Resident Evil 3

Born in a giant's shadow — its misfortune is its timing

To judge this game fairly you have to grant one thing first: it arrived at the wrong moment. A year earlier the RE2 remake had redefined, near-flawlessly, what a remake should be — same engine, same Raccoon City, two scenarios, a tyrant that roamed the whole map — and it planted the bar at a series high. Twelve months on, this third entry takes the baton, and every relative shortfall — the short run, the heavy cuts, the softer horror — gets read against that bar in pitiless light. The press split accordingly: nines calling it relentless terror, sixes calling it a hollowed-out trim. Average it out and it lands somewhere honest: good, but not that good.

Move the giant aside for a moment, though, and judged purely on its own terms this is a well-made, ferociously paced, visually rock-solid piece of cinematic action horror. Strip the comparison away and very little about it actually disappoints. Its problem was never quality. It's size and direction — two things a sequel can fix, and a remake of a beloved original cannot.

Who should buy it, who shouldn't — it depends which horror you came for

The buyer's profile is clear. You want tight, thrilling, cinematic action horror, you're fine with a roughly six-hour run taken in one breathless sitting, and you enjoy what the RE Engine's staging and the dodge-driven combat hand you. If that's you, this is a heart-rate weekend, and it leans cheap often enough that the cost of entry is low. Treated as a single tense evening rather than a months-long obsession, it more than earns its place — few games deliver a rush this concentrated, and fewer still look this good while doing it.

The non-buyer's profile is just as clear. You're after the long haul, high replay value, the step-by-step suffocation of pure survival horror, the RE2 ritual of studying a map and rationing every round. This one will probably let you down — too short, too much like RE2, cut too deep, poking again and again at the "this could have been more" nerve. And one more group should think twice: if you're here for the original's complete Raccoon City, for the clock tower and Mercenaries, this remake won't hand back the city in your memory. It gives you a faster, narrower, more action-forward version, and you'll want to brace for that gap.

Last word — that escape still hasn't been copied

When the bill is totalled, the most valuable thing this game owns is its opening flight. The whole of Raccoon City buckling under your feet, Nemesis breathing down your neck the entire way, fire and rubble hammering the words "nowhere to run" straight into your chest — that single-take cinematic pressure is something its peers still rarely manage to recreate. It may not be the best entry in the series, may not even be the best remake, but it owns one high that nobody else has.

That drive doesn't fade after the opening, either. It holds a no-room-to-breathe urgency from first minute to last, compressing six hours into an escape with no dead air. You can fault it for being short and cut too deep, but you'll struggle to name a boring stretch — that refusal to ever dawdle is its own underrated craft. It's a bowl of golden fried rice cooked only halfway: the bites you get are good enough to make you forget the chopsticks, and then, halfway down, the bowl is empty. Worth it or not comes down to whether you came for those few good bites or for a whole bowl of rice.