Survival of Horror — Resident Evil: Revelations
I remember when Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D came out on the 3DS in 2011. It was during quite the software lull following the launch period, and I was hungry for something to play on my fancy new handheld. I was enamored by this wonderful little arcade action game, a fully-fleshed out version of my (at times, quite severe) obsession that was Resident Evil 5’s minigame. On the go, no less! And in 3D on top of that! I adore that game to this day, and I continue to wish for a full-on Mercenaries HD at the very least.
There was something else, though. Something bigger, brewing on Nintendo’s little handheld. In 2010, Capcom showed off a suspenseful and strange trailer of Resident Evil fan favorites Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield holding each other at gunpoint, while a Chris lookalike (with an Australian accent) cackled and mocked them both. This new game was to be Resident Evil: Revelations, and such a simple concept was turning out to be something very interesting. What could possibly have Jill and Chris, partners for years, at odds like this?
With that little trailer in mind, I remember being ecstatic to try the game out myself. The 3DS exclusive Mercenaries 3D came with an ace in the hole: a short gameplay demo for Revelations. I could hardly believe what I was seeing; this was a full-fledged Resident Evil title, or rather a snippet of one, in my very hands. I could play it anywhere that I wanted. It was like a vision of the future!
I played this little five-minute demo relentlessly for a small window of time before I cooled off and decided to wait for more info, in the meantime living in a world that consisted of little more than Mercenaries 3D and eventually, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D. Thankfully, my poor, wanting soul didn’t have to wait long for the next update. Eventually, more coverage popped up and a new demo was being added to eShop. Unfortunately, this was in the weird age where Nintendo had actual restrictions on how many times one could start demo software, in their words, to prevent people from getting their fill of a game without buying it. This meant I could only start the software ten times before it ran out.
In case you’re wondering how fanatical I was, rest assured that I did not use up all ten of my startups for Resident Evil: Revelations. No, instead I would play it through four or five times on a single startup, making the hard decision to close it each time and decrease that number after a while. It was so hard not to be addicted to it; the demo, while having nothing to do with the original trailer’s premise, felt like classic, slow-paced Resident Evil. Jill was trapped, at the start without a weapon, and had to eventually go through a small section of the environment that evoked the same atmosphere as the very first game.
Needless to say, I was beyond excited for this game. So excited, that I felt both joy and unadulterated gamer outrage when news started to break that Resident Evil: Revelations would be the first game to utilize a 4GB cart for the 3DS, to pack all that game into the cart. Because of this, Capcom planned on charging $50 instead of the normal $40 for 3DS games. I don’t know if you’ve used the internet much nowadays but even back then, the outrage and coverage was so scathing and intense that Capcom backed down from this stance within months of the announcement. With that roadblock out of the way, this was the time for glory.
When I played Resident Evil: Revelations, I was enamored. I was absolutely in love with it. A full, complete Resident Evil adventure on a handheld. It looked incredible, it played great, there was so much to do! Everything about it was utterly mindblowing, most of all that it was portable. My honeymoon period with this game was passionate and intense, I must admit. Once things started to cool off and years went by, however, I wasn’t sure exactly how things held up. Some more of the negatives started to pop into my mind rather than positives.
Thankfully, that’s what this retrospective is for. I hope to see what it is that got me into Resident Evil: Revelations so intensely, while seeing if I can find out why I feel a little more sour about the game than I used to now. I wonder what exactly this game has hidden beneath the surface. Relax, I’ll keep the puns to a minimum. Anyway, let’s dive right in!
Resident Evil: Revelations — January 26, 2012 (3DS, X360, PS3, Wii U, PC, PS4, X1, NSW)
Version used for review: PC remaster, 2013
Warning! This review will spoil the entire game!
Story
“They’re turning guppies into Jaws!”
The core tenet of Resident Evil: Revelations is right in the title. It promises a story with many mysteries to unravel over the course of the game, and the introduction starts us right in the middle of one. We begin with the venerable Jill Valentine on a small tugboat. She’s a member of the BSAA, the same group we learned about one game ago with Resident Evil 5. She and her current partner, fellow BSAA agent Parker Luciani, are coming up on a gigantic cruise ship, named the Queen Zenobia, floating aimlessly in the Mediterranean Sea.
Seemingly abandoned, this ship is the last known location for series vet Chris Redfield and his partner Jessica Sherawat. After a cursory search through some rooms of the ship, they start to realize something terrible has happened. Bodies are littered everywhere, with gore and gunk aplenty. One in particular looks partially mutated, giving the two BSAA agents extra cause for concern. Sure enough, it’s not long before the two are attacked by a grotesque, fleshy monster called an Ooze. Naturally, the trained agents are able to take it out without much issue.
We’re then treated to a jump backwards to a newscast informing us of a magnificent city on the water in the Mediterranean Sea, called Terragrigia. This was a beautiful metropolis, completely solar-powered, and completely self-sufficient. This paradise became the target of a terrorist organization called Veltro, who unleashed all sorts of bioweapons on the citizens trying to escape. This prompted the Federal Bioterrorism Commission, or FBC, to step up and offer a nuclear solution: the Regia Solis. This solar array is what helped power Terragrigia in the first place, and it is what ultimately destroyed it; by focusing all that solar energy on one focal point, the FBC ignited Terragrigia and sunk it, taking out Veltro with it. This whole event was dubbed the Terragrigia Panic. So, why are we learning all this now, out of the blue?
Well, we’re shown the head of the BSAA, director Clive R. O’Brian, on the beach where Terragrigia can be seen in ruins in the distance. Turns out, some gross growths have washed ashore. Parker and Jill show up to investigate with him, searching the horrible growths and finding a vial in one of them. After O’Brian takes it, he receives a distress call from HQ that Chris and Jessica have gone missing on their mission. Their last known position was in the middle of the Mediterranean, which brings us back to the ship.
Jill and Parker explore more and find an FBC agent named Rachel Foley… or rather, her corpse as she gets bashed to death by monsters. After finding a key that will let them continue further, they make their way further into the ship and are gassed by a mysterious masked figure. You’ll notice a theme with this game as it constantly jerks your around back and forth between different people. Why do I mention that out of the blue?
Again, perspective changes to Chris and Jessica themselves, who are in fact not on a ship but in the mountains. They’ve been sent to investigate a possible Veltro revival, and unfortunately find evidence of just that. O’Brian then notifies them that they’ve been set up, and that Jill and Parker were sent to the Mediterranean and have since lost contact with HQ. Chris and Jessica hustle toward their evac point in order to get out to sea ASAP. We then return to Jill and Parker’s perspective as they wake up on another part of the ship.
This becomes a running theme that bothers the hell out of me, honestly. I don’t mind jumping around to different perspectives in a story, but Resident Evil: Revelations does it so often and in such disjointed fashion that it borders on obnoxious. You will be whipped back and forth between three different groups (Jill and Parker, Chris and Jessica, and the most annoying duo in Resident Evil history, Quint and Keith) and also back and forth through time, from the Terragrigia attacks until now. On the surface, this is how they try to tell a larger story spanning several areas.
In practice, it only serves as window dressing to tell a bog-standard political thriller in a Tarantino-esque non-linear story progression. In something like Pulp Fiction, the stories told are out of order but still fit together just fine in almost any way you tell them, solving unanswered questions later on if you watch them in different orders. With Resident Evil: Revelations, a majority of the time the order of these beats are ordered in such a way that they generally just cut away from one perspective to another, then come back to the original one to answer whatever cliffhanger they left on. It still has to be played in each scenario’s chronological order to make sense, but it feels like a pale surface-level imitation of much better works. This point will be coming around again, so keep it in mind!
For now, let’s get back to where we were. Eventually, Jill and Parker find each other and make their way further into the ship, where they meet Raymond Vester. He was an FBC cadet back in Terragrigia, and Parker and Jessica saved him from being mauled by Hunters. He’s being weirdly mysterious about stuff, and heads off in search of his partner Rachel (oops). Jill and Parker realize they need to get communications working to make contact with the outside world and eventually find themselves trapped in a sealed room in the ship’s bilge, with water filling it fast. Aaaaand cut to Chris and Jessica landing on the ship’s helipad to come rescue them. They search the ship top to bottom and end up in the same room as Jill and Parker… except it’s completely empty. Actually, fakeout, it’s a sister ship called the Queen Semiramis! We cut back to Jill and Parker, who are hopelessly trapped and certainly drown — oh who am I kidding, of course they find their way out.
After a while, they get comms back up just in time for O’Brian to inform them that someone is activating the very same Regia Solis that brought an entire city to its knees. Realizing that they’re about to be vaporized, they rush to activate a diversion plan. They succeed in messing up the solar array’s targeting system just enough to avoid the ship being obliterated, but it causes a gigantic rogue wave in the sea that floods a large portion of the ship. The two barely manage to escape to higher levels of the ship in time to meet up with Chris and Jessica, who finally track them down.
All this time, BSAA agents Quint Cetcham and Keith Lumley are putzing around in the same snowy mountains as Chris and Jessica, looking for clues to solve who’s behind this whole mess. Eventually, they come across some files that implicate none other than… Clive R. O’Brian, who is using the Veltro name to lure out the actual big bad, Morgan Lansdale. Quelle surprise! Utter shock! Who could have possibly guessed?!
Chris reveals to Jill that they have to neutralize the T-Abyss Virus in the hidden lab on the ship. They found it on the Queen Semiramis, and he assumes the two ships are the same. He and Jill go to take care of that while Parker and Jessica go to the bridge to close the bulwarks and attempt to slow the ship’s rapid sinking. Chris and Jill eventually reach the lab and while Chris works the computer, Jill attempts to get an authentication token. Here’s another weird story detail. Along the way, she uncovers a T-Abyss vaccine and, apropos of nothing, decides to take it. She doesn’t keep it for study, she doesn’t bring it back for the BSAA to make more of it… she just injects herself with it. For no discernible reason.
Now, because this story is ridiculous, it ends up immediately saving her life, as the room is flooded with T-Abyss water not seconds after she decides to take it. She makes it back up and Morgan reveals himself via satellite communication. The two neutralize the virus using the token and are forced to escape once the self-destruct system activates. Yes, even the ship has one of those.
Turns out, Jessica was the one who pushed it. She’s been a mole in the BSAA for Morgan this whole time! Dun dun duuuuuun! Parker confronts her, but Raymond shows up and attempts to stop her too, Jessica shoots and Parker takes a bullet in the shoulder for him. He tells Raymond to go after her as she runs away and he slumps in the bridge. Things aren’t exactly looking great.
Jill and Chris start their escape, swimming and running through the lower areas of the ship as various areas start exploding. They find Parker, who was trying to escape himself. He explains that Jessica is a mole, and Chris and Jill help him stagger toward the front deck heliport. Unfortunately, the grating in the floor gives out and Parker falls to his death, which is awful. He was one of the best characters in the game!
Sadly, Jill and Chris press on without him. They reach the helipad and, after a boss fight, escape the sinking ship. O’Brian finally comes clean with them, explaining that he set all this up to try and lure Morgan out, since he had reason to believe that Morgan had conspired with Veltro to cause the Terragrigia Panic. Yes, you read that right. Clive R. O’Brian staged a mock revival of a terrorist organization, then he took several of his own agents and, knowing it would be insanely dangerous, put them all in highly deadly situations without warning them in order to smoke his target out. This dude is somehow the good guy. What the hell?!
Somehow even more baffling than that, Chris and Jill are totally unfazed by this… revelation. The very same Chris that feels used and abused by the systems of power in Resident Evil 5 is completely okay with being a guinea pig in the political thriller happening around him mere years prior to that game. You can tell the difference in writers almost immediately, and surely that’s the main reason for a discrepancy such as this; nevertheless, he tells O’Brian that their one goal is to find evidence of Morgan working with Veltro.
O’Brian tells them that there was a third sister ship that Veltro used, called the Queen Dido, that sank during the Terragrigia Panic. After instructing them to investigate the ship, O’Brian is held up by Morgan himself, who attempts to arrest O’Brian for conspiring with Veltro. Chris and Jill reach the ruined city and dive into the waters below, making their way into the ship in hopes of finding any lasting evidence. Luckily enough for them, they find that the leader of Veltro has been alive at the bottom of the sea for the entire year since the Panic. Despite having a very finite amount of air and food, he survived for an entire year underwater, with plenty of candles burning and even some electricity to boot! The game handwaves this off as Jack “surviving off of revenge”. That’s… certainly one interpretation.
However, being alone for that long will make a man mad, and Jack Norman was indeed crazed. His only escape, in his mind, was the T-Abyss Virus. He injects himself before Jill and Chris can get to him, as he waves a PDA around wildly. This PDA, he claims, has records of all his interactions with Morgan from before his betrayal at Terragrigia. One mutation and a boss fight later, the duo grab the PDA and exonerate O’Brian by showing video footage of Morgan giving Jack an open case of T-Abyss. Instead, Morgan is arrested and taken away, vowing that O’Brian is making a grave mistake. Classic villain fluff.
Oh, did I forget to mention that Parker is alive? After getting shot, and then falling several stories through a ton of fire, Raymond finds him barely able to stand, trying to escape. He helps his friend out, totally kneecapping that emotional moment from earlier. Now, personally I don’t hate this because Parker is a treasure and I want to protect him, but it’s a pretty cheap copout. Either way, he escapes and is picked up afterward, with Raymond nowhere to be found.
Nearly everyone gets a happy ending, with Clive R. O’Brian, director of the BSAA, taking responsibility for endangering the lives of his agents and t̶u̶r̶n̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶h̶i̶m̶s̶e̶l̶f̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶c̶r̶i̶m̶e̶s̶ retiring without any penalty in order to live a quiet life so he can write a mystery novel. Though, in all honesty, a government official committing serious crimes and walking away without a scratch isn’t the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard…
I didn’t even get a chance to fit in the ridiculous forced usage of classic literature. Resident Evil: Revelations uses one of the most boneheaded shortcuts to making your villain seem smart: reciting classic literature to sound more intelligent. I wonder who could possibly be the bad guy in this story? Is it the person perhaps blathering on and quoting The Divine Comedy in his cell phone calls? Is it him? Could it maybe be that guy?
It simply beats you over the head with it. Instead of engaging with the work it so often tries to invoke, Resident Evil: Revelations uses The Divine Comedy as nothing more than a throwaway attempt to raise a villain a step above. It’s window dressing poorly imitating sophistication, and the closest Capcom gets to relating to it in this game is when O’Brian mentions Dante and Vergilius.
After the credits roll, we end the game in a coffee shop, with Jessica sipping on something from a mug while meeting up with a contact, who turns out to be none other than Raymond Vester. Turns out, they both work for the same organization, and he was confronting her on the bridge with Parker because he wanted to appear to be on their side. And yet, he was already thought to be dead earlier in the game, so why does he even announce himself there? He could just escape the ship and be fine. Regardless, they discuss how things are going to be very interesting going forward as they set a vial of T-Abyss on the table, and then there’s the cut to black.
Needless to say, that never happened. The T-Abyss Virus hasn’t been heard from since Resident Evil: Revelations released in 2012 in the series and I doubt they have plans to go back to it. Either way, the story here is an incredible mess. There’s absolutely no thematic reference to a classic poem despite their attempts to discuss it, the story jumps from perspective to perspective and even back and forth through time with wanton abandon, plot beats happen for no reason at all (seriously, what possesses Jill to have her vaccinate herself out of the blue?!), and there are basically no lasting consequences as a result of this story anywhere else in the timeline of the series.
It’s not all terrible, but by and large it’s disappointing and drags the entire experience down with it. Resident Evil: Revelations sets itself up as an interesting political drama under the guise of the Resident Evil name. Instead, it stumbles and trips all over itself in various hamfisted ways in an attempt to be smart. Double and triple-crosses abound, and the game staggers through it with the grace of a drunkard. I want to like this game’s story, but trying to explain it while staying sane is like treading water in an endless sea.
Graphics
“Damn, it’s like a disco ball’s in front of my face!”
If you look up any list of the best-looking 3DS games, Resident Evil: Revelations is often near the top of all of them. Despite coming out so early in the system’s life, it set an absurdly high standard that was rarely met for the next several years. This is all well and good, but when the game got the HD treatment, things got a little more… interesting. That’s jumping ahead a bit, though, so let’s get down to brass tacks.
On the 3DS, Resident Evil: Revelations is a stunner. Capcom used their highly-scalable MT Framework engine on the handheld starting with Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition, and from there they used it for many games. By the time Revelations had come around, they were well-versed enough with it that they were able to squeeze every ounce of juice out of Nintendo’s little handheld. The game runs flawlessly at 30fps, even when running in 3D. The 3D effect, by the way, is gorgeous. It’s a window into another world and again, the game runs great even when using said effect. It’s marvelous.
The textures and lighting are extremely high quality for a game running on a 240p display, and it all meshes together with fantastic model quality and gorgeous pre-rendered FMVs to bring the whole experience together. Surprisingly, environments end up being fairly open in parts, namely the mountains. Despite this, the game continues to chug along fine and look great in the process. Resident Evil: Revelations is a technical marvel for the 3DS and it’s a standout graphical release for the portable console.
The next year after its release, Capcom released a remaster of Resident Evil: Revelations. This HD version of the game would eventually make its way to every console under the sun, and it has the impressive (or sad?) distinction of being the only Resident Evil title natively on the ill-fated Wii U. The company boasted various improvements to the game, chief among them being completely redone model textures and other texture improvements to better fit 720p-and-higher resolution screens.
True to their word, the models look great on modern displays. Each one is highly detailed, with clear textures. Most of the enemies and allies all look sharp, which is nice! The problem with the HD version’s visuals stem from two main points: the lighting and the cutscenes.
Firstly, the lighting. While the solution worked fine on a smaller screen, the lighting just feels very wrong in the HD version. While it brings life to the scene on the 3DS, it’s hard to describe what happens in the transition to larger displays. Between the better models and the older lighting, it feels like this strange mish-mash that causes the better models to look like plastic dolls in various scenes. It’s extremely distracting to say the least.
The other problem with Resident Evil: Revelations’ graphics are the cutscenes. As I mentioned before, they were made as pre-rendered FMVs in order to better accommodate the 3DS hardware. Unfortunately, it’s made painfully clear that Capcom hadn’t planned this version ahead of time once you play it on a larger display. They clearly used the older models in these scenes, not to mention all those textures in every scene that were meant for a 240p display. Blowing those up to my 1080p display was almost physically painful to experience, so I don’t highly recommend it if you can avoid it. Yeesh.
That being said, the HD version does run pretty well in most instances. The 360, PS3 and Wii U versions target 30fps, while Xbox One, PS4 and Switch target 60. It’s a little less stable on Wii u and Switch, but not so much so that it becomes distracting. Wherever you choose to play it, Resident Evil: Revelations should run great for you.
So, depending on where you play it, Revelations will vary in quality. As a complete package, I’m shocked to say that I think the 3DS version comes together best, with textures and lighting that match the smaller screen far better. While there are higher quality textures and higher framerates in later releases, there are several major drawbacks in the form of the untouched FMVs and lighting that doesn’t play well with higher quality models. It still looks mostly good for the HD versions, but it doesn’t hit the great status of the 3DS version.
Sound
“Good work. That’s music to my ears.”
Much like the graphics above, there’s quite a bit of variation in what’s happening with the audio of Resident Evil: Revelations. The voice acting in particular is a strange case, as most of the characters do just fine. Parker is great, with his actor Kirk Thornton bringing plenty of personality to the amiable BSAA agent. In looking up his name, as a sidenote, I learned a whole lot of other roles he did. I was shocked to find out he’s the voice of none other than the edgelord Shadow the Hedgehog! The more you know!
Similarly, Roger Craig Smith takes his role as Chris Redfield in stride. In his worry for Jill’s safety, it’s interesting to see him laser-focus on the mission, often to the exclusion of everything else that demands his attention. Roger does a great job of this, trying to get everyone around him to focus on the task at hand before worrying about anything else. The care for his partner trumps all else. It’s a great characterization.
However, here’s where things start to stumble a little. The VAs for Quint and Keith are a little bit obnoxious, to say the least. Quint sounds like the kind of stereotypical nerd you’d find talking to Matthew Broderick in War Games. Keith is far less grating, acting as the chilled and relaxed foil to Quint’s hyperactive technobabble, but together they make a very annoying duo that does little more than exist for some comic relief in a game that simply does not need it. This is to say nothing of the fact that Quint is a stalker and it’s played for laughs…
Speaking of which, the girl he’s creeping on is Jessica Sherawat, who Ali Hillis does a great job of embodying. The issue isn’t with her portrayal of Jessica, but rather Jessica herself. I’m all for a sex-positive vibe in my characters and media, but she plays the flirt so hard that her sudden turn as a mole never once shocked me. Near the beginning of the game, she trots out every buddy cop trope to Chris. “Do you trust me as much as you trust Jill?” “Oh, Chris, your mind is always on the mission!” Stuff like this, paired with her ridiculously villainous wetsuit outfit, screamed “I’M GOING TO BETRAY YOU” so loud it almost blew out my eardrums.
Lastly, we get to the leading lady herself. Michelle Ruff plays the part of Jill Valentine, and it’s sort of strange to see something this weird play out that is not her fault. See, her voice as Jill is great! She should be a great fit for the character. The problem, as she’s discussed before, was the voice direction for Jill. She was instructed to make Jill sound as droll and unsurprised as possible for some reason. Apparently, someone confused apathy for badassery. It’s strange because as you might expect, Jill comes off as one step above robotic in-game. Even when she attempts to sound stressed, it’s barely above a casual speaking tone in urgency. Why the voice director would place such a restriction on her, I will never understand. It stonewalls one of the coolest characters in the series for no reason whatsoever. Here, let me cleanse my palette with a good Michelle Ruff performance as Jill.
I imagine this is why Quint and Keith sound the way they do. To their credit, it’s not their fault that Resident Evil: Revelations plays out this way. The voice director made some strange choices, letting some characters like Parker show emotion while stunting others to ensure they sound like they’ve been drugged in the recording booth. The acting itself is great, as the actors sound good and do what they’re told, but it becomes a mixed bag once they’re given poor direction. It’s a strange situation all-round that I don’t recall hearing about happening anywhere else in the series.
Thankfully, the music is very different. There’s practically nothing bad to be said about the soundtrack of Resident Evil: Revelations. The team of composers this time around are Kota Suzuki, Ichiro Kohmoto and Takeshi Miura. If one of those names sounds familiar to you, you’ve been paying attention; Takeshi Miura is one of the main composers from CODE: Veronica. Surely you may expect a great soundtrack from a talent such as that. Thankfully, that’s exactly what you get, as Resident Evil: Revelations shines in this department.
“Lost” is the menu theme of Resident Evil: Revelations and it’s a great introduction to the game. It’s a somber piano and string piece, both of which will see heavy use in this soundtrack. I have a hard time explaining why I think this particular piece is so good, but it instills this feeling of mysteries beneath the surface, if that makes any sense. It’s a great way to introduce your game, and it’s become the main theme of both Revelations titles for a reason.
As soon as you hear “Abyss” begin, you don’t even need to play the game to know that something dramatic and terrible has happened. Sure enough, this is what plays when the Queen Zenobia is hit by a rogue wave. Accompanying this panic-inducing soundtrack is the ship rapidly flooding, leaving Jill and Parker trapped underwater and desperately swimming for their lives as they attempt to find air. The strings again bring a high tension to everything, while backing horns make the escape feel grander and more adventurous. It’s a great track!
No matter the Resident Evil title, it’s practically a necessity to have a good theme for the laboratory. “Red Place” gives off moody, sterile vibes. Some errant piano keys form a mysterious little melody, then a light, constant percussion kicks in with some synth to come together, forming the idea in one’s head of a completely sanitized space that makes you feel dirty inside. You know terrible things have happened here, even if you can’t find a speck of dust in the place. It’s unsettling at best. Strangely enough, it gives me vibes of the soundtrack from something like Perfect Dark or more recently, Zero Escape Vol. 2: Virtue’s Last Reward. It’s atmospheric, and yet strangely catchy at the same time.
In keeping with the dramatic themes of Resident Evil: Revelations, we can toss in some unnerving operatic choir for good mix! “Falling Chorus II” plays near the tail-end of the game. You’re inside a ship at the bottom of the sea, the lights have just gone out, and you come across a dining hall with the half-mutated corpses of Veltro members, laid out with inscriptions memorializing them. There is little more here than haunting voices singing and whispering amongst ambient background noise, but it’s enough to be incredibly effective in the moment. It makes the scene much more impactful.
The final track here actually only plays in Raid Mode, the side-game for Resident Evil: Revelations. “Trace of Riddles” uses a steady bass undertone, piano and ambient synth to create one of the moodiest, most atmospheric tracks in the entire game. While going through familiar areas of the Queen Zenobia, it gives the environment a completely different feel, somehow invoking a far more desolate feeling than the main game despite there being way more monsters attacking you.
So, despite some very strange voice direction, most of the performances are good. The music is stellar, with some of it living up to some of the series’ best. I’ve been fairly critical of Resident Evil: Revelations so far, but the music is nothing to scoff at, and some of the performances are great, with Parker being a standout. All in all, the audio in this game is so far one of its best qualities!
Gameplay
“What a pain in the ass piece of shit. What a night!”
In the years since its release, Resident Evil: Revelations has been hailed as a return to form for the series. In a time when action gameplay was the leading genre for the series, people turned to the 3DS title here and saw slower paced gameplay that was more reminiscent of the older Resident Evil titles, thus determining the game to be a slower paced survival horror entry. However, I’m here today to tell you that this is only about 25% true.
In order to accommodate the 3DS’s portable nature, Resident Evil: Revelations is split into smaller episodes, with chapters in each episode. It actually works quite similarly to Resident Evil 4 and 5 in that regard, with one addition: recaps. In case you have to stop your game for a while and come back to it later, Capcom added story recaps between each episode. They’re unobtrusive and skippable, so they don’t really detract from the game’s pacing much.
As for when you are actually in-game, you’ll be constantly swapping between characters, as I mentioned above. However, the main character of Resident Evil: Revelations is Jill Valentine and you will end up spending the most time in her wetsuit. Jill’s sections are what people refer to when they mention the “return to form” for the series, and on the surface it’s not hard to see why. It’s a creepy cruise ship with ornate decorations, slower-paced gameplay and it’s far more claustrophobic than the more open action titles. There’s lots of exploration around the ship and running around from area to area feels great.
To enhance exploration, Resident Evil: Revelations introduces the Genesis scanner. This handheld device gives you a first-person viewing angle with a scanner HUD. Some items are hidden from view and can only be grabbed once you uncover them with the Genesis scanner. These can range from extra ammo all the way up to necessary key items. To tell if you have something around you to scan, you can peek at the proximity detector on the HUD. If it’s flashing yellow, it means that you should stand still and look around in your vicinity, as something can be uncovered through scanning here. After scanning the item, you can walk up and pick it up like normal. It’s used often and it’s honestly kind of fun to search for items, but I quickly found myself filling up so much on ammo that it became burdensome at times.
Throughout your time playing as Jill, you’ll encounter all sorts of monsters called the Ooze. These slimebags are people infected by the T-Abyss Virus and take on some rather aquatic qualities. For instance, their “tongues” are gigantic toothed suction tubes like lampreys, so don’t get grabbed by one! There are several types of Ooze, in addition to several other grotesque enemies you’ll encounter in your treacherous journey. As a trained agent, however, Jill has several defense mechanisms at her disposal. First is the arsenal she can find throughout her adventures, consisting of the usual pistol, shotgun and magnum. Also, in true survival horror fashion, machine guns. And sniper rifles. …And four types of grenades.
In addition to these guns, Jill can also find a first for the series: customizable weapon parts. In other Resident Evil games, you could either find or purchase upgrades to your weaponry. In Resident Evil: Revelations, you’ll find boxes of weapon parts in all sorts of places. Some are lying around, some are locked in safes, and others are hidden until they’re uncovered by the Genesis scanner. You may find some of them lying around in areas that you very clearly cannot reach. If you use your noggin, you might realize that this means there will be some backtracking throughout the course of the game, but we’ll get to that. As you collect weapon parts, you can find item boxes located throughout the Queen Zenobia to attach and replace these upgrades to your guns as you see fit. This is also where you can equip whichever loadout you please, as you can only carry three guns at a time. I love this customization and it really opens up all kinds of insane combos, even if it doesn’t lend itself well to slow-paced survival horror gameplay.
Making its return from Resident Evil 4 and 5, the melee attack is back! However, Resident Evil: Revelations tries to balance it out from those games. It’s only one melee per character, meaning you can’t do all the crazy melees from 5. The melee attack itself is pretty weak, but you can make it more powerful at a cost. You have to commit to the attack, as holding down the melee button will charge up your damage. If you can pull off a full-power melee, it’s a devastating assault. If you so much as get sneezed on while winding up, however, it cancels the melee entirely. I like this risk/reward system, but it’s really clunky sometimes and I found myself just resorting to my overpowered guns instead of my fists.
Not to be outdone by its console-sized brethren, Resident Evil: Revelations also brings back the emergency dodge mechanic from Resident Evil 3. That said, this too has been modified. Instead of having to aim your weapon or something to that effect when being attacked, you can simply hold forward right when you’re going to take damage, and your character will do a little sidestep out of the way. What I feel makes this a better dodge than in 3 is that you get invincibility frames while dodging, making it feel worth your while to attempt it when in a pinch. It’s still inconsistent when I try to get the dodge, but it’s still more consistent than 3’s so I’ll take what I can get. Needless to say, it’s still not a great dodge and other games in the series do it way better.
All of these enhancements and gameplay modifications to the Resident Evil formula apply to the other characters you play as throughout the campaign, with the exception of the item box and weapon parts. When you play as Chris, Parker or Keith, you have a preset loadout. However, any ammo or grenades you pick up throughout these sections carry over to the next time you play as them. Yes, you read that right. In addition to Jill, your time with Resident Evil: Revelations is split between three other protagonists. Let’s just say that this will be a running theme throughout 2012 Resident Evil titles…
These sections where you don’t play as Jill range from inoffensive to downright grating. They blatantly exist for one purpose: to pad out gametime. To that end, the objectives in these side chapters come off as oftentimes obnoxious filler that the game could do without. The worst example of this are the two Terragrigia Panic flashback segments. In the first segment, you’re meant to experience the desperate escape from the city. Parker and Jessica fight their way to the roof, where they escape by helicopter. It makes sense to show how hard it was to escape with their lives, right? Well, right before the penultimate chapter, you have another flashback to Terragrigia.
Here, it shows Parker and Jessica again, starting at the rooftops. They escape… down to the meeting room where the first flashback begins. Not only do they make you run down one long linear section then back up through it again throughout the course of the story, but they make you do it in reverse order to fit the plot, when the section in question means has next to nothing to do with the plot that O’Brian is trying to describe to Jill and Chris at the time. It’s painfully obvious that Capcom wanted to pad out the game, and it’s just as painful to play through it. I’ll take the lamprey tongue instead, please and thank you.
Worse yet, this padding has little visual variety. Despite boasting its fat 4GB 3DS cart, Resident Evil: Revelations can only hold so much on that size cart. Thus, these secondary gameplay segments take place in revisited areas, sometimes to my utter confusion. In the beginning, Chris and Jessica notice a plane crash in the mountains. The wreckage was full of cages, probably with monsters in them at one point. They move on and eventually, after a long section of caves and cliffs, find an airport way off in the distance. Later on, Quint and Keith examine this airport and discover a security token… for the on-board computer of the specific plane that crashed in the mountains, somehow. They then haul ass all the way back to where Chris and Jessica start their mission, which doesn’t even make sense as they’d have passed the plane to get there since there’s no other way up. After the onboard computer miraculously works and they get just enough info to push the plot along, it dies and they decide to further investigate back at the airport for a better computer to use. They run back and forth for no other reason than to make the game take longer, and it drags on way too much.
Thankfully, the parts of Resident Evil: Revelations that take place on the ship itself are quite entertaining. The atmosphere of the Queen Zenobia is great all around, with moody lighting and the light, constant shifting of the camera with some creaking to remind you that you’re on a ship. The level design of the ship itself is great as well, making backtracking far less linear and painful than it would be otherwise by offering multiple ways to reach just about any other part of the ship at any given time. Running through Jill’s sections isn’t perfect, but it’s far more enjoyable than just about any other part of the game, most of which could be cut and affect neither the story nor the fun factor. Quite the opposite; chopping these excess tumors off the game would probably enhance my enjoyment and keep the story from being a bloated mess.
The base gameplay of Resident Evil: Revelations isn’t bad. It has strong foundations, and in some ways it builds on them to make some fun sequences. However, there are so many sections that are either less fun or downright dumb that it drags the whole gameplay loop down. For all the good that Capcom does in Jill’s sections of the game, it undoes a lot of it by constantly cutting away to either less interesting or far less fun characters and gameplay segments. It hurts the overall package and makes the desire for subsequent playthroughs less enticing as a result.
Extras/Replay Value
“Well, a little friendly partner swapping should keep us on our toes.”
At the start, it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot to be had in the campaign extras for Resident Evil: Revelations. Upon finishing the game, you unlock an additional difficulty. On the 3DS, this is Hell Mode, a harder mode that remains difficult but fair. In the HD re-releases, however, this is renamed to Infernal Mode and is ridiculously difficult to the point of tedium, and finishing it made me feel empty rather than accomplished. There are several unlockable weapons and upgrades you can get by using the Genesis scanner to scan handprints hidden throughout the game, including a machine gun and a sniper rifle. These are nice bonuses to play around with, and naturally, you can unlock the coveted Infinite Rocket Launcher. Instead of being a time-based completion bonus, you get it by beating these harder difficulties. On the campaign side, that’s about all there is. However, there is plenty more meat to this game.
In what I consider to be a much smarter reuse of the game’s assets, Resident Evil: Revelations offers up Raid Mode. Not at all like any of the Mercenaries minigames from games before it, Raid Mode offers up an all new style of gameplay to the Resident Evil franchise. Instead of being a time attack score mode, Raid Mode essentially cuts the main game up into levels with end goals. You begin at level 1, and level up as you do well in these segments. Enemies have levels too alongside health bars, and may sometimes have buffs you have to contend with as well. You play through these chunks of the game with weapons (that have randomized stats) and parts that you can either find in the levels or buy from a shop in the menu. Yes, Resident Evil: Revelations has a Borderlands mode, and it kicks ass.
In the 3DS release of the Resident Evil: Revelations, all the playable characters in Raid Mode are from the campaign. Jill, Chris, Parker, Jessica, Quint, Keith, Raymond, O’Brian, Lansdale and Jack Norman each come with their own special skills; for instance, Morgan specializes in using sniper rifles, while Jill excels with handguns and machine guns. In addition, many of the characters have unlockable outfits that you can use by clearing certain challenges. These can range from hitting a certain level or by clearing difficulties, or even getting a rare weapon drop. There’s plenty of customization here to be had, so feel free to experiment with your friend to see what combo works best.
Oh, did I forget to mention? Raid Mode has co-op available. You can play solo, but in my experience it is far more fun with a friend. The two of you can tackle these challenges together, hopefully pulling some good loot along the way. Raid Mode comes in three difficulties: Chasm, Trench and Abyss. These three difficulties are the same levels, but more and more difficult. Naturally, doing levels on higher difficulties results in getting more EXP, helping you get closer to your max level of 50. You have the same level no matter which character you’re using, so leveling is simple and quick. At least, on the 3DS.
When releasing the game on HD consoles, Capcom decided for some reason to make Raid Mode a complete grindy mess. In fact, aside from some extra content in the form of more variation and rarity in guns and two extra characters (Rachel Foley in her normal and mutated forms, and HUNK as well as a Lady HUNK variant), I find the HD version’s Raid Mode to be a substantial downgrade from the 3DS original. Instead of a fun, smooth leveling system, grinding for levels becomes an existential nightmare. Enemies ramp up in difficulty almost exponentially, making it nearly impossible to progress through even medium difficulty without grinding like crazy for super overpowered weapons with which to take down your foes. The fun factor disappears almost instantly, which did nothing but piss me off. It’s really bitter, because I really enjoyed the side mode in Resident Evil: Revelations. Sadly, that only stays fun on Nintendo’s little handheld.
Despite all the fun content you can get for this game, its fun factor is strongly dependent on where you play Resident Evil: Revelations. On the 3DS, the unlockables you get are really cool with a challenging but fair hard mode and Raid Mode is a complete blast to run through. Unfortunately, in the HD re-releases, Infernal Mode is difficult to the point of being cheap and the Raid Mode in that version becomes such a grindfest that it’s honestly embarrassing that Capcom released it the way they did. This is definitely a mixed bag, as only one of the many, many platforms makes good use of its extras.
Conclusion
“Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”
I think I’ve nailed why I fell off the wagon with this game. When I first played it, I was enraptured with the portable nature of Resident Evil: Revelations. The spectacle of a full-fledged Resident Evil in my hands was awe-inspiring. I wasn’t paying much attention to the story because I was too busy having fun with the wild ride the game puts you through. I was being blind to its faults, to put it bluntly.
Nowadays, it’s hard to ignore it, as just about every re-release puts its issues front and center by removing or undoing the few things the game originally did right. The story is completely ridiculous, full of constantly revolving between multiple protagonists, some of which are some of the worst the series has ever endured. A lot of this isn’t the fault of the actors and actresses; rather, it’s the baffling voice direction and garbage writing that hurt the story the most, not to mention that the head of the “good guys” throws his best agents unwittingly into the jaws of death and gets away with it.
On top of the many and egregious problems with the story and some of the characters, the gameplay getting dragged down by constantly turning away from Jill is a pain. The game reuses areas often to the point where it makes no sense to be in these environments with other characters, other than to squeeze every possible drop of blood from the stone. It’s a situation where I truly feel that less is more, and the need to jump between characters back and forth through time does severe damage to the game’s pacing.
It’s not all doom and gloom, of course; Resident Evil: Revelations has amazing music, with an atmospheric OST that strongly captures the isolated feeling of being trapped on a ship in the middle of the sea. Similarly, the ship’s level design is really fun to run through, making a nice loop that makes backtracking fun instead of grating. Sadly, anything that isn’t the ship becomes a straight line, oftentimes traveled forward and backward. If you’re lucky, you get an arena fight to break it up, but otherwise you’re stuck with level design so straightforward it would make Final Fantasy XIII blush.
Resident Evil: Revelations also introduces one of the most fun additions to the series yet with Raid Mode, which I had tons of fun exploring with friends on the 3DS. A looter shooter version of Resident Evil wasn’t something I realized I wanted until that moment. Sadly, the rest of the issues I have with Resident Evil: Revelations lie with the re-releases of the game. For no discernible reason, Capcom destroyed the majority of the replay value from these versions by making the Raid Mode unnecessarily grind-tacular. It’s utterly obnoxious, doing nothing but wasting the player’s time for daring to play their minigame. This goes for the unlockable difficulty as well; Infernal Mode is an incredible test of patience, requiring copious amounts of extra sanity in your reserve tank to finish. Needless to say, I don’t recommend it.
At the end of the day, I don’t think Resident Evil: Revelations is without merit. It introduces several cool gameplay touches and even a great side mode to the series. Sadly, several of its glaring issues are only magnified when brought to the big screen, with the clearly made-for-3DS textures and models at times looking awful when blown up on larger displays. It only makes me think of the problems I have with it, causing me to more easily realize the issues I have with it. They are many, they are grievous, and in the end, they drag this game down into the deep.
