Sometimes I find it hard to know what to think about a game. It can be especially hard when it's an installment in a great series. The first Resident Evil is one of my favorite games of all time, and
the second was one of the greatest follow-ups ever made. Those accolades would be enough to ensure that the third game Nemesis would be a disappointment. After all, once you reach the top, there's only one way to go. However, Resident Evil 3, while decent, has enough problems gnawing at it even without the sky-high expectations from the previous games.
The third game's plot is all over the place in every sense. Picking up in the middle of the zombie apocalypse attacking Raccoon City, the game follows Jill from the first game as she tries to escape the dying town. However, setting roadblocks for her is the Umbrella Corporation, the company behind the infection. (NOTE: I would have given a spoiler alert for those who hadn't played the first two games, but those people had twenty years to play them. So, whatever.) There is a team of mercenaries hired by Umbrella to clean up all evidence of their wrongdoing in the city that she gets mixed up with, but the bigger concern for Jill is the Nemesis, a near-indestructible beast that's actually programmed to hunt her down. The game does take some interesting chances with its storytelling due to its Live Selection system where, at certain story points, the player can make a choice on how to proceed. However, the decisions in the end don't result in any drastic changes to the story, a definite missed opportunity. While the story of this game is significant to the overarching narrative of the series, it doesn't stand well on its own like the first two games' stories did.
Click For the Full Picture Archive
While the first two games kept a balanced mix of action and puzzles, the third game shifts the balance to favor the action part. There are very few puzzles in the whole game though, thankfully, they are more involved than previously. The action got a huge boost here. More enemies are onscreen at once. Jill can mix her own ammo in addition to herbs this time. There are environmental attacks available, the most common being the cliched exploding barrels. Jill also got two new moves at her disposal. She can do a quick 180 turn, but surely they could've given it its own button rather than mapping it to down and square, couldn't they? Jill also has a dodge move that operates like the parries in Street Fighter, demanding timing so perfect that trying to do them caused more deaths than they prevented.
The game definitely pushed what the original PlayStation could handle. The character models were some of the best the system produced. There were points that I saw nearly a dozen zombies onscreen at the same time with no drop in graphic quality. The locations had more variety than the previous games and look excellent even now. The voice acting was much improved over the first two games though there was still plenty of overacting. However, the one element that keeps the game from falling to a "C" is the titular Nemesis. Its design was outright terrifying, and its growl of "STARS" never stopped getting my heart racing. Even worse, it's armed with a rocket launcher at points and would actively chase Jill through multiple areas. Even escaping to a save room won't necessarily get it off Jill's back; it'll just wait for her to come out. Even now, the Nemesis can provide the same sense of panic that the xenomorph in Alien: Isolation could.
Resident Evil 3: Nemesis does plenty right with its sense of terror. However, while I could play the first two games over and over again (and have), I don't feel the same desire with the third. Though it tried a few new things with the plot and beefed up the action, it lost the magic that the other games had. While it is worth checking out for those invested in the series, in the end, I just didn't care if Jill escaped or not.
