Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (2017)

Developer Capcom
Publisher Capcom
Platforms xbox one, Playstation 4, PC (windows)
Genre Horror
Reviewer

Review

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

Resident evil 7 (RE7) is a first person survival horror game developed by Capcom available on Windows, Playstation 4 and xBox one. For this review I played the game on the PS4.

Spoilers ahead!

Here it is my first game review of the year, and it's quite a dozy! When I think of a game franchise that divides it's fans my first thought is Resident Evil. The popular opinion is that RE4 is the best one and RE5 and 6 are complete trash and the games before RE4 are too old and clunky, and don't even bother with the spinoffs.

With that said this is my first proper RE game, I played like an hour or so of RE4 and 5, (which I'll defiantly be playing through and maybe reviewing on this site as well).

In Resident Evil 7 you play a man named Ethan, who received an email from his girlfriend Mia telling him to come to this creepy run down mansion in the middle of nowhere in rural Louisiana.

He goes to the mansion and finds Mia who tells Ethan she didn't actually send him an email to come get her but instead she made a video warning him to stay away from the mansion.

Mia then proceeds to turn zombie and attack you. After defeating Mia you are bashed over the head by an old redneck man who ties you up to a chair and tries to force you to have dinner with his redneck family. That would be him, his wife and his son.

You refuse dinner and the redneck tries to kill you, before being interrupted by a phone call. Now the real game begins and you have to find out what went down in this place.

Resident Evil 2

You let a police officer into the house who is quickly killed by "Daddy", (which he calls himself), and you must fight him. It's here you find out that the "Baker" family are all zombie-like where in they've gone fairly insane and they can also regenerate from damage done to them.

Once you defeat Daddy you proceed further in the house unlocking rooms, solving puzzles, and trying not to get killed. You eventually head down to the basement and get confronted by black sludge monsters and Daddy again whom you have to defeat, again, with a chainsaw.

After you're done in the basement, main hall, and upper level of the mansion you find your way outside. There's a greenhouse outside where you face off against Momma and her zombie bugs.

I should also mention periodically throughout the game you get phone calls from a woman named Zoe who we find out to be the Baker's daughter. She gives you objectives to do around the house and also tells you how to cure the zombie-ism affecting the Bakers and your girlfriend.

After you defeat Momma in the greenhouse Zoe rings you and says she will meet you in person in a trailer just outside the mansion. You go there and of course she has been kidnapped by the Baker's son, Lucas.

Lucas's gimmick is that he likes to make elaborate traps to torture and kill people. Lucas rings you in the trailer and says you must find 2 key cards to unlock a building on the estate. Once you do so and go into the building it's filled to the brim with Lucas's traps. Exploding boxes where you have to take the risk of either getting hurt or finding an item, bombs attached to the wall with trip wires, a death match arena where you have to defeat a big bad sludge monster and finally an elaborate puzzle room.

Now before entering the building Lucas is in you should have acquired a video tape which you can play in the trailer, this video tape will let you play as another character going through the elaborate puzzle room first so Ethan can get through the room without dying.

Once you finish Lucas's puzzle room you find Mia and Zoe and make 2 antidotes for the zombie-ism. Here's where you get attacked by Daddy again for the final time, in his massive sludge monster form.

Similar to a Zelda boss he has multiple eyes on his body you have to destroy. Once you destroy him a cut scene plays and you inject him with the antidote which finishes him off once and for all.

You, Mia and Zoe go outside to a boat where you must decide if you'd rather cure Zoe or Mia of their Zombie-ism and go back to the mainland.

You go home by boat with whoever you cured, but after a while of boating you come across a massive derelict freighter ship. You get attacked by the sludge monsters again and Ethan gets knocked unconscious and brought onto the ship.

Resident Evil 7

Here you play as whomever you cured, going around the ship, avoiding monsters, and trying to find Ethan. It's here you meet a little girl named Eveline, who turns out is behind the sludge monsters and infecting the Baker family.

She infects people and takes control of their mind spreading the black sludge and trying to infect as many people as possible. She goes away for a little bit and you find Ethan who was tied up in black sludge. You once again take control of Ethan and watch as whoever you cured gets attacked and infected by Eveline.

You escape the ship and find an old salt mine, then you find a laboratory in the salt mine with a machine that can cure the infection. You insert a blood sample from Eve you collected in the ship into the machine which gives you a cure for her and which should get rid of all the monsters and black sludge and cure the rest of the Bakers.

You make it back to the house, go into the attic where Eve is and inject her with the serum to cure her. This turns her into a huge black sludge monster who tries to attack you, you fight back and eventually the fight is taken outside where helicopters are in the sky circling the mansion. You fight Eve some more and finally a special anti-zombie gun gets dropped from the sky by one of the helicopters which you use to finally kill Eve with.

Resident Evil 7

All the evil black sludge is destroyed, everyone she infected is cured, and you get to ride in a helicopter with Chris Redfield!

Well that was an abridged version of the story of this game, RE7 is very similar to RE4 where it changed the gameplay dramatically from the last 3 games. The game is also available in Virtual Reality on PS4 if you have a PSVR headset which unfortunately I did not get to try out.

I really enjoyed this game, this was the first game in a long while that I finished in a single sitting; it took me a little over 8 hours to beat.

A lot of people are giving the game flack for being "Too Scary" which I have to say is kind of bollocks, personally I did not find the game that scary, mainly at the start when the game is very slow and quiet and atmospheric.

Also Resident Evil fans have been crying out for a truly scary new RE game since RE5 in 2008 and well here you go, your new scary RE game.

Resident Evil 7

What I didn't really like about the game was how combat focused it was, there was a lot of sections that in previous RE games you'd stagger an enemy and run by them and try to avoid combat, whereas here there's multiple situations I ran into where I was forced to kill enemies.

Also the game is a little on the easier side compared to previous RE games. The puzzles are not too demanding, there's no NPC you have to escort and keep safe, there's ammo practically everywhere and they basically give away the materials to craft health items and ammo.

The knife is also kind of overpowered in a weird way, in other RE games you use the knife to stagger enemies and get away, but in this game you can just kill everything with it.

Also in previous RE games it was a requirement to get headshots to kill anything, but in this game you can happily take down everything with body shots and they won't come back.

Also the currency system is super simplified in this game. In RE4 there was a merchant who sold you a lot of items, but in this game you pick up coins so you can unlock three items in the trailer you can completely survive without, (except maybe the health upgrade which in my opinion is too cheap, it costs 3 coins but you should have about 5 even if you're not actively looking out for them).

Overall I'd say definitely pick up this game, it's my first must have game for 2017. You can enjoy it whether you are a Reisdent Evil fan or a first timer.