On my fourth run at Insanity, Infinite ammo unlocked, Infinite rocket launcher unlocked, and man, it really does feel like I needed both for this difficulty. At least when it comes to my playstyle, which is "Every room must be cleared".
First run at Classic difficulty and I really enjoyed my time with the game. Ended at 19 hours.
Not sure what the complaints are about, it felt exactly the same in terms of difficulty than all the original Resident Evil games (first half RE, RE2 and RE3, second half RE4). Maybe just ever so slighly easier than my first run of RE2R, done at Hardcore.
Sure, would have been nice to have another mode between that and Insanity, but I can't really complain.. I was scared, I was stressed, and died quite a few times. The game felt a little bipolar as an experience, and made me extremely worried for the replayability (which is and always will be what makes these games special) but actually on my fourth run now and it's MUCH better than I feared in this regard. With the exception of the Orphanage. That section needs to be skippable.
Love Leon portion of the game, felt a little rushed in polish and quite a bit RE6-like, but loved the structure of that part of the game. This is a true and successful blend of all games in the series, which couldn't have been easy to achieve.
I enjoyed the story for what it is, feel so clever I got the canon ending first time, but the more I think about it the less sense it makes. Like, it's full of things that make zero sense.. Gideon on a armchair blissfully enjoying some music while Grace, the one he had been looking for for decades, the chosen one, the person on the planet he needs the most, is miraculously escaping death downstairs because of a person HE just transformed into zombie the moment she arrives.. like, what?
For the rest, a nice "Resident Evil greatest hits". Love that there was no Ada, I'm so sick of the fact she has to be into every single thing with this character. This was a breath of fresh air, RE Degeneration-like and I loved it.
Audiovisually, the game is great. Playing on PS5 Pro and there's some pretty neat visual treats. Audio in the home theatre is
phenomenal, it still manages to surprise (and scare me) in the fourth run. Masterful.
Cutscenes legitimately look pre-rendered, the hair system with that Sub surface scattering is just sublime. But also some reeeally inconsistent assets here and there, mostly in Raccoon City.
Imo, RE2R is still the most beatifully consistent game they've made. Played with proper calibration by understanding the sliders, it looks impeccable to me still. Like a pre-rendered visuals game, a feeling I didn't get as consistently with Requiem. And I mean, some of the shared assets I compared between the two games are in fact lesser quality in Requiem.
TLOU is mainstream like RE and that comes with limitations. You can't really reach peak by playing to the masses.
I know some will disagree, but despite of how much I LOVE the Resident Evil games, and always have since '96, they kinda do feel like products. There's some exceptions, like RE 2002, and in some ways RE2R, but mostly that's what they feel to me, unlike say Silent Hill 2; expertly made products, with infinite amount of stuff to love in them, and great GAMES, but consumables in a way, relatively quickly "mass produced" and put out. Whereas to me TLOU always felt and still feels like a piece of legitimate art. Something I didn't get from TLOU Part II, which instead felt like something that desperately tried to be art and failed.
TLOU was horror perfection as it gets. One of the best games ever crafted. You can see that Capcom looked at that for some motivation on some of the enemies in RE9. TLOU had no faults imo. It may never be topped in the horror genre.
TLOU, the first one, is the only game in my 30 years of gaming that I would truly consider perfect.
Like, I love RE4 equally, and Witcher 3 the same, and even RE2R, but I have a ton of issues with them still. "Issues" I can easily forgive and ignore due to my love for them, but they are objectively there. With that 2013 game there's not a single thing I would change, it was a true lightning in a bottle and time only cemented that as a fact for me.
I distinctively recall it had been the first 10 out of 10 in the history of some gaming outlets, some 20 years active by the time the game launched. Remember being like 5 hours into the game like "Really? I mean it's good but surely not THAT great".. and then things started to happen. And by end I was in awe in a way that hasn't actually been replicated to this day, in any media.
There's some people who literally made a living by only speedrunning that game for 13 years, like Anthony Caliber, and are still doing it this very moment. lol
But as a horror? Maybe the hospital in Part II, but for the most part nothing beats P.T. (the original with procedural random ending portion), RE7 in VR, and Resident Evil 2 Remake imo. Granted, haven't played Silent Hill 2 Remake still, but really looking forward to the experience.