I grabbed the 360 version and I've played up to right before the labs, and this whole remaster is a really mixed bag. I'll try and lay out my feelings, but this will mostly be technical stuff as the core game is largely untouched from what I've seen so far.
Firstly, the backgrounds. I don't pretend to know what process was used to upscale/upres these, but it's very inconsistent. The majority of the areas look like they've been upscaled with a filter with some slight touch ups here and there. This really works for some rooms such as the mansion dining room and main hall. Others look like the source may have been of a lower quality for whatever reason, for example, the entire basement of the guardhouse looks really bad, especially the aqua ring control room which looks honestly horrendous. I wish I had capture gear to post screens, but it's by far the worst area I've seen so far, and it really stands out against the high quality models of the character and the shark in the background. The touch ups I mentioned mainly seem to try and help hide blemishes in the upscale, so added bloom or shadows and such.
Some areas seem to have had a lot more work than others, seemingly backgrounds with more dynamic lighting or effects. An example of this is the birdcage hallway beside Kenneth which seems to have been either entirely remade or almost entirely retextured. While it certainly looks sharper than other rooms, it seems like half of the shadows and little details of the room have been lost, leaving it feeling almost sterile in comparison to the Gamecube version. Where the added or reworked stuff works the best is in outdoor areas, where a lot of foliage has been added around the scenes. Again, I have a feeling this is to hide some of the worse looking areas in the upres but it really fits with these areas. The path from the mansion to Lisa's cabin in particular looks incredible now, with the weird depth of field effect beyond the path looking much nicer and giving a much clearer image of that background.
The other big thing with the backgrounds is their choice to pan up and down the backgrounds so they can make them widescreen. For the first few areas, this seemed like a nice choice, but the more I've played, the less I like it. Let me just say that I think it's a nice idea and with some more work, it could have been really great, but it's how they've implemented it that really bothers me. Essentially, as you move through a screen, the camera will pan up or down depending on what it needs to show. However, this seems to be tied to both player movement and animations, so you will have moments where the camera keeps panning up and down as you're jumping up and down from boxes or picking up items, or running back and forth in a scene to solve a puzzle. That might not sound like a big deal, but it looks needlessly silly at several points. At other times, they will needlessly pan in a room where it isn't needed, which causes the framing of the scene to look terrible, with an item flashing off screen or showing more of the character's body than their head and such. I think the better option would have been for them to look at each scene individually and decide which needed to pan and if it was unnecessary, lock it to a frame that conveys the background best. As for the pan itself, it would have been much better to have it trigger in a required background of the player hit an area in the environment so it would pan automatically (which I believe Zero did in several scenes) so that the scene wouldn't keep slightly moving up and down constantly.
The character and enemy skins are another weirdly inconsistent area, with Chris, Jill and Rebecca (of the characters I've seen so far) having a nice upgrade while Richard doesn't look great. Richard's injured arm in particular looks really bad now, just a muddy texture that, when the game decides to zoom in on it, you wonder why they didn't put any effort into upgrading this. The same goes for several zombie skins; I noticed one looked really bad when it jumps out of the bath in the mansion, the skin just looks low res now, which is strange when some of the zombie skins (such as the first zombie) have been updated. I know this one is a more unrealistic wish for the upgrade, but it does noticeably stand out at times.
The only other issue I've noticed is that, on two occasions, the wrong instrument was used for background music. The two occasions have been when Chris and Rebecca take Richard to the sick room and "
Sigh of Relief" plays, and the other is the main guardhouse music "
Ivies' Domain", both of the main tracks are using the wrong instrument which, I guess, is just an odd bug but really stands out. I've noticed in other places that the mixing of the music's instruments are really odd, so when
Neptune attacks, for example, the frantic part of that track is mixed more evenly with the other tracks and doesn't sound as good as the original. This has happened with a couple of tracks, but that was the most noticeable one for me so far.
The only other thing I haven't talked about are the controls. One really great addition is that they've introduced tactical reloading, where you can reload while aiming by pressing the run button. I loved this in Resident Evil Deadly Silence and I love that they brought it across for this. As for the new style controls, I hate them but I understand that I'm biased, being an old style Resident Evil fan and I've hated this control type since Devil May Cry. Tank controls always worked for prerendered games because they did away with the need for situational awareness so to speak; if you push forward, you will walk forward, if you push left, you will turn left, if you push back, you will back up. The new controls work for one screen, but then in the next screen if you take your thumb off and that direction and hit it again, you could be going in the opposite direction, meaning you always have to be concious of the angle and the character. It just feels like a needless hassle when tank controls work perfectly for this type of game and it makes the animations look terrible. But again, I understand that that's probably just me.
But yeah, that's my impressions so far. At the end of the day, it's REmake on more systems, and in my eyes it's probably the greatest pure survival horror game that was ever released. But it's such a mixed bag technically that I just don't know what to think of it overall.
