Fuck this game. Seriously. Fuck it. I have never had my rose-colored glasses yanked off my face and shattered so unapologetically as I have this week when playing Code Veronica.
This is the first RE game I’ve played in my marathon that hasn’t yet been remade in some form or another. It’s an “HD” re-release of Code Veronica X, which is pretty much the only version you’re going to find anywhere outside of the Dreamcast. First, this being an “HD” port is all kinds of bullshit. This game looks like ass. It’s upscaled, but still uses the original low-resolution textures, low resolution cutscenes, and low resolution everything else. The only things that have been re-worked were the menu and inventory screens, because they would’ve looked like utter garbage scaled up to 1080p or even 4k in the case of the Xbox One X. So “HD” refers to static screens and nothing else.
My younger self owes me an apology. See, many years ago, I lamented the direction the Resident Evil games were going after Resident Evil 4. “They’re too linear,” I said. “They don’t have the mystery and the survival aspect anymore, they’re just action games.” It’s true. I said all that.
Well, ‘Younger Self,’ I can tell you one thing for certain. You’re a fucking moron, and you need to stop asking for things. You see, Resident Evil Code Veronica was the last Resident Evil that would ever Resident Evil before RE4 came out and changed the world. And Resident Evil, it did.
Code Veronica takes the classic RE factor and cranks it up to 10, then breaks off the fucking knob and keeps turning it, then writes a number 25 next to it with a marker. That’s right, on a scale of 1 to 10, it gets a 25. That’s not a good thing, by the way. It’s very, very much not a good thing.
I forgot just how much backtracking and convoluted item-solving were in this game. I hadn’t played it through it its entirety since I was a youngster in college, and I came into with fond memories of it being the best (read: newest) Resident Evil of all time.
In truth, this game is redundant garbage. And that hurts to say, I was a champion of this game for the longest time. But I can’t deny the fact that during my playthrough, I wanted to do bodily harm to myself and others on more than a few occasions. I had forgotten the dark side of Resident Evil. The rage inducing deaths, the head-bangingly monotonous backtracking, and the “wtf were they thinking” game design all came screaming back to me in upscaled, horrendous 4k.
There were so many things that angered me, I began making a list, scribbled on a notepad in non-photo blue map pencil because I could not be bothered to find anything better. So here we go.
This game is fucking dark. Like, literally dark. The only way to adjust the brightness is to adjust the brightness of the screen. That’s right, it wants me to change my actual settings in order to see their shit. No thanks, my HDTV is calibrated just the way I like it.
This is an un-edited direct feed screen grab from the game. This is how dark the game is, even with light sources in the scene. Play “count the zombies.” Fun, isn’t it?
This game is fucking cheap. And I don’t mean that in a “difficult in a way I can’t comprehend” kind of way. I mean fucking cheap. Before I list the ways in which this game kicks you in the balls and laughs, I must remind you; This is a Survival Horror game. Survival horror games work off of a basic concept: surviving the horror. There’s the horror aspect, monsters, ghouls, zombies, mutants, and whatever else is trying to murder you at every turn. The survival aspect is what’s important, and what differentiates it from any other video game where, ya know, something is trying to murder you at every turn. Survival horror was unique in that it meant managing limited inventory space, scarce weapons and ammo, and usually just enough healing items to string you along into the next encounter. Resident Evil didn’t invent the genre, it mastered it. Then Code Veronica came along and tore it all to shit.
Code Veronica commits a few cardinal sins in the survival horror genre. The first is that it respawns monsters. Like, quick. RE has always had a trigger event or two where the game “refreshes” the hallways and rooms you’ve been running through and cleansing, and it does that to keep the game from getting boring. These events usually happen after a certain point in the game, or if the character leaves the area for a while (by that I mean, say, Chris leaves the mansion, goes wandering around in the sewers and guest house, then swings by the laboratory, and then heads back to the mansion like, four hours later.) Usually it’s accompanied by aforementioned trigger events, i.e. the introduction of the hunter. Now, hallways that had been cleansed of zombies now have the possibility of having a hunter encounter. This is nothing new to the Resident Evil franchise and it’s been long accepted as a staple of survival horror.
That’s not what Code Veronica does. CV consistently respawns monsters, over and over, mere minutes after leaving an area, with no explanation. Kill five zombies in a secluded room at the end of the complex, leave, come back five minutes later because you forgot to pick up the green herb, and oh hey, look, five more zombies. In a game where health and resource management are key to survival, this is fucking blasphemy, and it breaks the game. CV requires regular backtracking, and having respawning enemies but no respawning bullets or green herbs is fucking stupid. And that’s only the first way this game is cheap!
Another way the game fucks you is with the cheap hits. In a classic Resident Evil game, knowing when to avoid zombies is as important as knowing when to blow their heads off. Two zombies in a large room with plenty of space? Just run around them, they’re not worth the bullets. In Code Veronica, however, the entire damn game is comprised of narrow walkways and choke points. And those motherfuckers know exactly where to stand so that you can’t avoid them.
So what do you do? You have a choice, either try to squeeze past them before their grabbing animation can kick in, or you kill them. If you are good with the knife, then you sir, are better than I. Just keep in mind that your knife will ricochet off of literally everything. Yep, that’s right, the developers gave the knife collision parameters. Standing in doorway? Your knife will the hit the frame. In a tight walkway between the wall and some boxes? Your knife will hit either the wall, or the boxes. Standing next to literally any object in the game will cause Claire’s swipe to stop halfway, as it clinks against whatever you’re trying not to hit. The zombie standing right in front of you? Yeah, no, it won’t hit that, just everything else.
There are also creatures called Bandersnatches that have a long, elastic arm that will stretch and strike at you from across a room. They’re annoying, and even better, sometimes they’ll give you a slap the exact fucking second you enter a room. That’s right, before you even know where you are, you’re taking a hit from a monster.
Did I mention that health is limited? And heaven forbid you have to avoid this monster and come back later, cuz guess what? It’s pretty likely you’re going to take that hit again when you enter the room. The only way to avoid it is to waste the ammunition and kill it. At least that will buy you a few minutes before, you know, it respawns.
There are other cheap ways the game screws you over, as well. Stagger loops are fun. Ya know, getting grabbed by one zombie, shaking it off, then getting grabbed by another before the player has regained control of Claire. That’s always a hoot. Another fun one is the moth hallway in the Antarctic base. The moths will plant larvae on Claire, which will poison her. There is planter with blue herbs in the hallway as well, which she can use to cure the poison. The player is required to go through this hallway repeatedly, and good luck getting through there without taking hits and getting poisoned. Here’s the kicker, and I tested this myself. Claire is only poisoned when the larvae hatches. There will always be at least one larva that won’t hatch until Claire leaves the room. That means you can stand next to the blue herb (and I did) for ten minutes waiting for the larva to hatch and poison her, and it will not. Leaving the room will cause it to hatch and poison Claire, which means going back into the moth hallway to cure her. Oh, and did I mention that no matter how many times you shoot and kill the moths, they’ll always respawn? There were times I cured Claire, and before I got to the door to leave the room, I was attacked again and re-implanted with larva? Yeah, that’s fun.
The game expects you to live within the rules of the survival horror genre, yet constantly breaks the rules itself. How are you expected to manage your bullets and health items in order to survive, when they’re constantly forcing the player to expend them?
Some of the puzzles are really vague. Not only have I been playing Resident Evil games for a good portion of my life, but I’ve been playing them a lot lately. So if there’s anything that’s fresh and at the forefront of my mind right now, it’s how RE logic works. Code Veronica has a very high number of item puzzles, and some of them are just way too hazy. I don’t know if anyone not accustomed to RE’s way of thinking would ever figure some of these out. For example, Claire watches a video of the Ashford children being disturbing little monsters and plucking the wings off of a dragonfly before feeding it to ants. Okay, weird. But there’s also a dragonfly object in the game, and by examining it, the player will have the option to remove the wings and use it as a key. Okay, fine. Examining objects is a staple of RE, but a newcomer might not get that right away. Another one is the valve object. In the past, there have always been either a valve, or a crank, or a valve and a crank. These are differentiated by their stem shapes. One is usually a square, and one is an octagon. The octagon stemmed valve goes in the octagon hole, and so forth. Easy peezy. But here, they fuck with your head again. Now, only one valve is used for both. The player is tasked with modifying the stem themselves using a grinding machine. Now, I didn’t look around for documentation, but I don’t remember seeing any explanation to do this. I knew to do it, of course, because I’ve played the game before (and I apparently have a strategy guide collecting dust on my shelf so I may have gotten it from that back in the day). A newcomer would not know to do that. It’s just too loose of a connection to make, and if they’re using past RE logic, they’re running around looking for a second crank.
There were other story quirks and dumb shit that I was planning to go into, but I’ve already ranted on the game longer than I expected, so I’ll just leave it at that. There’s some weird chronology that doesn’t make much sense. They seem to get to the Antarctic really fast, like, in a few hours fast. Now I’m not sure exactly where Rockfort Island is… I think they said South Pacific? In true RE fashion they’re extremely vague about the setting, because then they’d have to think. So, I don’t know, maybe it is possible to get to the Antarctic in a few hours. Who knows.
Now that I’ve torn the game a new asshole, is there anything the game does well? That’s a good question. Once upon a time I would’ve shouted from the mountain tops that everyone needed to play this game, but that’s just not true anymore. The game has aged in all the worst ways. The controls suck, the graphics are not good, the puzzle logic is far-fetched, and the acting… oh God, the acting. If there was one thing I think they did well, it was the use of the fixed/semi-fixed camera in a 3D environment. Silent Hill used that to a great effect, and it’s obvious that the CV developers took inspiration from that. It helps to make the game feel more modern, but the tank controls still hold it back.
DOES THIS GAME DESERVE A REMAKE?
Uhhh, hmmm… I don’t… maybe? It’s really difficult to say because the game is terrible. But is it terrible because it’s obsolete, or because it’s just bad? I mean, the original RE on Playstation was obsolete, but still totally playable, despite terrible acting and shitty graphics. It’s really difficult to say if Code Veronica really brings anything to the table that the series couldn’t do without. I suppose it would be cool to play the game with modern graphics and minus all the bullshit I just complained about above, but CV really didn’t consist of anything unique. A lot of the areas we see in the game look a lot like areas we’ve seen in the past. Sure, it’s a different location, but it’s still “laboratory hallway” or “nostalgic mansion.” If anything, I would love to see the importance of the training facility and Ashford mansion minimized, with the bulk of the game taking place in the Antarctic. Also completely eliminate Chris’s island segment, since it was nothing but re-tracing Claire’s footprints anyway, AND this whole idea has already been re-done in Revelations 2 (more on that later). The entire Chris segment could easily be explained in a short cutscene.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
I don’t really know how I ever thought this game was great. I’ll probably get a bit of flack for saying that, because there’s a pretty large fanbase out there that wants to see this game re-made. Despite my negativity in the above paragraph, I do see the potential in a remake, but they would have to re-work a lot to not only make it justified, but have it stand out from the others. The game really amped up the silliness, and I think a lot of that was due to the awful writing and acting. Aflred’s terrible wanna-be Joker is cringey and his backstory is flimsy at best. Also, why is literally every Umbrella founder clinically insane? Is it because of the convoluted way in which they have to lock/unlock their doors? Or are the doors a result of the fact that everyone is bonkers? Chicken? Egg? Anyone?
Okay, I’ve wasted enough energy on this game. So I’ll just close by saying Fuck It.
Fuck this game.
