Resident Evil: Revelations review

You can read this review in full in our print edition.

Our February issue, which is on sale now, includes an in-depth Post Script article on the steep challenge of making Resident Evil's trademark scares and tension work on a handheld console.

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Ever since Shinji Mikami reinvented survival horror for a second time with Resident Evil 4, the series has struggled to bottle that same lightning again. Resident Evil 5 leaned too far towards action spectacle for its control scheme, while the forthcoming Operation Raccoon City looks to have caved in to thirdperson shooter mores altogether. Revelations, the franchise’s fourth portable outing, takes most of its cues from Resident Evil 5’s gung-ho gameplay, but still finds itself uncertain where its allegiances lie.

The bulk of the story, set between Resident Evil 4 and 5, flits between two pairs of heroes: Jill Valentine and newcomer Parker Luciani, and Chris Redfield and his own new sidekick, Jessica Sherawat. Their tale takes in sights such as a creepy, creaky cruise ship and icy caves infested with wolves that have clearly been spending too much time with the dogs from John Carpenter’s The Thing. There’s variety to the levels, then, but they’re a mishmash of beauty and blandness, offering a jumbled mix of action set-pieces and quiet exploration.

While traversing them, you can choose between thirdperson and firstperson shooting, both of which make use of the responsive 3DS Circle Pad for aiming, with the latter option helping to maximise the small screen space of Nintendo’s hardware during firefights. If you choose a hybrid of the two, switching between perspectives, the experience is a mixed bag (as it was in Kenji Eno’s similarly snowbound and Thing-inspired Dreamcast relic D2), at times offering a convenient way out of sticky situations, and at others destroying the tension with close-ups of erratically behaved foes.

The use of firstperson perspective comes into its own when scanning areas for items, secrets and clues. The ‘Genesis’ device would make Samus Aran proud, and its use extends to analysing foes to identify their weaknesses. Scanning enemies while they’re alive adds a nail-biting time-attack layer, forcing you to find some distance and monitor your health while learning more about the lumbering freaks. Said freaks – from blobs with teeth to some nasty, gnashing Hunters – are as brain dead as the zombies that roamed the series’ 1996 debut. Their lack of spatial awareness, emphasised in firstperson, is a greater pity, because the character models and animations throughout are stellar, setting a new visual standard for 3DS. Revelations proves that Capcom’s MT Framework Mobile has the chops to deliver on a handheld what was once only possible on home consoles.

It’s Jill Valentine’s portion of the game that is the most visually arresting and comes closest to the series’ former gameplay glory. As she and Parker delve deeper into the Queen Zenobia cruise liner (a gorgeously detailed and intricately designed mini-mansion on the sea), the game hits a fine loop of exploratory memory tests and corridor shooting. The few puzzles are minor distractions rather than obstructive heavyweight mind games, and your main objective is key hunting through the many deadly decks. It’s a shame this solid, engrossing loop is broken by an episodic structure and the design team’s commitment to a fractured narrative. Bizarrely, the third act introduces a comic-relief double act, Quint and Keith – the third pair tangled up in the hunt for the truth behind mysterious terrorist group Veltro. If the game gave itself over entirely to the survivalist thrills of the Queen Zenobia, discarding the more trigger-happy scenarios offered up by the ensemble cast, Revelations would be a more coherent, singular and dynamic experience. Instead, a garbled, head-spinning backstory gets in the way. 

It’s a sign of the brand’s increasingly complicated and restrictive mythology that Revelations’ creators have tried to carve out a unique story. Though the plot brings back Resident Evil’s poster children, it’s a far more standalone affair than the numbered entries in the series and, sadly, far less gripping for it. Heavy-handed exposition is delivered through slick, extravagant cutscenes, and the new additions to the cast are derivative of established archetypes: Luciani is a mouthy stand-in for Luis Sera, while Sherawat is little more than an empty-headed Rebecca Chambers lookalike with the most ridiculous wetsuit in recent memory. Without a dedicated co-op campaign from the get-go (areas unlock for use in the action-focused Raid mode upon completing episodes), these NPC comrades are largely redundant in your first shot at the game, detracting from the sense of isolation with their cringe-worthy chatter. The co-op Raid mode is, ironically, better suited to a lone player, recycling singleplayer environs that are by their very nature tailored for one, with their countless corridors and assorted cramped spaces. There’s none of Resident Evil Zero’s co-op puzzling here, besides the need to do some heavy door lifting. It feels like a missed opportunity on a platform with strong online functionality.

The push to make Resident Evil accessible was arguably instigated by Resident Evil 5, but Revelations picks up the ball and runs even farther toward the casual-shooter goal. The ability to sidestep now means that blind spots – the currency of Resident Evil’s jumps and scares – are a thing of the past. Item management is barely an issue either, since discarding a weapon instantly plants it in any available storage box.

Revelations is a pick’n’mix of the series’ iconography and mechanics, then. It takes the best and worst of Resident Evils past and present, and spot welds them together unevenly. If the designers had committed wholeheartedly to either polarity of action or horror, Revelations may have been a headshot, but what we’re left with is more like a glancing blow. [6]