Resident Evil Dead Aim Review

Playing this game now considering how apathetic I am towards this franchise nowadays was a rather peculiar experience for me.

In many ways, while being a spin off, the game feels like a weird transitional period between old school RE and RE4. The game has the backtracking(no item management but you pick up items like RE4), health management, and going through and unlocking areas in somewhat interconnected maps, but it also has the emphasis on shooting, the lack of puzzles, the use of quick turning, and the awkward movement that RE4 would later have.

The action gameplay while "fine" for the most part and the weapon feel and headshots being satisfying, it can be rather jarring to switch from third person to move around and then first person to shoot. In fact, first person aiming makes the game feel like it's light gun origin with how much the reticle keeps tracking the enemies when close. It's not bad and is serviceable for the most part but it really is easy to see why RE4 would later have over the shoulder aiming. It just leads to less disorientation when lots of enemies are on screen and you have to aim at lots of enemies. Plus enemies get super damge spongey later but more on that later.

The old school aspects of this game while at first can be pretty charming in that it predates RE Revelations in how it emulates the older games style of backing tracking in one location, the ship section is not that long and the game becomes much linear later, so that inital charm slowly starts to go away. All though to this game's credit, this is the only game in the RE series I played where the tactic of running away from enemies actually felt reliable to me since enemies get so damage spongey later, I often had to run away and it worked well, since I don't have to worry about manveuring with the tank controls liked in the fixed camera angle games and have to worry about the zombies' unpredictable movement. This game also doesn't suffer from the same issues of REmakes 2 and 3 where the camera shakes so much to the point when a zombie grabs you, I lose my sense of direction and alignment every time I break out of the grab. In this game, I get grabbed and the camera never shakes.

Overall, my apathy towards Resident Evil and it's fans increase day by day, but this game was a surprisingly decent time.