I recommend_ Resident Evil Village (even though I didn't like it very much) [Review] -

 resident evil village okay i'm gonna start by saying that i think this is a good game and i do recommend it especially if you're a resident evil fan definitely but i did not click with this and in many aspects i felt quite let down by it having said that i think a lot of people are going to love this because village harkens back to what many consider to be the peak of the franchise resident evil 4. and make no mistake resident evil village is like resident evil 4 2 structurally tonally gameplay action set pieces item economy inventory management a lot of it is one to one with resident evil 4 and i know that's going to make a lot of people really happy resume 4 was a seminal entry into the resident evil franchise for a variety of reasons but certainly one of those reasons was that it ditched the kind of self-serious true horror tone it became far more about this schlocky ghost train style of horror that was completely over the top and ridiculous and fun it was fun horror where the preceding entries were trying to be like scary horror then we had resident evil 5 and 6 terrible we like to pretend those don't exist and then there were the spin-offs as well but then we get to resident evil 7 which was the first game to be in first person perspective and it brought an entirely new tone to the franchise it wasn't just serious scary horror it was this grotesque personal horror like your wife chopping off your hand horror like you're trapped in an escape room while discount jigsaw gleefully counts down the moment to your incineration horror like being fed maggot soup until you die horror the framing of it the intimacy of it the skin crawling creepiness of it it was just so much darker than anything the series had done before and it felt like a real leap for the franchise i loved that game and i think it's the best resident evil game ever but i know that i'm like the only person that thinks that that is a very minority view a lot of resident evil fans did not like seven they felt like it was too much of a departure and a lot of them still called for a return to what we got in resident evil 4. i think my love of seven really explains why i couldn't gel with village and it also explains why a lot of people will gel with it and they'll just get a huge kick out of it resident evil village is an accomplished theme park style ghost train of horror that will cut you from exhibition to exhibition but never achieves the sort of tonal or thematic congruence that seven had in spades its exploration is more expansive and rewarding its combat deeper and more flexible its set pieces more elaborate its replayability is unquestionably stronger but its weak cast of characters laughable plot lines and disappointing boss encounters took me out of the experience robbing me of the x factor that resident evil games live and die by resident evil village is a good game i just didn't like it very much resident evil village is a direct sequel to the events of resident evil 7. surviving the horrific events of louisiana ethan his wife mia and their daughter rose all settle down into a new life in europe somewhere when suddenly disaster strikes and their child is kidnapped awakening in a mysterious village in what is essentially transylvania ethan has to overcome the lords of the realm to save his daughter while also uncovering the inevitable link back to the umbrella corporation and the t-virus that each game serves up rewriting history further and further back with each new iteration i swear to god one day we're going to discover some wall painting that shows like apes discovered the t virus and that's what triggered our evolution into humans just watch man it's gonna happen the biggest and most successful evolution that village serves up is its semi-open world structure each of the game's four villains has their own fifedom that you'll visit at some point but they're all connected by the village for which the game is named different parts of it open and close you progress through your journey so while it's only small in terms of square mileage it feels extremely dense and rewarding to explore you'll knock off one boss which might give you an item or key that will unlock a new section of the village which in turn could result in two or three more sections opening up if you spend the time to explore sections can also change with time with new items arriving in them or new mini bosses just turning up unexpectedly each part of the village isn't a space you move through once there's spaces you check back in on to see what new surprises they have in store for you these sections serve as really important pacing when set against the four boss controlled areas you have to explore those segments are the dense intense on-rails experiences you expect from resident evil games so your return to the village feels like a chance to breathe you can stock up at the duke shop you can circle back and open up a locked drawer since you now have a block pick on you or you can go hunting yes that is the thing you can do in this village you hunt fish and pigs and you chase chickens around like rocky balboa so you can then hand the ingredients over to the fat man who will cook you a delicious meal permanently buffing your stats more than anything the semi-open world structure makes resident evil feel very substantial very hefty it's a 10 hour game so it's shorter than resident evil 4 it's about the same as whereas evil 7 but it feels like more games than seven four boss zones one big explorable village littered with secrets many of which i'm sure i missed along the way resident evil 7 was a very curated and linear experience from start to finish as are most resident evil games village affords you more freedom and has more to offer had i loved what village done with the story tone and characters i'd feel a really strong pull back to the game because the structure of it definitely justifies repeat playthroughs more than many other resident evil games do it doesn't hurt that all of this looks absolutely spectacular i played it on ps5 where the frame rate was a rock solid 45 frames because i played with ray tracing on but you can push it to 60 frames with ray tracing off note that for pc there is ray tracing but only if you have an amd gpu no word yet on whether or not ray chasing will arrive for nvidia cards later on resident evil village is the best looking resident evil game ever made and just an incredible looking game full stop there are plenty of vistas to take in but skyboxes are cheap the real graphical showcase is in the minor details the moonlight splashing over cobbled stones the luminescence of gilded halls the contrast of light and shadow that you get in flamelet caves the ray tracing won't knock you over like it does in control or whatever but it deepens the aesthetic of each environment making it feel more lived in and authentic i'd say more than the lighting though it's the attention to detail that exists in each space the textures on the walls the gold leafing on furniture the individual rivets that keep the factory bolted together and the incredible amount of detail that each enemy model has you really do walk from room to room just soaking up the environmental storytelling on display and marveling at these enemies as each of them try and take big chunks out of your throat and yeah they're absolutely totally gonna do a lot of that throughout your playthrough one of the big reasons that resident evil 4 was so beloved was that it kicked the action up a notch or like 12 notches it abandoned the tank controllers of the previous games to arrive at a third person over the shoulder perspective that would zoom in tighter when you aim down sights combat in the previous games was about feeling disempowered and vulnerable whereas in four leon was just a [ __ ] badass super elite soldier policeman dude who would just blast away enemies with his huge arsenal of weapons and he would roundhouse kick anyone who dared survive a shotgun blast to the face resident evil 7 took the series back to its roots albeit in first person your arsenal was a lot more limited as was your ammo economy as were the total number of enemies 7 was definitely not an action game it was a classically inspired survival horror village straddles those two frameworks in a way that i did not particularly enjoy for example enemy movement is one of the biggest modifiers that capcom can use to control the feel of combat in resident evil 2 and 7 enemies generally walk really slowly and present as easy targets giving you plenty of time to line up head shots you're meant to stand your ground and make every shot count and there was a real risk reward framework there because if you took too long the enemy would be on you and that would be that in village enemies move way way more their movements are too fast too erratic and too unpredictable for you to aim for the head as a consistent strategy especially when there's lots of enemies around this means that most of the time you're dumping rounds into their chest which feels more actiony but not in the same way that ford did where you were just like this hurricane of destruction i found combat to be frustrating which is not something i felt in any resident evil game before this really still the variety of enemies and weapons is great there's multiple types of each weapon multiple pistols multiple shotguns etc and the intention like resident evil 4 is that you both level them up and eventually replace them with new better versions you can buy from the duke the range of weapons does give you a pretty broad range of tools to draw from and allows you to decide how you want to approach things you can use your pistol against regular enemies but the shotgun might work better if you have enough ammo to spare flying gargoyle-like enemies can be sniped from afar but you can also get up close which works fine too later on arm and enemies with weak points might be best stunned with a pistol or shotgun only for you to then whip out your sniper rifle for a precision hit you'll also unlock automatic weapons towards the end of the game which bring a lot of destructive power but yeah it's late game as you'd expect oh and one thing i should say is that on the ps5 village makes excellent use of the adaptive triggers automatic triggers will kick back as you try and hold them down and aiming down sights becomes harder the lower your health gets simulating the struggle that ethan faces as his enemies use your body like an all-you-can-eat buffet it's a subtle touch but it was nice so yeah combat gives you more weapons more ways to approach things but as i said i think it's halfway between the gutter and the stars it's not slow tense and thoughtful enough to be counted as that classic survival horror combat nor is it arcady or actiony enough to deliver the same release that resident evil 4 did unquestionably though there's more combat to engage with here than there was in seven which is great for players that like playing in higher difficulties or in the mercenaries mode which does come bundled with the game as a free add-on so structure exploration visuals they're the parts of resident evil village that i liked the combat i'm like it's okay but i admit it's definitely more flexible and there's more to it let's talk now about what i really kind of disliked about this game which is yeah it's a whole whole bunch of things who's this friend stay back everything okay so for this section i'm going to say they're going to be some minor story spoilers i'm not going to show you bosses but i might talk about like you know the path to the boss i'm not going to discuss any specific story details but i will discuss how the story made me feel if you want to go in completely fresh to this game then don't watch this section having said that i'm not going to spoil the game for you if you trust me i think it'll be fine okay cool let's go if you have paid any attention to the marketing of this game you're gonna think it is essentially the lady dimitrisk show and believe me i have practiced the pronunciation of that name and i'm still probably getting it wrong from the moment she burst onto the scene it was a sexual awakening on social media where we were all tormund giant spain heaving with lust for the big woman an entire library's worth of memes were spawned like my personal favorite from chris raygun oh no oh no oh but beyond the memes lay a genuine interest in a character that was really compelling she was so unique so classy so terrifying so thick we'd never seen a villain like this before and she really supercharged the narrative surrounding this game not just because of the sex stuff but because she seemed actually interesting i think the marketing of this game has definitely led to some incorrect expectations about the centrality of the big woman and that's not a spoiler by the way i think it's just the honest resetting of expectations that capcom has been unwilling to do at this point lady dimitresk is an important figure in the game but she's just one of the figures and the other figures you'll square off against are nowhere near as interesting or compelling or watchable as lady dimitrisk they do not hold a candle to her and it really speaks to a broader problem with characters in this game resident evil games have often had a really cool cast of heroes and villains chris jill leon claire ada wong veronica that's a joke by the way you had villains that pushed the story forward like ramon salazar and albert wesker and you had gameplay-led antagonists like mr x and nemesis in resident evil 7 you had what i think was the perfect fusion of both narrative and gameplay the baker family were powerful forces in shaping the game's events and tone while also being powerful gameplay forces in chase sequences or boss battles or exploration sequences or whatever beyond lady d village really fails to set up the sorts of story arcs and villains that keep you invested in particular with regards to the main antagonist which is just a complete fail rather than being this shadowy force that wafts in and out of proceedings to make their presence felt villagers main antagonist is essentially just like a final boss fight that you get to after you've cleared everything before then it's not a meaningful fleshed-out connection to this villain and again when set against the promise of lady dimitresk it's very vanilla very generic and very disappointing none of this compares to how much i hate the protagonist ethan winters i hate him so much i don't think i've ever hated a video game protagonist more than this guy ethan feels like what you'd get if you removed all of the active verbs from a person's biography there's a reason we never see his face because if we did he'd have this like thousand-yard stare we can see in his eyes that the lights are on but nobody is home he is completely incapable of grappling with even the basics of the situation he finds himself in constantly wondering aloud what's going on as the player controlling him knows exactly what the [ __ ] is going on you've heard of input delay when controlling a character well ethan is the first video game character to embody the concept of narrative input delay where the player is feeding ethan a constant stream of information but ethan's amoeba brain is in a constant state of buffering more than anything else though ethan is just this massive charisma vacuum he has no presence no agency no personality nothing he is this wet mop of a character that slops awkwardly from scene to scene and his biggest moments of character development are when enemies cut off a new part of his anatomy and by the way yes i know that ethan was the protagonist in the last game but like the rest of the game was so strong that it didn't matter that ethan completely sucked okay and there are other characters to carry that story forward with the absence of those characters here you're just like focused on ethan and how much he sucks anyway just as the bosses are upstaged by the entrancing lady dimitrisk so too is ethan upstage by chris redfield whose new character model fixes whatever the [ __ ] this was in resident evil 7 here chris is magnetic his every utterance imbued with the leading man badassery that hollywood was built on where ethan is this flaccid baiter chris redfield is this barking alpha dog to the point where ethan has chris saved as alpha in his phone see even ethan knows his place sadly chris is criminally underutilized throughout the majority of this game he does have his moments in the sun but they feel too few and far between and too brief when he's there we're like glued to our screen hanging off his every word but as he turns his back we're like no no don't go don't go don't leave me with ethan there is a gang we could have had we play as chris redfield and you spend the entire time facing off against lady dimitresk and as the story progresses there's like more sexual tension between hero and villain and at one point they tussle and like chris's shirt gets ripped off and lady dee's dress gets like split up the side and then he falls over and she tries to like stomp him in the face with her stiletto but she misses revealing a knife hidden in her garter which chris grabs and then he like slashes lady d because he misses and it slices her dress which falls open wait what what happened where am i um what was i saying oh that's right ethan winters totally sucks with an absence of heroes and villains to motivate you there's one final character who might save the day for you the village there's an excellent ign first article that went up last week with village's director maury marcesato that discusses the goals he set when he began making village i really recommend reading that i finished the game and then i read the article and i was like yes this absolutely explains everything i'm thinking and feeling about this game at this point one of the things he says in that interview is that he considers the village to be the game's second most important character after ethan and yeah i think that's true it's structure the exploration the secrets all of it is more important to this resident evil game than other story lines or the cast of characters when i had finished the game i wrote in my notes that the village was like the central hub in a ferris wheel of horror experiences when i read this ign interview i was really struck when i saw sato say that they had used two phrases to guide their designer village ultimate survival horror and a theme park of horror one of the biggest reasons i failed to connect with this game was that it was never trying to create a cohesive singular immersive horror adventure instead it's purposefully trying to offer four distinct horror experiences that are separate from each other in structure tone narrative and gameplay they each pull from different inspirations like resident evil 2's police station or resident evil 4's gauntlet style survival or alien isolation's asymmetric hide and seek or even at times the over-the-top ridiculousness of resident evil 6 each of these chapters delivers its own discreet little horror fairy tale but there isn't the connection between them that i think the best resident evil games really nailed the events of resident evil 1 2 and 3 all felt like these white knuckle adventures that flowed seamlessly from section to section and felt connected right the way through to better illustrate the point recall resident evil 7. that game's marriage of story characters world and gameplay was masterful except for the tanker section at the very end which felt so out of place and disconnected from the rest of the game that's what i mean when i talk about that connection that flow that immersion and how things really break down when that's lost village is never able to achieve that cohesion in narrative tone and gameplay because it's not trying to it's trying to be an anthology of horror like a special quadruple episode of tales from the crypt keeper for some that will be great for others like myself it shatters the willing suspension of disbelief and never lets me sink deep into the story and world the last thing i didn't love about this game again was something that was explained in the ign first article quote for village the team didn't just want to create a scary horror game while resident evil 7 satisfied fans of the genre some players found it too scary to even play for village the team went for an experience that is still scary but in a way that more players can enjoy that's from the director of the game this is a really important quote because it perfectly sums up one of the key differences between seven and eight it abandons the chilling gruesome horrific nightmare fuel that powered the first game replacing it with a theme park style horror that you get in like a ghost train ride this is great for people that found resident evil 7 too scary and there were a lot of people that fell into that category and it's really great for people that felt like seven just took itself too seriously moving towards a silent hill or evil within approach to horror and leaving behind the campy over-the-top ridiculousness of resident evil 4. resident evil village feels authentically resident evil it has so many just crazy moments that i just that i laughed at it has so many story reveals that are as consequential as they are utterly absurd many will celebrate this as a return to form for the franchise reconnecting to its roots and the dna that made resident evil 4 so memorable people like myself may feel that resident evil village is a regression in tone directing its ambition in a way that sees it taking steps backwards i think that's probably a good point to finish on the different ways we might interpret the word ambition in many ways resident evil village is a more ambitious game than any resident evil before it it isn't the longest game in the series but the density of its semi-open-world structure gives you reasons to take your time and explore this rewarding space its combat isn't the most actiony nor is it the most survival horror-esque it's trying to arrive at its own unique balance its theme park horror design is trying to provide a broader range of experiences than we've ever seen before and it's doing it in a way that is consistent with resident evil's long history and the unique tone it brings to the survival horror genre village does not lack for ambition this game is anything but lazy capcom really swung for the fences on this and i think it gets a lot of it right and that's why i have no problem saying that this is good and i recommend it but for me i think that ambition was misdirected i think village retreats back to some familiar territory in its action in its story characters tone resident evil 7 felt so confident and sophisticated it felt like it was made from a single marble slab and sato just carved everything back until all that was left was this singular story the singular family the singular world we look at marble sculptures and we kind of marvel at the wizardry required to create something like that like how on earth could you have so clear a vision at every step of the process to have created something so detailed and so elaborate and yet so seamless there's no wondering at that wizardry here in village it feels a lot more sort of bolted together and as you run your hands over it you might feel the seam lines and that might be just enough to shatter the illusion for you it shattered it for me i recommend resident evil village it's a good game it just wasn't for me thanks for watching my video if you liked it give it a thumbs up if you didn't give it a thumbs down so i know to do better for next time if you enjoyed yourself consider subscribing and if you really enjoyed yourself maybe 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