Turns out Resident Evil is good when you actually play the games

My history with Resident Evil is that I perhaps saw about 3 of the movies in cinema (and more at home) and all I can remember is Milla Jovovich and that one time they used a remix of A Perfect Circle's Outsider in a trailer. That said it's not that my opinion of Resident Evil was completely dismissive. I knew it is highly regarded by fans and I did dabble with a bit of Village and Biohazard to get a taste of that myself, but just never quite felt the gameplay. To be fair, maybe I just didn't play enough of either of those games.

Heck, I didn't enjoy my Demo experience of this game too much either. Don't get me wrong it's an interesting beginning, but with no difficulty setting the demo just felt like a despair simulator. Come visit a village full of crazy people wanting to kill you, also there's a chainsaw man and cause you suck at this game you ran out of most bullets already. Playing the actual game alleviated that. I survived that first village area first try going in with assisted mode and by the time I entered the next area and shot down the whole settlement of angry grandmas and grampas I felt hooked.

The great thing this game has going for it that could convert people to being Resident Evil fans (like it did me) is that it's easy difficulty is perfect for newcomers. The difficulty keeps failing to an acceptable minimum, but it's also not super easy where you could just breeze through the game - the common mistake which a lot of highly esteemed video games have (God of War, the Horizon games, even Nier Automata, Shin Megami Tensei).

In terms of gameplay this is a third person shooter with a bit of stealth and a bit of horror. Appearently the common consensus is that while the game is otherwise excellent there's a bit too little horror, but well... don't look at me to give my opinion on that as I fried my brains with disturbing banned cinema in my teenage years.

Controls felt like crack, gun variety is pretty cool and it will require you to learn atleast some basic differences and uses of various weapons to progress through the story comfortably even on easy mode. The story is fine. It's not amazing. Unlike Last of Us the story serves more as a set piece to set up the gameplay, the world and boss fights.

Gameplay is amazingly diverse. None of the boss battles feel too much like a repeat (well, except for the two instances where the game is like: now try dealing with two of those!). There are some pretty cool exploration sections and puzzles. One time you ride a mining cart like a rollercoaster. Enemies have different ways you can take them on: bugs which fly and are best shot down with a handgun, big shield guys will have their shields crack down from shotgun blasts, Garadors will claw you to death up close, but they are blind so you can take them on from behind and there are Regeneradors... who you don't deal with (trust me, it's better).

Anyway, it's overall an excellent experience. My main gripes are that the story is not that amazing and Leon's stupid J-pop hair makes little sense (trained super soldier never got his head shaved). I also can't relate to any of the criticism which is currently bringing down the game's metacritic score. This is a great game. I shot a bunch of growling old people and I'm happy about it.