants you dead, and was quite literally programmed (by Umbrella, a nefarious pharmaceutical company) to kill you and other police officers that know too much about the larger zombie kerfuffle. Nigh-unkillable, Nemesis takes grenades, rockets and bullets like a champ. Over the course of the game, you’ll face him in boss battles several times, one or two that are fantastic and another two that are more frustrating.

There’s an element of the boss rush to Resident Evil 3. The standard zombies that Jill encounters out on the streets of Raccoon City pose almost no threat at all, especially once you’ve mastered the art of dodging, a feature that returns from the original Resident Evil 3. Even those hunters that I mentioned in the introduction, covered in biological armour, and their amphibious chicken wing-looking cousins, the Hunter Gammas, are no real threat. Both go down with one or two rounds from the grenade launcher that you find relatively early. Nemesis, on the other hand, takes work. Outside of the main boss encounters, Nemesis cannot be killed: all you can do is down him for a minute or so while Jill jogs off into the night. Here, we come to the main criticism that I have of RE3. If you played the RE2 remake, you’ll remember the razor-wire tension that came with the galumphing footsteps of Mr X. Hearing him stride around the police station, knowing that every noise you made would grant him more opportunity to find you, was terrifying. In Resident Evil 3, Nemesis is, for the vast majority of the game, absent. While you’re never that far from a boss fight with him, his absence negates a lot of the game’s terror. In a way, that makes sense, RE3 is far less interested in survival horror than its two predecessors, but it often feels like the game is tilting the balance far too much in the player’s favour. I want to be scared, to feel like Nemesis really is, well, a nemesis. I don’t ever truly get that feeling in Resident Evil 3, Nemesis is just a guy, animal or lump of oozing flesh that appears every so often to give the player a meatier challenge. Ammo conservation barely even matters anymore, so keen is the game to shower ammo and weapon upgrades upon you.

The story is schlocky, as you’d probably expect from a Resident Evil game. Jill meets up with a team of Umbrella mercenaries, most of whom didn’t attend their ‘How to Be a Bastard’ program, aside from the secondary antagonist Nikolai. Chief among these is Carlos, the secondary protagonist of Resident Evil 3, who you’ll play as in a couple of sections, who seems to believe he’s far more funny and charming than he actually is. Your first task is to help a train full of civilians escape, things go awry, and you move on to a grander aim, escape Raccoon City with a phial of zombie virus vaccine before the US military nukes the entire city. It’s a fine story. It’s serviceable.

However, sometimes RE3 does get really good. Notably, there’s a section about halfway through the game where you’ll return to the police station from RE2. You’ll learn more about the events immediately prior to Leon’s arrival and even get to face an old foe. Another section that’s genuinely fantastic, albeit a little long, is a section that you’ll play twice, once as Carlos and once as Jill: a dilapidated hospital filled with the dead and the dead that are somewhat impatient for their resurrection. Both of these sections work so well thanks to really tight level design. The hospital apes the police station, with tight corridors, blind corners, and a lot of different rooms to explore, complete with harrowing notes left behind by hospital staff. The more open areas of Resident Evil 3 are actually where the game is at its most dull. Burning cars and a handful of accessible buildings, all of which are pretty small, just aren’t that interesting to navigate through. The meatiest versions of the game's combat, in every sense of the word, come with two of the game’s boss battles against Nemesis. You see, to lend these fights a sense of variety, Nemesis changes massively throughout the game due to his injuries. At first, he’s a humanoid figure, but this is only his first form, and they get a lot more interesting as you progress through the game, even if you do have to fight one of his forms twice.

It’s in these moments that Resident Evil 3 actually offers its players a challenge. For the most part, you can get through the rest of the game without much, if any, real difficulty. You’re so empowered by the end of the first act that you’re pretty much a one-woman army, so much so that switching to Carlos, a mercenary with military-level equipment, is actually a downgrade. Sure, you’ve got plenty of ammunition, with the game clearly intending to use these sections as a way for you to blow off some steam, but this attempt at empowerment just doesn’t work, as you’re lacking Jill’s stronger weapons. The only time that Jill faces an enemy that’s worthy of her is in the boss fights with Nemesis. If there were only one or two boss fights with him, the game would be really, really dull. Perhaps it’s the Dark Souls fan in me, but after mulching tens or hundreds of common or garden zombies like an aggressive groundskeeper, there’s something really nice about actually needing to engage the tactical part of my brain. Nemesis is more than happy to mess you up if you don’t.

Resident Evil 3 bridges the gap between the claustrophobic horror of RE2 and the 1980s action movie stylings of RE4 while carrying off neither of these with the same panache. It isn’t willing to embrace sheer silliness or sheer horror and suffers for it. Carlos, at times, feels like a cardboard cutout version of RE4’s Leon. His mouth isn’t quite as smart, his jokes aren’t as good and he’s generally far less interesting, but you can see what they’re going for. It just never quite lands, something that is a common theme throughout the game in its totality. It never reaches the heights of other games in the series, but you can see that it’s trying, and in a way, it’s quite endearing. After all, shoot for the moon, and even if you miss, you’ll end up in the S.T.A.R.S..

7/10