The expectations for this game after RE 2 were off the roof; RE 2 had some problems but still felt like something worth paying 60 dollars for as you got two different scenarios you could play over four times. I think the main problem people had with RE 2 Remake was that the scenarios weren’t different in the same way that the original RE 2 game was. In the original RE 2 game the scenarios had it so Leon/Claire would actually have different stories and different cut scenes (ala in scenario A Ada “dies” from falling off the walkway, in B she “dies’ from Mr X smashing her ass, I believe that in A Sherry gets poisoned but in b she doesn’t or vice versa), you’d also fight different bosses in the original, A was Birkin and B was Mr. X whereas Remake just combined both of those things and made a story that has internal inconsistencies. The reason for these lack of multiple stories, I think, was because Capcom wanted to make everything cohesive so people wouldn’t be worried about what’s cannon and what’s not cannon (which is something people still wonder about today in regards to the older games). However, overall RE 2 is still a game worth your money, you didn’t feel shorted, you had tons of game play to do with different scenarios, you could challenge yourself by turning up the difficulty and you had free dlcs as well. Re 3 remake I came away feeling half disappointed and not disappointed. Like I felt like I couldn’t complain because you have to compare it to the original game but I think there’s honestly many ways in which the og 3 is better than this one.
I’m going to go through most of the game now so if you don’t want spoilers and want to play it for yourself and form your own opinion (which you definitely should) go away, scram, I’m serious why are you still here? Go away dude, this is my house.
In Depth plot discussion:
Note: For people confused about the time period of RE 2 and RE 3 RE 3 is split into two halves in regard to its time. The first half of the game takes place before RE 2 and after Jill is infected and thrown into the hospital that takes place AFTER RE 2. So RE 2 happens in between the start and end of RE 3.
Ok so the game starts off with some serious RE 7 vibes. You wake up as Jill, the main character who survived the Spencer Mansion bullshit in the first one. She goes to go check herself out in the mirror and sees herself becoming infected, weird body horror. Then she wakes up and it was all a dream. This was a part of the plot that felt WEIRDLY underdeveloped, as its only brought up one other time when Jill actually is infected and has one more dream where an infected Carlos is trying to kill her. Seriously, after that its never brought up again, it almost feels like Capcom was trying to put something cool in their trailer right? Or they didn’t finish doing whatever kind of story they were trying to do with that. Another thing about RE 3 remake that you have to keep in mind is that RE 2 remake had YEARS to be made, people wanted that game since like 2002 when the original RE 1 Remake came out on gamecube. So that’s what, 17 years they had to work on the game? Whereas this game felt more rushed because well, it was more rushed.
Anyway, Jill gets a call from Brad Vickers, (who the game does cutesy stuff with later), the pilot who saved Chris, Jill, Barry and Rebecca’s ass in the original game but who everyone seems to hate for whatever reason. Brad calls Jill to make a vague warning about how she needs to get out of town, which seems pretty unhelpful since it seems pretty obvious there’s a fucking zombie apocalypse going on outside, when * ruh roh * Nemesis runs into Jill’s apartment and starts tossing her around. Already its kind of weird because Nemesis is done up in bandages for… no real reason. I think its because of the surgery he had but its really just to show how he changes overtime and the damage done to him I think. Jill dips out of the place but Nemesis follows and Jill gets into a car and instead of trying to dip from Nemesis (which granted probably wouldn’t work even in a car) drives right into him and off a fucking cliff. Nemesis is pretty much fine but Jill is fucked up, realistically with how brutal the impact is and I do think the game did a great job with how sickening the crash was, Jill would’ve probably had like a broken neck, a broken back and wouldn’t have even able to squeak, much less crawl away from Nemesis. So she drags herself out of the car and Nemesis is about to put her down when Carlos, a member of Umbrella’s special operatives team (UBCS I think) rocks Nemesis with a rocket launcher. Oh Carlos, all the women and gay guys are just in LOVEEE with him. The dialogue he has and the guy playing him do a really good job of winning you over and he’s just as likable a character if not more likeable than in the original. I just wish people would stop modding him shirtless and freaking out about how they’re going to raw dog him and shit but whatever. Oh and there’s a part in between Nemesis chasing you where Brad defends Jill from zombies and gets bit. This will become important later but is also kind of a fuck you to fans of the original who were expecting Nemesis to kill Brad.
So Carlos brings Jill to the train station to meet Mikhali, the leader of the group I think? Its either him or Nicholai I get confused on that but anyway, he’s also part of the UBCS. They talk Jill into turning on the power for the station so they can get the hell out of Raccoon City. I think there’s a problem right here and I think it kind of adds to peoples thoughts that the game is too short. For anyone whose played the original the fact that you’re ALREADY at the train station is kind of jarring, I think it creates some other problems early on too. It kind of shows that Jill can’t hang with Nemesis on her own or at least that’s the impression we’re given early without being saved and also there’s not a lot of shit you have to do. Your mission is to turn on the power and put in a route for the train…. that’s it. In the original game to start up the power you had to find three different things (it was like fluid, cords and a battery I think) which took you the entire first part of the game to find. Without that objective it just kind of feels like you’re just dicking around town without much reason. Also this part of the game is where you started the demo so if you played that, the demo felt like it dropped you into the middle of the game but it turns out you were actually at the start. Jill acts kinda bitchy toward Carlos when he gives her a radio (I’ve seen people complain that Jill is too mean in this one but I disagree, women typically have an attitude about things and Jill acting bitchy could be construed as the game keeping her as a badass and her trying to keep her cool when dealing with Nemesis instead of just freaking out and crying in a corner or whatever) and you go upstairs and see this little desk where you can put three crystals in… hmmm, that was a very important thing in the original RE 3 where you had to find all three crystals to advance to the area with the train. Here its just something you get items from, again making old parts of the game that were important unimportant for not that much reason continuing the feeling that the game is short.
You run outside of the train station and have to deal with some zombies. This is the first time you actually see how the gameplay works and its kind of clunky. They took out the survival weapons from RE 2 and RE 1 remakes so if you get grabbed you’re getting bit or clawed or whatever. So what you have to do is dodge but the dodging in the game is fucking wonky and hard to get a handle of at first. I’ve beaten the game on normal and hard at this point and I still don’t feel confident in my ability to dodge away from one zombie in front of me. The dodging is also wonky in that you dodge differently when you’re playing as Jill and Carlos. When you’re Jill you’re trying to go to the left or right of the attack whereas with Carlos its more like a melee attack that stuns your opponent and you want to go straight at them… which is hard to get used to do when you’re used to do ducking and weaving to the left and right the whole game. So you head further into town and run into a fire right next to a fire hydrant so you’ve got to go find a fire hose. You go through the area and into a doughnut shop that has the closing song from RE 2 original playing in it which was a nice touch.
You have to solve a somewhat obnoxious safe puzzle to get a dot sight for your pistol and as you go through town you’ll notice that there’s tons of areas blocked off by locks and chains which you can get through with your bolt cutters and lockpick that you don’t have yet. One of the main things you can find here is a shotgun which you’re pretty much going to need. I will say one of the nice things about the Remake games from 2-3 is that the maps will stay red if you haven’t picked up all of the items which is pretty helpful if you’re low on items or even just if you’re trying to find everything. Find the hose, check out the train station, notice its completely out of power and then run to the hydrant and put the fire out. If you played demo you’re probably expecting Nemesis to jump out here but he doesn’t. You’ll meet Nicholai past the garage where you find the bolt cutters and he shoots a guy Jill was trying to coax and calls you a punk ass bitch basically for not killing him. I love Nicholai and the game really does a great job of making him important and showing off just how fucking psycho/greedy he is. Nicholai is also part of UBCS but he’s in on his own scheme as he was hired by Umbrella to find info and report it to them on the zombies and other creatures. Basically what he’s doing throughout the game, though you’re not supposed to know this until about halfway, is that he’s going around killing the other Umbrella researchers and gathering their information so he can be the only one with any info on anything and get the biggest payout from Umbrella. He’s truly badass and truly psychotic, he’s also paranoid and not just a little bit rapey toward Jill, at least according to the RE 3 Novelization (which is great trip inside the characters head).
Jill continues toward a power plant facility and this is where you run into the most obnoxious, possibly scariest monsters of the game. But before dealing with them I’d suggest, since this is the area where you can pick up lock pick and bolt cutters, to grab both of them and run back and get everything you can right now (you can use the bolt cutters completely and then discard it here). Using both you’ll get the shotgun and all of the emeralds for that desk you have to put them in back at the train station. I’d head back there and put them in before prompting Nemesis to show up. You’ll get a stock for your shotgun I think as well as some other weapon items.
Head back to the train station and get ready to get THROAT FUCKED by the most obnoxious monsters in the game. These things throat fuck Jill and leave some kind of green, vegetable like parasites in her and you can ONLY get them out by smoking weed…. err eating a green herb. This part is truly scary because if you’re low on herbs these things can fuck your day up. Jill getting poisoned here isn’t like getting poisoned in any of the other games, it slows her down so much she can’t run at all so if you need to run back to your item box you could easily end up dying. I felt like they put this in to increase the length of the game more than anything as its honestly just obnoxious and could eat up all your herbs but I will admit the monsters are scary. Not because of their design or anything but simply because you DON’T want to get infected. Anyway, Jill turns power back on and hopefully isn’t completely out of herbs because after all that bullshit now you’ve got to deal with Nemmy! As Jill is heading back to the train station Nemesis pops out of a wall and its on. If you have grenades Nemesis it’s no problem really, if not you’re going to have to get good at dodging and using the electrical boxes that are thrown around the city.
Jill gets past Nemmy, runs back to the train station and you have to do a quite obnoxious puzzle with creating a route for the train. Run back out through the doughnut shop and deal with Nemesis again and his weird… I honestly have no idea what to call them. They’re zombies but they’ve got weird squid things attached to their heads and are quite obnoxious as they’ll pull you and hit you with their tentacles and can fuck you up from far away. What I would do to deal with the first one is electrocute Nemmy, then pop the squid face with a shotgun or just throw a grenade and it will make Nemesis drop an attachment for your gun and kill the squid thing. Oh that’s another thing I forgot to mention, Nemesis will occasionally drop items in boxes that are attachments for your pistol. I’ve only gotten two attachments for mine (I think it was a suppressor and a larger clip) and I’m not sure if you can get more than that from him or not. Its not really as cool as in the original when you could get the Eagle parts and get a whole new weapon along with the five other drops he does but whatever. Run back to the train station and there’s one of those fucking squid faced guys cock blocking you. Now I died on this part a couple times because I was completely out of herbs from the earlier part with the plant monsters so getting through this was obnoxious, I think I jut circled around him until he moved out of my way.
Jill regroups with Carlos, Nicholai and Mikahli but instead of getting on the train she decides to draw Nemmy away from the rest of the group. This pissed me off because I had like nothing to heal with and just felt like the game was dragging time out without any real objectives because if you’ve played the original 3 you know that no matter what Nemesis is going to fuck up the train anyway. And I also found it really misfitting for Jill to be yelling, “You want Stars? I’ll give you stars!”, because I kept on getting punched out Nemesis like right away and having to restart where in the original game when she says it she says it at the finale of the game where she’s about to kill Nemesis with a magnum. Anyway you’ve got to deal with Nemesis in a very tight area and kick out a grate without him getting you, basically just get him by the barrels and blow them up and then dip as fast as possible. Now you’re in the sewers! Yay, who doesn’t love trekking through shit and dealing with sewer monsters!
Here the game gives you a grenade launcher (which I’ll refer to as gl) and then you have to fight some hunter gammas I believe they’re called. They’re big white monsters with red giant teeth mandibles that open up but they’ve got tiny white legs. Their weaknesses are their legs which you can hit to make them drop or their mandibles (their main weak spot) and you can usually drop one with one flame round from a gl. The sewer part is pretty short here, you get a battery pack that’s obnoxious to carry around as it takes two slots to carry but you need it to open doors but this part will prob only take like 20-30 minutes tops. You get back to the surface and Nemmy’s after your ass with a flamethrower. Getting away from him with the flamethrower is fairly easily actually, there’s a save room that pops up once you get into a burning building but it seems weird to even put it there as you get an auto save as soon as you go up the stairs. Dodge Nemesis for a while, reach another saferoom which you should probably use and then go up to fight Nemesis on the roof. Now on normal this fight really isn’t that bad, might end up using most of your ammo but nothing too hard. On hardcore the fight is an absolute pain in the ass, you have to duck around the steel pilings to get away from his flamethrower and completely run in the other direction if he starts shooting flames up at the sky. And then the boss fight actually gets way harder when you blow up his flamethrower as he starts hitting you with the remains of his shrapnel and its very hard to dodge correctly. Took me probably like 6-7 tries on hardcore, obnoxious as hell but I will say this is the only Nemesis fight in the whole goddamn game that FEELS like an actual Nemesis boss fight.
Jill drops out of the roof, tells Carlos for like the 30th time that she’s killed Nemesis (I don’t know why she ever thinks its actually dead and it starts to make her look naieve which shouldn’t be a thing at all because she’s already dealt with shit like this in the first game) and starts to run back to the police station when SURPRISE MOTHAFUCKA! FRENCH FRIES MOTHAFUCKA! ALL RISE MOTHAFUCKA!!! Because Nemmy is back with a fucking rocket launcher! First time I dealt with this I died a lot, its way different than dealing with Nemesis with rocket launcher in og 3. However when I played the game on hardcore I actually didn’t have any problems with it, its really just getting used to dodging it. When its orange keep moving, when its red dodge constantly until he’s stopped. That’s pretty much it, you just gotta spam that dodge button and keep going straight. Carlos saves you by blowing up a gas tanker and sends you on the train while he stays behind to hang out with some black guy I can’t remember the name of and will be referred to as NC for New Character. They’re going to go to the RPD for…. no real reason honestly. They’re supposed to find info on this doctor but he’s in a hospital that they would’ve gotten to if they had taken the train anyway so its really just an excuse to reuse the RPD from 2 and fill in some gaps. Anywho, Jill and Nikhali get wrecked by Nemesis who jumps in the train, Nicholai dips and leaves Jill to die which is kind of a nice development in that it makes it different from og 3 as it shows that Nicholai’s intentionally trying to kill Jill and that Jill and Carlos will be set up as enemies with him here instead of being left in the dark (which is again another thing pulled from the RE 3 novelization where Jill and Carlos find a diary from a dead umbrella operative that showed that Nicholai was crazy and killing people, in fact what’s interesting is that the novelization and the remake have this realization come at almost the exact same time as in the novel Jill and Carlos learn this as they’re on their way back to the train station to leave).
Mikhali suicide bombs himself to um protect Jill, Jill gets knocked out and we cut to Carlos and NC going into RPD. They run into Brad Vickers who bites Marvin (which explains how Marvin got infected which was a question the original games never answered), Marvin dips into the RPD and you don’t see him again until the 2nd game. Now this is kind of a nice reference to the original second game as your Carlos and you kill Brad, who takes a bunch of shots and he drops the keycard. I guess its actually a combination of giving you a reference to og 2 and 3. In og 3 Brad gets killed by Nemesis and you can grab the keycard from body, in RE 2 og Brad is a super zombie and if you get to the police station without picking up any items at all you get Brad outside the police station and you can go downstairs and cap his ass for a special key that will let you change costume. Brad in re 2 og is considered a super zombie so the fact that it takes a clip or two to put him down is pretty cool. Carlos and NC go into in the police station and Carlos has to go to the rpd room. Now if you’ve played re 2 you know that’s on the second floor and you could easily get to it if you had the keys but everything but the bottom floor is locked.
So Carlos runs into, what is technically in cannon timeline, the first appearance of a licker. Basically with this retcon Carlos is the first person to run into a licker instead of Leon or Claire. You run through the police station trying to find dynamite for the shower room to get through to the Stars office and after you blow up the door shit can get kind of hard. Carlos only has a pistol, a machine gun and maybe a few grenades to get through what is probably about ten zombies or so pouring out of the explosion plus a licker once you get past the door. If you don’t want to deal with any of that and think you can make it past without dying you can just run into the STARS room and not have to deal with the enemies. Carlos and NC (Kenneth maybe?) get communication from the scientist/doctor they were looking for and he tells them he’s the only one with a vaccine. Carlos and NC argue a bit about what to do with the info, Carlos wants to give the vaccine to the government or whatever and NC says its Mikhali’s call but its made a moot point when Carlos learns that Mikhali is dead af and Jill got turned on by Nicholai, as Jill tells him through radio contact. Carlos leaves NC to his own devices and we cut back to Jill……
Jill picks up a few items, then radios Carlos and we see the same scene of radio contact but from Jill’s pov. Nemesis comes running but falls into the water. Jill brushes this off with a “dumbass can’t even swim” line which again…. quit counting your chickens before they hatch woman! Nemesis immediately jumps out of the water in a new dog form. This pissed me off…. a lot honestly. I didn’t like that Nemesis, when we’re maybe almost halfway through the game is already changing shape and to me it made him a more generic bow. They could’ve done something cool like they did with mutated Mr X in the last remake but instead you get one regular boss fight with Nemesis and then after that its not even really Nemesis anymore. ITS THIS WEIRD GODDAMN GENERIC DOG LOOKING BOW!
Granted in the original game they had Nemesis change shape into something similar too but that was at the VERY end of the game. I get that Capcom wanted to make it different or not feel like the same boss fight or…. whatever but there’s ways of changing Nemesis around where he doesn’t feel like the same fight over and over again. As it is the boss fights basically go like this, Nemesis as normal in a pretty decent fight, and then two Nemesis boss fights that are almost exactly the same thing when he’s in a weird dog form and then a final boss fight where he’s just a random ass big generic bow monster that you have hit pulsating sores on. Instead of feeling unique and like a big deal they turned Nemesis into like literally ANY goddamn bow boss from the modern games, ala the last three boss fights feel like something that would fit in perfectly in any of the Revelations games or RE 5 or 6. Also because they do this Nemesis has completely lost any power to stalk you anymore, he’s just a boss fight now and a pretty goddamn generic one at that. It also makes the game feel too damn rushed yet again, Nemesis WAS stalking you and…. now that you’ve gotten a whopping two and half hours in he’s not anymore. Its just…. kind of lame. I will say I think the boss fights with Nemesis work a lot better on hardcore than on normal because on normal the boss fights are pretty easy as long as you have all your weapons. Its weird too because the last boss fight with Nemesis actually feels the easiest, this is fixed on hardcore where the boss fights actually are harder each time and the last time is actually the hardest fight because if Nemesis hits you once you gotta heal.
I’m going to skip the rest of the plot description at this point because I feel like I pretty much said everything I wanted to say about the game that was bothering me, though I will give a shout out to the Hunters as being scary af and making a comeback since not being in a Resident Evil game since 2002!
But overall this is a good game, its fun to play and dealing with Nemesis is fun and kind of entrancing. But for 60 bucks idk, there’s nothing additional here. It almost feels like it could’ve been a 30 dollar add on to RE 2 instead of its own game, its short af, they fuck with Nemesis so hard its not even really Nemesis anymore and it just feels kind of disappointing once you hit the end. But its still worth playing and technically has about the same length as the original game…. but there’s a lot of things about the original game that I like a lot more than this one. There was a boss fight with Nemesis in the courtyard in og that I KEPT on getting stuck on and having to reload the game from because Nemesis was so damn hard (I didn’t know about the magic of freeze rounds at that point). There’s other parts of that game that are rough too, its easy to get fucked up by Nemesis in boss fight with the valves and RE 3 og is just a HARDER game than this. This new one has so many auto saves and such you could probably honestly beat it without saving at all and there just isn’t anything that I was consistently stuck on for a long period of time…. well I did die on the first Nemesis boss fight on hardcore a lot, the hunters would slice my neck a lot as Carlos in the hospital, the part defending Jill was rough and the final boss fight I died a lot (this all happened on hardcore not normal). Even with those parts though there really wasn’t anything I was stuck on or knew I couldn’t beat or that I was going to have to restart or that really inconvenienced me at all in the same way. Also in og 3 Nemesis is SCARY because he will not leave you alone no matter what you do… this Nemesis is just kind of on your ass in the same way for a little bit but when he starts using the weapons its pretty much just run away from him and then disorienting cut scenes. Even with knowing all of this though I’d still say the games decent and worth your time but know if you’re an og 3 fan you’re probably going to be salty about things. I’d give it a 3.5/5.0
Note: As much as I love Nicholai’s character I’m not sure if it was a wise decision to make him feel more important than Nemesis and the final thing where you shoot him feels kind of lame from a game play perspective. Oh also they should’ve made Billy from RE 0 Nemesis.
