Resident Evil: Revelations Review

Resident Evil has been on handhelds before but Revelations is the first time the experience has been so successfully ported over, but to my dismay its just not an experience I want to have on a 3 inch screen. Revelations takes place between RE 4 and RE 5, but despite a story that involves a massive ocean-floating utopia and a satellite that shoots solar rays eviscerating anything in its path, the story is completely inconsequential.

Revelations resembles RE5 the most, in terms of controls and tone. You can't move while aiming and a lot of the button configurations are the lifted straight from RE5. Tonally the game is more action focused scaling down some of the bigger set-pieces from 4 and 5 to accommodate the handheld format. The action feels great, my only advice is to immediately switch to third-person view in the options simply because first-person feels janky and more cumbersome.  The game follows an episodic nature wherein you switch perspective of several duos of BSAA agents in different locations all the while unraveling the mysteries of the Queen Zenobia a luxury cruise liner that has become the homebase of a radical terrorist group known as Veltro as they threaten to expose the conspiracy surrounding Terragrigia the aforementioned floating paradise and its untimely destruction. The story jumps between Jill and her new vaguely European partner, Chris and his hyper-sexualized female partner, and a duo of bad SNL castoffs, one of which is named "Jackass" (I wish I was joking) who has the most grating voice I have ever heard.

If you couldn't tell by the description the plot is a mess and worse still is that its uninteresting and irrelevant as it is over and dealt with by the end of the roughly 8 hour campaign. The most impressive aspect of this game are the graphics, which are the best of any handheld to date (the PlayStation Vita is still not officially out at the time of this writing). The environments and character models are incredibly detailed, looking as good as their console brethren. You spend the vast majority of your time on the massive ship, thankfully its interiors are varied and detailed enough that it doesn't become monotonous or even confusing when you begin to backtrack. Yep there is a lot of backtracking in this game, going through the same areas again and again as you find ways to access doors you couldn't before, this time with twice as many enemies around, its a chore but at least the combat is fun.

Revelations is anything but, its a side-story that doesn't even warrant the convoluted plot it's given. The campaign is lengthy and filled with fun combat and cool puzzles. The backtracking gets tedious as does an overabundance of underwater traversing segments, which veteran videogame players know is always poorly executed. So while the story is boring the gameplay itself is fun and beautiful to behold, and a "Raid" mode akin to hoard or firefight modes in other games extends the lasting appeal with combat focused co-op (online or local) missions. But when it comes down to it, as great as this game can sometimes be I just don't want this type of experience on a handheld.

(3 out of 5)