Resident Evil Village (for PC) Review

 

PROS

1. Beautiful aesthetics and atmosphere
2. An expansive map to explore
3. Good location variety
4. A wild swing in terms of Resident Evil’s overall mythology

CONS

1. Muddy weapon upgrade system
2. Uneven pacing in certain sections
3. Some performance issues in testing

RESIDENT EVIL VILLAGE (FOR PC) SPECS

Product Games Platform	PC
Product Games Genre	Horror
Product Games ESRB Rating	M for Mature

In recent years, Capcom has brought the once-floundering Resident Evil series back to life. The publisher found its cadence with a soft reboot (Resident Evil 7) and two lavish remakes (Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3). Now, Capcom follows those successes with the $59.99 Resident Evil Village, a Best Pc Game Of All that deftly blends the old and new.

Resident Evil Village is a direct Resident Evil 7 follow-up that continues Ethan Winters’s story by dropping him in a new locale, the eponymous village in a fictional Eastern European country. Although Resident Evil 7's first-person camera remains, Capcom mixed older flavors into the pot. Village walks like a remix of Resident Evil 4, with gameplay that hews closer to RE2 or Code Veronica. Village is bigger and weirder than its grounded predecessor, but it doesn’t go into full action hero mode like Resident Evil 5 or 6. The foundation of modern survival horror was already good, and Capcom has successfully built upon it.

Winters Is Coming

Ethan Winters does not have the best of lives. In Resident Evil 7, he entered Louisiana’s swamps to find his presumed-dead wife, Mia, only to survive horrific happenings at the hands of the mutated Baker family. Village picks up some time later, with Ethan and his wife caring for their baby girl, Rose. The domestic bliss is destroyed when a paramilitary team, led by RE mainstay Chris Redfield, breaks into their home, kills Mia, and takes Rose. Ethan awakens from the attack and sets out to find Rose—and discover what’s going on in this hells cape of a hamlet.

In the intervening years, Ethan has leveled up a bit. His character splits that difference between resembling Resident Evil 7’s hapless nobody and the hardened soldiers that Redfield, Jill Valentine, and other RE protagonists have become. Think Die Hard 2’s John McClane, rather than his Die Hard or A Good Day to Die Hard incarnations.