Gameplay

Resident Evil Village, or Resident Evil 8, note the roman numerals VIII in "Village," is a game that stays true to its roots. There can be no doubt that this is a Resident Evil title even after only half an hour of gameplay. This is a good thing, of course, even though I probably wouldn't mind if some new ideas were tried out with this game series. You work your way through rooms solving puzzles, always getting a bit closer to your goal, fighting enemies in-between.

I completed the whole game in a little over 10 hours, which isn't that much I have to admit, especially considering the asking price of $59.99. I felt extremely well entertained in those hours, though. This time, the game takes you to Romania in Eastern Europe. The setting is also much more open-world than before even though the game is still extremely linear and the maps are rather compact. In terms of graphic violence, Resident Evil 8 is definitely more brutal and bloody than previous Resident Evil games.

The story is decent, but nothing we haven't heard before. Near the end, there's a couple of surprises that are definitely worth your play time, especially if you're a Resident Evil fan or have played "RE: Biohazard" before. Unlike earlier Resident Evil titles, I found the puzzle difficulty far too low, almost everything is completely obvious. It seems Capcom wanted to make their new title more accessible to this decade's audience. Inventory management has been a huge pain in some previous games, but this is pretty much a complete non-issue in Resident Evil Village—thank goodness. In my whole playthrough, I had to reorganize my inventory only once, while picking up a new weapon, which took up more space than expected. I did purchase some inventory upgrades at the merchant which were not prohibitively expensive, though.

The merchant makes a comeback after Resident Evil 4. "The Duke" is a great little addition that sprinkles some character development flavor over Resident Evil by giving you several options to spend your money. For example, you can buy more ammunition, which is always tight in Resident Evil. If that's not a problem for you because you've mastered headshots, then maybe an attachable weapon part could interest you? Or a new weapon? The Duke also offers to make your guns stronger, improve reload times, or the clip size—all for a fee, of course. Ammo is surprisingly cheap, at least on standard difficulty, which makes the whole "ammo management" aspect of Resident Evil almost trivial. Given the Resident Evil context, I like the developer's decision to limit the supply of ammo in the shop and that stock is only periodically refreshed as you progress through the story.

Another aspect of the merchant is that he can craft food that will permanently improve some stat or attribute. You have to collect the ingredients all over the game world, though, so these mechanics felt completely tacked-on to me. Game difficulty wasn't high enough to make me want more health anyway. Just like in previous RE titles, you can craft health potions, ammunition, etc., on your own as long as you have the raw materials, which you'll find scattered throughout the maps.

Resident Evil Village does not just consist of the "village" as you also make your way through several other zones with various art styles and environments—namely, castles, a swamp, the village, of course, and a modern industrial settings that reminded me of Doom+Borg ship. Capcom did a fantastic job here. Depending on the map, you'll also encounter different types of enemies that are all just bullet sponges with minimal intelligence of their own. Just like in previous Resident Evil games, you always want to aim for the head or shoot at that glowing thing that indicates special vulnerabilities. There's usually enough space to keep kiting enemies, so they won't hit you at all. Most enemies are so slow-moving that they can't outrun you. A character similar to "Mr. X" is present, too. He follows you and can't be damaged, but he can hurt you big time, which increases that sense of tension. He's not nearly as annoying as in earlier games as the map design makes it relatively easy to avoid him.

Overall, Resident Evil Village is an entertaining new addition to the series, a definite buy if you've enjoyed previous Resident Evil titles. The launch price is quite high, though, and I'm not convinced I would be willing to spend that much for 10–15 hours if I was a newcomer to the series. I also felt like many aspects of what make Resident Evil so fascinating have been simplified to where I sometimes felt like I was playing Call of Duty. Still, it is a good game; it is the reason I didn't get much of my other work done and blew through it in one weekend.

PC Port / Tech / Graphics / Performance

From a technical perspective, Resident Evil Village is very impressive. Capcom has achieved amazing graphics that look fantastic even without raytracing. Take a look at our spoiler-free screenshots—there's just SO MUCH detail in the open world areas. It's not only detail, but also the atmosphere and art style that support the claustrophobic emotions of this survival-horror shooter. Character rendering has always been good in recent Resident Evil titles, and Village improves on that while still using the same "RE Engine" as DMC5. Faces, characters, and animations are extremely lifelike and believable.

The polygon counts of some interior maps are fairly low, though. It almost looks like a different team was responsible for creating those. If you go through our screenshots, you'll find some images that look like they are from a video game 10 years ago. I'm not sure how much it costs to have these made properly, but overall, they tarnish the impression the game left. Another point of criticism is the terrible field-of-view setting, which is way too narrow for a PC game. This can lead to headaches and dizziness, especially when sitting relatively close to a large monitor. RE: Village has no field-of-view setting, something that should be trivial to add and is my opinion a mandatory setting for every game with first-person perspective.

AMD has partnered with Capcom to include several FidelityFX technologies. For example, Fidelity FX CAS helps sharpen little details that otherwise are slightly blurred, possibly due to the anti-aliasing algorithms. There's also FidelityFX CACAO (combined adaptive compute ambient occlusion), an improved version of ambient occlusion. I tried to spot differences in various scenes, but didn't find anything. On paper, the algorithm is similar to classic SSAO (screen space ambient occlusion). It uses the depth buffer data to detect pixels that have "stuff" around them, which would make them darker because light can't reach them as easily as other pixels. The beauty of this approach is that it can run in a shader, completely on the GPU, without any knowledge of actual scene geometry. This screen-space approach makes it independent of the scene's complexity, too. From what I understand, the novelty of CACAO seems to be an "importance map" that is generated to help the pixel shader spend more time on areas that will be heavily occluded, and it is of course optimized for AMD hardware.

Textures are incredibly detailed and won't get blurry when you walk up close. The lighting is also amazing and looks fantastic even though nearly all of it is pre-baked during the authoring process. A side effect of pre-baked lighting and shadows is that most objects in the game world are static and can't be destroyed, moved, or interacted with. Still, it's totally worth it in my opinion. While playing through the game, I wondered whether this is raytraced several times—the artists did such a great job designing the levels, combining light and shadows for an extremely immersive experience. I also very much like the fact that there's proper floor geometry throughout the game—one of my biggest criticisms for graphics in Cyberpunk 2077 was its terrain, which was "too flat" for the most part.

Resident Evil 8 is powered by the same RE Engine we saw in many other Capcom titles since 2017. I'm sure there are plenty of improvements under the hood. Thanks to support for DirectX 12, the game runs very well on all recent graphics cards. There's also lots of settings to adjust the graphics fidelity to match your hardware capabilities. Performance is actually very impressive for a game in 2021. Compared to the 22 games in our GPU review test suite, Resident Evil Village runs quite a bit better.

Especially on AMD RDNA2 is the performance unbelievable. AMD's latest graphics architecture powers not only the Radeon RX 6000 Series "Big Navi" graphics cards, but also the new consoles from Sony and Microsoft. This is probably the reason why the game runs so well on RDNA2—games get developed and optimized for consoles first. In our performance tests with RT off, we see AMD's latest cards punch far above their weight. For example, at 1440p, we usually have the RX 6800 XT fight it out with the RTX 3080. Here even the RX 6800 non-XT can beat NVIDIA's second-fastest SKU. While the fight RTX 3090 vs. RX 6900 XT is usually a win for NVIDIA depending on resolution, the RX 6900 XT always beats the RTX 3090 in Resident Evil, at 1080p even with a 17% (!!) margin. The Radeon RX 6700 XT is a great card for 1440p gaming; it can achieve 73 FPS at 4K, and at lower resolutions, it's faster than the RTX 2080 Ti.

Generally speaking, Resident Evil Village is really well optimized, achieving excellent FPS rates across the board even at maximum settings. This makes it a perfect candidate for raytracing because if you have well over 100 FPS, there is no reason not to give up some FPS to improve the rendering quality even further. Unfortunately, I found the raytracing implementation in Resident Evil not impressive at all as it barely makes any visual difference—check my comparison screenshots. The first screenshot is the best RT scene I found in the whole game, and while you might be able to spot little differences side-by-side for the others, these are impossible to notice in gameplay. I also feel RT sometimes looks worse than pure rasterization—the artists did too good a job improving the world with "RT off." I suspect "RT on" was added very late in the development cycle, possibly rushed, so neither assets nor maps were optimized for the new technology.

Just like in other titles, the performance hit of raytracing is very significant, but thanks to the high FPS rates, the impact isn't a problem at all. For example, the RTX 3090 reached 85 FPS at 4K, and even RTX 2080 Ti manages 60 FPS at 4K. At lower resolution, even an RTX 2060 or RTX 3060 is perfectly sufficient for a playable RT experience. Here, too, AMD can shine. While their hardware capabilities would suggest otherwise, the raytracing performance on AMD Radeon RDNA2 is very decent. The RX 6800 XT ends up between the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 3080, and the RX 6900 XT almost matches the RTX 3080.

Originally, raytracing was promised to be "physically correct." It's not even close in Resident Evil. The reason is that not all light sources contribute to the lighting algorithms, so you can easily find plenty of scenes that don't look right when searching for physical correctness. These past few days I've even been wondering whether we should care about accurate representations if compromises work better for the gameplay experience. No doubt raytracing is the future, but not in Resident Evil. To me, it felt like they added RT to tick the "next-gen" checkboxes, which will help with marketing the game. Oh, and make sure to upgrade your Windows 10 installation to at least version 2004 or the raytracing options will be grayed out even if you have supporting hardware.

I'm similarly disappointed by the Variable Rate Shading implementation. To me, VRS has huge potential as it's a completely novel approach to reduce the GPU load through the benefit of "smart" algorithms. Unfortunately, the implementation in Resident Evil Village is completely dumb. I may be wrong, but it looks as though they simply shade the whole screen at a lower rate to me, which is not what VRS was designed to do. Maybe this is an issue in the press build only and fixed for release, or afterwards. If anything changes, I'll update this review, of course.