3/5 ★ – MechaniChris's review of Resident Evil: Revelations.

As a DS game, I’ll bet this was pretty impressive. Playing on the XBox One X right after RE4 feels a bit unfair, but that’s how they released it, so. I do find it interesting how many of these non-mainline series games take place on a ship of some kind. Gaiden, Dead Aim, and now this. Though strangely, despite being the most technologically advanced and featuring two of the series main characters, I found this to be the worst execution of the ship setting, taking place mostly in the bowels of the ship and offering very little in terms of visual or gameplay variety. My main issue however is with the enemies. The T-Abyss virus, while interesting in concept, has created an entirely new kind of aquatic zombie that are scary to look at on first glance, but soon become incredibly boring to fight. They are very much bullet sponges, and shooting them in the head seems to provide no greater satisfaction that shooting them anywhere else. In fact, the combat in general is very unsatisfying due to the lack of impact of your weapons, and the overly sensitive sensitive aiming. It feels SO close to the combat system of RE4, yet feels like a much cheaper knockoff. I guess that sums up my feelings of the entire game. It feels less like an RE title and more like an imitation that borrows a couple of characters. All that said, I don’t want to only bash the game. It was clearly designed to be played on the 3DS and the mere fact that it CAN be played as a console game is impressive for a mobile title. All of my gameplay concerns would probably melt away had I played it in its original format, but unfortunately, it does KIND OF feel like a 3DS game on the XBox. Even the story is fairly interesting compared to the other spin-offs in this series and it’s nice to get a somewhat more grounded experience after the series started taking steps in a more operatic direction. In fact, I would argue that this game is far more story forward than it is focused on gameplay. Finally verdict: it’s okay, decent even. Impressive for mobile, but disappointing for console, which is maybe an indictment on mobile gaming in general. It’s certainly not the worst on this franchise of high highs and low lows. Kind of the definition of middling. But hey, it was nice to see what Chris and Jill have been up to while Leon was off saving the president’s daughter. UPDATE: So! I played a level of the 3DS version that was included with The Mercenaries 3D and my suspicions were correct. The game played immediately better, and was clearly the superior version that I should have played in the first place. It’s hard to say how much better the whole experience would be on the 3DS, but it was enough to raise my ranking of this game a couple slots on my RE ranking list.