for example :
Yeah the story is kinda silly, but its also done in a really appealing way for a handheld title. Some here have complained about the "previously" videos, but those are skippable and I think they do help serve as a reminder of what you did last if you were to drop the game for a while - as you might on a handheld. The actual conspiracy plot was convoluted and crazy but I think RE has plumbed these kind of depths already. It's nowhere near as distasteful to me as the last Metal Gear game I played in that regard, and I kinda like Metal Gear.
I think the flashback to Parker helping the Cadet was to show you, in advance, why he saved Parker despite having ultimately ulterior motives. It was less about the hunters and fighting and more about showing how Parker helped him and was deserving of being saved.
As for puzzles, it actually does more than I expected. The quick screwdriver puzzles and things like the blow torch later on weren't meant to be all that involving... and I know what you mean there weren't many environmental puzzles either, aside from the casino door and steam room in the bilge, but I felt as though progress was well designed, well controlled and characters confined to set sections of the ship, things carved up with dynamic events, splitting up from partners, chases, boss battles... And yet the ship sections also felt quite open to exploration. I loved how the game tested your knowledge of the geography of the Zenobia when boarding the sister ship as Chris... That was a genuinely good 'gotcha' moment for me. I also feel as though the game made scanning an integral part of things, if you wanted to maintain ammunition and supplies. Weapon configuration started to come into it big time towards the end... I really had to get my weapons right to put down Norman.
All in all I felt the game gave us back some of that sensation of being trapped and only able to explore a confined space, like the mansion in racoon city, as it goes from bad to worse... and yet the locales were diverse. Tower buildings, ship decks, snowy mountains, abandoned airport tunnels, a decrepit shipwreck....
I prefer this to RE5 and its sufficiently different to the others that I don't really want to compare it to those. I enjoyed it.
I don't think it felt like a shooting gallery... I mean, they're not like ganados or whatever in that they don't do so much climbing and chasing, or appearing to work together, but in the right combinations of t-abyss breed and with characters like the comms guy and Rachel to deal with it was certainly tense combat at times, even if the underlying AI might not be technically that deep... For a handheld game, the atmosphere of dread when faced by some things was great.
As for the hangovers of more modern resident evil, I even liked those. I'm thinking particularly of the speed boat and helicopter gunship battles and the fight with what I assume was a t-abyss infected whale.. I mean, it was just cool seeing how nice it could look if nothing else!
