Chris Cooper ranks the Resident Evil games…
Back in 1998, around the time the second game was released, was when my relationship with Resident Evil began. My brothers and I were too young to be playing it but we’d managed to convince our mum to get us a copy of the first game now that it had gone Platinum and was only £20.
Perched on the edge of the bottom bunk in front of our 14″ CRT, we waited. What followed was the start of a fascination with a franchise that has both amazed and frustrated me. Several times I’ve been on the verge of giving up with the series, but it’s still here and I’m still playing it two decades years later.
I’ve played a lot of the games so thought I’d rank them in ascending order. Let me know what you think!
12 – Resident Evil Survivor – PS1, 2000
When I was younger I’d lap up anything from the franchise. They could have served dog poop on a plate and I’d have tried to plug a controller in.
So I happily played Survivor, ignoring the fact the controls were a mess, and that I couldn’t use my lightgun (a pretty severe misjudgement for what equated to a shooting game!) Survivor forced the arcade shooter style onto the style of the original games with little thought given to how they’d combine. The story plodded, and even the enemies looked as bored!
The absolute antithesis of Resident Evil 7, Survivor is a badly designed and poorly thought through game that does nothing for the series.
11 – Resident Evil 0 – GameCube, 2002
I can explain how interesting I found Resident Evil 0 by telling you that I had to google what the story to remind myself what happened in it.
Capcom had found a way to make a game set around the most popular time in the chronology without wrecking the story they’d already told. That’s cool, but it would be cooler if it really had anything to say. RE0 doesn’t make much of a contribution to gameplay or story in the series.
I don’t care about Rebecca Chambers or Billy Coen. Zapping between characters was novel at best. There’s no denying that it’s a very nice looking game, but RE0 didn’t leave much of an impression, other than the feeling that Capcom wasted time sticking story where there didn’t need to be any.
10 – Resident Evil 6 – Xbox 360, 2012
RE6 was the ultimate culmination of the ideas introduced in RE4, and the absolute opposite of everything the original trilogy represented as it fully embraced dramatic horror over survival horror. Bar a brief time with Leon where things felt tense, the game falls into action sequence after sequence, completely forgetting what made the series successful.
I really wanted to see the meeting between Chris Redfield and Leon S. Kennedy. Perhaps my expectations were too high, but it felt as though it was written by a ten year old. The whole story is clumsy and obvious, with the only mystery coming from how everyone ended up in this position.
The series ‘chronology had become so convoluted by this point that some characters have had children, who have become involved, and other younger characters have become badass agents themselves. It makes the world feel very small.
Nivens made for a half decent new addition—NIVEEEENNSSSS—but overall the only saving grace was getting to laugh at it via co-op. An overly bombastic and numbing affair.
Originally published June 16, 2018. Updated July 27, 2024.
