Resident Evil 3 (2020)

A half-finished Jill sandwich.

A while ago already, I decided to celebrate the then-upcoming Resident Evil Requiem(9) by doing a marathon of the previous mainline titles. I also planned to review every game I completed. A new Resident Evil sequel was a silver lining to look forward to, considering how much of a trainwreck 2025 was for me.

But I’ve attempted marathons such as this in the past. The problem is I’ll start to feel the strain at some point. See, there’s an important fact about video games I should’ve learned at age five: they’re supposed to be fun. When they stop being fun, and they become as much of a chore as a career or housework, you’re supposed to quit playing them.

The Resident Evil 3 remake is where that strain began. I would find free time in my schedule, and the thought process would go, “Hey, I loaded the dishes and scrubbed the toilets. Maybe I ought to play a game as a reward. Now, what game am I working on right now, as part of this marathon I am, for sure, dedicated to completing?

“Oh. Oh, that one.”

The first two remakes were landmark accomplishments. Capcom expanded the maps in ways that felt natural. They added surprises and new challenges in unexpected places. And they included everything old alongside the new. REMake had the guardhouse and the caves, and RE2Make included the sewers beneath the Police Department—even that big pipe filled with the cockroaches.

Best of all, these remakes made Resident Evil feel scary again. They had tankier zombies that transformed into Crimson Heads, and Mr. X chasing us while we struggled to remember the next steps in our routes. The remakes heightened the tension in what otherwise used to be campy experiences.

Now in 2020, the best year of our lives, it was time for Resident Evil 3: Nemesis to receive the same treatment. Since the previous remakes did such a great job with their source material, the expectation was that 3Make would do the same. Considering the kind of gameplay Nemesis had, they might even do it better. RE3 moved the action to exterior locations, a welcome change from the character being trapped in a building. The titular Nemesis, a hulking, unkillable mutant, stalked Jill Valentine everywhere. There were branching Choose Your Own Adventure moments that determined where Nemesis showed up.

Taking all this into account, there was no limit to what Capcom could do 21 years later. I remember reading threads where users speculated what the upcoming 3Make might be like. They imagined a sprawling, open world Raccoon City, where Nemesis could stalk Jill in real-time. Maybe she could even commandeer abandoned cars, like a Grand Theft Auto with monsters.

Resident Evil 3 is chronologically unique, in that the first half is a prequel to Resident Evil 2, and the second half a sequel. Opening a day before Leon and Claire arrive in Raccoon City, it depicts a town in screaming, hellish chaos as the infection overwhelms it all. As everything falls apart around her, Jill decides to make a final escape from Raccoon City while she still can.

Along the way, she will run into adversaries and allies alike. There’s Nemesis, of course. There’s also zombies, spongier naked zombies, spider monsters, and sewer atrocities. But Jill finds help in Carlos Oliveira, a member of the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Service. Now, I’ll try to ignore a pharmaceutical corporation having its own private military. Better yet, why was a Biohazard Countermeasure Service already established before this incident, as if Umbrella predicted such a calamity? These are the logic problems reserved for time travel subreddits.

In the PlayStation original, the game’s early story events were spread around a lot of exploring and item collecting. Capcom used pacing wisely, making you wait for Nemesis to heighten the suspense. But in the remake, all those early story events are served like Instant Mashed Potatoes. Nemesis doesn’t wait for the right moment before revealing himself. He crashes through Jill’s apartment wall within the first two minutes, the perfect place for a modder to add an appropriate, “OH YEAH!”

A carnival funhouse ride of linear laziness follows, with fleeting references to memories from the original game. They pop up in front of you and are then gone, as the remake travels along on rails. That once expansive outdoor area is limited to a few alleyways and buildings. No gas station, no parking garage, no sales office. Ther’s an arena big enough to space out some zombies, a doughnut shop, some interiors behind the doughnut shop, and an upstairs apartment. Whatever else you can call the city is so straightforward, it might as well be another indoor hallway.

As for Nemesis, he’ll pop up to yell “STARS!” like a bothersome puppet. Then you hold down the run button to get away from him. And I cannot stress enough how much of this game involves holding down the run button, or mashing other buttons to survive Quick Time Events.

To be fair, all the linearity and run buttoning happens in the game’s first half. The second half evens out to where it feels like a Resident Evil game again, with the exploring and item hunting making a return. But there’s no clock tower, no park. The final ‘Dead Factory’ area is reduced to a laboratory called NEST-2, named as such because the first NEST was at the end of RE2Make, and Umbrella isn’t clever with their wordplay.

Like remade Leon and Claire, every character curses a son of a bitchtits fucking shitbird lot. I am no prude—trust me on that. I just find it silly. Although maybe it makes more sense for Jill to swear the way she does in 3Make, having fought through two traumatic events. And Capcom puts her through the wringer during her escape, scratching, burning, and bruising her character model. By the end she’s a regular Joanne McClane, albeit with less air vents.

There’s plenty to dislike about 3Make, but it would be disingenuous to say I dislike everything. First, it looks fantastic. Turning up the graphics settings shows lot more photorealism than uncanny valley weirdness. 3Make is a pretty, shiny game, especially since Capcom toned down that squishy face effect from RE2Make.

Capcom also retains the dodge move mechanic from the PlayStation version. It’s much easier to perform now, which is critical in a game where bigger groups of zombies are more abundant. In the original Resident Evil 3 you needed a speedrunner’s twitch to pull off a dodge.

RE3Make is not a bad game. But it’s not a great game either. It looks nice, controls well, and does’t suffer from frequent crashes. That said, the previous remakes did so much, while this lazy and rushed product does so little in comparison.

This is the kind of game Steam Sales were made for. As of this writing, the regular retail price, six years later, remains $40. That’s insane. A game with this caliber of content is better suited as cheaper paid DLC, not full-priced software.

Get it cheap, play it, and forget about it.

Final Rating: **