Exploration and atmosphere are engaging enough, and the added escape room puzzles are novel, but the camera being so close and locked behind every movement, combined with the slow sway when shooting or swinging a weapon feels pretty bad. Lining up the camera at just the right angle to be able to interact with objects is finicky. Enviromental detail is really good and the monsters look cool, but the rendered graphics somehow look weird and everything looks kind of bad. The story is...I mean I've already played the original, and this doesn't really add anything. Maria's model and voice performance is so bad I ended up skipping the cutscenes, but her incessant remarks about everything I do in-game is particularly annoying. Other than all that, it's okay if you buy for at least half price discount.
Plays brilliantly out of the box; I do wish it wasn't 2x upscaled, but Classic REbirth is simple enough to download which allows character model resolution to match the pre-rendered backgrounds with its 'rEtRo' setting. The best part about this is that it's just an old port that works on modern systems; no AI upscaled textures, no reworked lighting, no re-recorded dialogue, just the pc port of Resident Evil. It's as tense, atmospheric, funny, and rewarding as it ever was.
