Reviews
[Review] ‘Resident Evil’ 0, Remake, and 4 Come Home to Nintendo with Underwhelming Switch Ports
The last console of the current generation to get ports of Resident Evil Remake, Resident Evil 4, and Resident Evil 0 happens to be made by the company whose underappreciated Gamecube console gave them their debuts. With all three on Nintendo Switch, these games come full circle from their Gamecube roots, unmistakably home to Resident Evil’s second great run of games. The hook this time being you can play them in portable form.
There’s been plenty written on these games over the years and countless reviews, so we’ll be covering all three in the one review.
We start with the chronological start of the Resident Evil franchise, Resident Evil 0. Setting up the events of not only the original Resi, but the fate of Albert Wesker as well, this prequel sees S.T.A.R.S. team member Rebecca Chambers stranded on an Umbrella train alongside convicted murderer on the lam Billy Coen. Being an Umbrella train naturally means something horrific isn’t far away, and the pair team up to tackle leech-like parasites carrying the T-Virus, zombies, and a rather large and irate scorpion among other things.
The twist to Resident Evil 0 is that you can ‘zap’ between Billy and Rebecca at any time, sharing inventory when they’re close, sending items across to get around obstacles, and getting each other out of scrapes. It’s the embryonic version of the co-op action found in Resident Evil 5, albeit in single-player form. It’s an interesting change to the formula, but it’s applied in a messy manner. Juggling items between two characters can become a massive pain during sections where they can’t interact close enough to exchange, meaning you’re stuck with whatever is in that characters inventory for a bit.
It fills in some story for the rest of the franchise, and it has that same melodramatic cheese factor as the original games, but it’s clearly the weakest of the bunch we have here. It’s a curio in the more traditional style of Resident Evil, but still a welcome, enjoyable one.
Unfortunately, it’s not the greatest port, as load times are painfully long, and given how many small spaces you’ll move between, it really knocks the pace out of whack. It’s not the only guilty party as far as below-par ports go here.
Next up is Resident Evil Remake, perhaps the greatest ever remake of a game. It respects its origins, but revitalizes them in new and exciting ways. Revisiting the Spencer Mansion is simply wonderful no matter how many times you go through it. The classic haunted house setup, filled with Fulci-esque undead (that now may come back to life again as even more lethal ‘Crimson Heads’) and an assortment of nightmare creatures spills out into a melodramatic conspiracy story that fully indulges in its inherent cheesiness. It’s among the best games in the series, plus the fixed cameras and pre-rendered backgrounds mean the game stands the test of time visually.
The biggest, and most welcome, change to the original story is the introduction of the tortured Lisa Trevor, a tragic, disfigured monster, her howling and moaning echoing off the walls long before you see her. She has a fascinating back story, and it really enriches the overall lore of the Spencer Mansion.
With the more recent version of this port and that of Resident Evil 0, there are alternate control schemes to suit more modern audiences. It’s a little touch, but it opens these games up to a wider audience, even if it can be just as fiddly as the original control setup at times. It’s certainly the more suitable way to play on the Switch in portable mode. The frame rate can be a tad choppy at points, and though it’s rarely a grievous issue, it’s a strange fault to have when this is a port of a remaster of a 17-year-old game that worked perfectly fine before.
To go a little deeper on the Switch versions benefits, it’s amazing how well suited these two games are to the portable mode, it allows for a greater focus on the games themselves and the relatively sedate pace of 0 and Remake make for engrossing experiences to be enjoyed in short bursts or lengthy sessions.
Resident Evil 4 is a different beast. The rebirth of Resident Evil as a more versatile action-orientated survival horror, and the first to abandon the Umbrella plots for a new breed of zombie terror via the Las Plagas virus. If Resident Evil before this game was a European style zombie nightmare, then Resident Evil 4 brings a bit of folk horror to the party. Resident Evil 2 co-protagonist Leon Kennedy returns as a special agent searching for the President’s daughter in rural Spain. Of course, there’s some weird cult shit going on, and you’re quickly determined to be a threat to the village’s operations, evoking the likes of Texas Chainsaw and The Wicker Man.
It’s no secret at this time that Resident Evil 4 is a stone-cold classic. Sure, its controls feel a bit dated in a very different way to Resi 0 and Remake (some modern remapping would have been nice as a side option, and it’s a shame motion controls didn’t return from the Wii version), but its D.N.A. is so entrenched in every third-person shooter that’s come since, that it feels warmly familiar, yet unlike anything else. The siege against the Ganados, the boss fight on the boat, the first dread-inducing rev of a chainsaw, and that knife fight are just some of the memorable highlights of a stellar action horror game.
Compared to the other two games, it doesn’t fit the Switch’s portable mode quite as well, but it’s easily the most stable and polished port of them all. Plus it’s an absolute cracker of a game so that helps.
All three games also come with all the extra content found in other recent ports, but it’s a shame that the technical side doesn’t match even the baseline of them. The Switch versions are not cheap, so to have issues not found in previous ports and charging more for the inconvenience takes the shine off having these games on the Switch in the first place.
It’s cool to have more Resi on the go, but there shouldn’t be with caveats.
Resident Evil 0 Score:
Resident Evil Remake Score:
Resident Evil 4 Score:
Resident Evil Remake, Resident Evil 0, and Resident Evil 4 review codes provided by the publisher,
Resident Evil Remake, Resident Evil 0, and Resident Evil 4 are out now on Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
Chuck Tingle‘s writing is embedded with a particular tonal trick that makes him perfectly suited to horror. “Propulsive” is the first word that comes to mind when I think of Tingle’s energetic prose, and when his books start wrapping themselves around characters and digging through their various complexities, it’s easy to be pulled along, absorbed in the feeling that an old friend is simply telling you a story.
Then Tingle will drop one of the single creepiest bits of imagery you’ve ever read, and you’re right back in the horror space. It’s not always a jump scare, but it is always a pulsing feeling of dread that keeps you hooked through the rest of the book.
Fabulous Bodies, Tingle’s latest horror novel, carries on these gifts, and the promise Tingle showed on books like Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays. His fiction’s growing ever more confident and precise, and his eye for horrific detail hasn’t dimmed in the least, making this a summer reading delight for horror fans.
Poppy is a single mother determined to make a better life for her daughter, particularly after growing up in group homes and foster systems. By day, she works hard to keep up the flow of upbeat, enthusiastic content as a fashion influencer, and while that’s going well, it’s not yet making ends meet. To make up the difference, she moonlights as a grave robber, lifting bodies from morgues and funeral homes and selling their pieces on the black market. It’s grueling, dangerous work, and it’s about to pay off big. Out of the blue, Poppy gets a call to transport the newly dead body of her musical hero, the legendary Eddie Michaels. It’s a weird gig, but the payout is big enough that she could walk away from her macabre side gig forever. Poppy takes the job, and things get complicated when Eddie turns out to be, well, only mostly dead.
From the moment Eddie’s corpse enters the picture, Fabulous Bodies takes on the vibe of a road novel, as the grave robber and the undead rock star make stop after stop, and Poppy tries again and again to wrap her mind about what she’s gotten herself into, and how she might get herself out. It’s a delightful premise, and Tingle never loses his grip on the fun of it. No matter how dark the novel gets, and it does get quite dark, the narrative keeps barreling forward, delivering macabre laughs and moments of beautifully gruesome invention along the way.
Because he’s set his protagonist up as a fashion influencer, Tingle has lots of room to play in the space of how we view human bodies, both alive and dead, how we use them, and what we value in them. This is the emotional core of Fabulous Bodies, and while it’s sometimes overshadowed by the runaway train of the plot, it remains a potent source of thematic exploration throughout the book, and it gets more complicated when you consider certain gifts Eddie’s been granted in his strange supernatural state.
In essence, we’re looking at a story about a grave robber who discovers a body that not only fights back, but takes control of any given situation. That throws Poppy for repeated loops and keeps the plot moving, but it also makes us consider on a deeper level exactly what we value about our own physical form, and what might happen when we lose our grip on it entirely.
The book’s themes and emotional concerns hum through the whole narrative, but the overwhelming impression I got while reading Fabulous Bodies was just how much damn fun this book is. I couldn’t stop reading it, not just because it’s so filled with sudden swerves and ghoulish setpieces, but because Tingle has honed his horror storytelling down to a fine, very sharp point. Fabulous Bodies moves like a roller coaster, complete with a tension-filled ramp-up and a finale that’ll leave you breathless by the time the ride is over.
If you haven’t been reading Chuck Tingle’s horror work up to this point, it’s time to get on board, because he’s just getting started, and he’s already mastered the art of the scary page-turner.
Fabulous Bodies is available now.
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