Post Script
Does Resident Evil 3 really represent poor value for money?
An unpalatable truth about modern videogames is that most people don’t finish them, though the completion percentage for Resident Evil 3 should be a good deal above the average. The lowest difficulty setting, Assisted, gives you an assault rifle from the off, and aim assist to make your shots more likely to hit the weaker enemies from whose attacks you can recover more easily – ensuring that just about everyone should be able to reach the end. On our first playthrough on the Standard setting, even playing cautiously and thoroughly, saving often and collecting all documents while pillaging just about every locker and attaché case, our run concludes at just over the six-hour mark. Before subsequent replays, our total playtime (which would appear to include continues after deaths and cutscenes) is a little over eight.
By current blockbuster-franchise standards, that’s a little on the short side, albeit comparable to the game it’s remaking. Though it doesn’t have the original’s multiple endings – which were determined by key choices that are also absent here – there are still incentives to play again. You can try for a faster clear time to improve your ranking: an S rank requires you to finish within two-anda-half hours having only used five saves. The points you’ve earned from actions throughout the story can be spent on equippable items that increase the damage you deal or reduce the amount you take. You can start with the lockpick and bolt cutters to save time, or spend credits on a knife that sets zombies on fire. The campaign’s relative brevity, in fact, makes it particularly suited to speedruns.
It’s more faithful to the original in spirit than in – forgive us for using the c-word – content, reworking sections substantially and introducing new ones, while prudently cutting others. Yet the very fact that it’s missing features from the original will be enough for some to trot out the ‘lazy devs’ accusations, even given the vast disparity in presentation standards. This is, in part, one of the inherent problems with remakes: a certain degree of faithfulness is expected, and any diversion from that is always likely to cause ructions among long-term fans (in that regard, Resident Evil 3 is hardly this month’s main offender). Yet content, as Bill Gates once said, is king – and in that regard it’s easier to see why the question of value has been raised so often and so vocally. Indeed, Capcom made something of a rod for its own back with last year’s Resident Evil 2 remake. That, too, was missing elements of the original: its two campaigns ultimately weren’t as distinct, nor would actions in one have a tangible impact on the other as they once did. Even so, that was enough encouragement to replay the campaign at least once, while the 4th Survivor mode (and even its jokey tofu-led variant) incentivised further attempts. The publisher can point to Resistance to justify Resident Evil 3’ s price tag, though – who could have guessed? – it appears most Resident Evil fans would have preferred a more substantial singleplayer component.
The value question is one we’re always thinking about, and we recognise that our own perception is skewed slightly by circumstance. We rarely review games under optimal conditions; deadlines, late code and embargoes demand we have a more concentrated experience than the average player who might complete a game in relatively bite-sized sessions over a longer period of time. So we’re perhaps less likely than most to complain that a game is too short – although, of course, we’ll always speak out if its length negatively affects it in any way. Outside extreme cases, we believe our role should not be to determine whether a game is worth your money – not least because a game’s price is rarely constant – but your time. At six to eight hours, give or take, we recommend playing Resident Evil 3; only you can decide how much that’s worth to you.