Review: Resident Evil 7: Biohazard [2018]

a review by the Azure-Winged Magpie.

Let’s do this!

Opening Thoughts

Note: My brains are still fried from my review/analysis (…?) of A Serbian Film.
(I don’t feel so good, Mr Capcom…)

Okay. So…

It’s been a while since I played a game…

I haven’t played any of these games before. This is my first one, and yeah… I’ve seen the “movies“ they made “based“ on these games ^yuck!, which I know have sweet FA to do with the games (what happened to the dude from Event Horizon?!), and don’t know sweet nothing else about the series. But…! Guess what?!

THE MAGPIE DOES WHAT THE MAGPIE WANTS! 

^☂️(ಠ ◡ ಠ^✿) — 🧟

And Imma start with NUMBER SEVEN! ^{because I CAN!}

What do I know about it? Nothing. What do I expect from it? Well… spooks and dooks. And what did I get from it?

A lot. A LOT of spooks and dooks.

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RESIDENT EVIL VII: Biohazard

WARNING: This section contains MINOR spoilers.

The game starts up in the POV of this girl who’s looking at this icky lovey-dovey video that she sent to her husband (I mean this vid makes my teeth get all itchy from the icky–sweetie-shit going on). And THEN… you hear her hyperventilating…!

She types some stuff into her laptop and starts recording a video to her man. She says she lied. She says that if he ever gets the video she’s recording, he should…

Stay away.

So you (yeah, YOU) play the muppet she’s sent the video to: this bloke Ethan, who’s lukewarm on the trail of his wife Mia (the girl from the video, obviously) who went gone missing THREE YEARS ago. He’s on the phone with a mate of his (in a scene like the intro of The Shining) and we get to hear all about this.

He offskies to this place out in the woods in Dulvey, Louisiana (which I looked up and is totally a real place), because he says “she wants [him] to come and get her”… which is TOTALLY NOT WHAT SHE SAID. 

So he parks in the middle of nowhere and waddles around, and finds a big ol’ house just kinda… hanging around in the middle of this nowhere. Some spooky dooky shit is lying around, and you’re kinda taken for a little ride before you actually get into the house. You find a VHS and start playing as a guy from this documentary crew who did a ‘Haunted House’ doc about the place for this show called Sewer Gators (oh what a name! What a lovely name!). It’s the usual story: “Abandoned farmhouse. Missing Family. Foul play suspected.” no biggie. Oh, and they’re called the Baker family. That’s something they tell us too.

The doc crew’s tape shows some Blair Witch shit going down, and I guess the lot of them bite the dust. We see the feet of whoever done dusted them, and… that’s kinda it. Pretty disappointing, that.

So you waddle around a bit, and you find Mia (like, obv), who’s been locked up in this tiny gated room in the basement. She’s alive! And she’s all confused. And she’s ready to ESCAPE.

You waddle around the big ol’ house. You see some spooks and dooks. Mia talks some weird rubbish (loony-speak). A door goes missing (a DOOR!). You find a dollie! …

… You hear about this “family” that “used to bring [her] food”. And you try to get some answers out of your waifu, but like fuck if she’s going to give you any. All she wants to do is up and get the fuck outta there.

And you do! You get away and you and Mia live HAPPILY EVER AFTER!

…
lol. JK.

This shit happens:

And just like that…

WELCOME TO THE BAKER FAMILY, SON! 

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Gameplay / Build

So Resident Evil VII‘s kinda a good example of survival horror. But it also has a bunch of problems that hold it down a bit.

It’s got a lot more action in it than games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Layers of Fear (which basically has no action), and I thought that it would’ve been better if maybe the action was kept out of the game a little more. The boss battles and stuff is fine, but we’re playing the usual muppet-who-becomes-an-action-hero in this one all over AGAIN.

In the beginning, when Mia goes… “nuts“ in the headcase, Ethan’s kind of a little not-used to fighting and everything’s really realistic (um… ignore that) and kinda fun. But once she’s “dealt“ with, the guy turns into Jason fucking Bourne or something.

And the fun kinda starts going away later on when the game just starts handing you guns and stuff to blast away at creepy-crawlies with (more on them in a mo). It’s a way lot more action than the game shoulda had, I think. Yeah, the ammo’s low and all. Health’s a bit hard to come by. But it’s just not giving me horror vibes, it’s giving me action vibes in the dark (put the vibes next to the creepy-crawlies for the mo).

There aren’t too many puzzles in the game, even though I thought there would be. They’re pretty easy to solve and I was kinda let down by that. I mean making puzzles too difficult isn’t fun either, but every example of the puzzles in this one was piss-easy.

The creepy crawlies just aren’t fun. The first few times, they’re fun to see and deal with. But they’re just standard videogame baddies just there to kill time. They look cool, though. I like the designs. And fuck those bugs Mummy Maurgerite births out. They were just flat fucking annoying.

So… the every-day baddies… not so much fun. But damn are the bosses ever fucking COOL. My favourite has to be Daddy. That dude is just straight-up nightmare fuel. He made me squirm in my pants every time he showed up right from the first punch. Maurgerite was alright, but fuck those bugs. And Lucas can go jump in a fucking fire, the annoying little shit.

But here’s the thing. I like Maurgerite’s boss fight (fuck those stupid bugs), and even Lucas’ little arena thingie, but Daddy Jack was the most fun BEFORE he goes full monster-mode. I liked him when he was hick-Wolverine SO MUCH more. His big, lumpy monster-self was just fucking weird and I didn’t like it. It’d be better if it was something else and not how Daddy goes down. It kinda shit all over the guy they’d spent so long making me squirm over. Daddy’s the one we get to “fight“ most often and every.SINGLE.ONE of the first few boss battles with him are fun as all hell. Such a disappointment that he goes down looking like a big puddle of tar…

Now, let’s throw bosses and gameplay to a side and talk about the atmosphere and feel of the game…

This game looks AMAZING, and it’s got a great horror atmosphere going for it. There’s a lot of sci-fi things going on that show up in a pretty big way later on, but I really couldn’t care about it. Maybe that’s just for people who’ve been following the story ever since the beginning, but it really didn’t work for me. It’s kinda like they ruined the horror by going into the whole experiment that’s going on. But I do like the horror vibes the game DOES have. It’s pretty neat, and even though the game tries to ruin it, it’s still there. It could’ve been used a lot better, imo. But hey, I don’t always get what I want.

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Closing Thoughts

I did kinda like playing this one, even though everything that’s cool about it ends up being a disappointment when the fun should really get going.

Oh, and one thing I should mention: this game really loses its surprises after the whole Mia thing. The game kinda tells you what to expect. And that takes a lot of the fun away.

I really wish horror EVERYTHING would stop doing shit like that. That’s how you fuck things up.

It’s a neat little game, but it’s not one of my favourites. I think Capcom could’ve done a lot more with this game. It’s an okay 12 hours (or something like that. I spent a lot of time fucking around). I don’t even think I’m going to go and recommend this one. It’s alright, but it’s not something I think was worth the time and the money I spent on it (I could say that about most games, tbf). I had fun, I guess, but not that much fun. The first two hours and the first battles with Daddy were the only real highlights of the game far as I can say. And it looks and feels nice. So there are those things.

It could be that fans are going to like this game a lot more than I did. I mean, some characters from the series show up in the story and it’s not like the game’s just a stand-alone, but it might as well be one with the way it’s set up and everything.

If you’re a fan, go ahead and play it, but if you’re someone new to the series, don’t expect this one to floor you with how awesome it is. It’s nice, and that’s really it.

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Final Ratings

THE AZURE-WINGED MAGPIE: 6.5/10

THE CROW: NA/10

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Here’s the official poster: