Genre: Survival Horror
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom

Aesthetically, the game is astoundingly beautiful, and frightening as well; the palette and lighting is consistently dark, the rendering of the rooms and characters has a grimy and dirty feel. Technologically however, the game isn't too impressive; all of the rooms are pre-rendered images. The character textures and models are great, as good as any game, but since the only polygons on the screen that need to be rendered belong to the characters and enemies, there doesn't need to really be all that much memory bandwidth to push them around. Kudos for the atmosphere, but when they make a real-time game that looks this good, then they'll get my highest praise.

Like the graphics, the sound exudes eeriness, just hearing some of the music, even without the game's graphics to compliment, gives me goosebumps. The sound effects likewise are excellent, they are resonant and sound as if they are echoing through the haunted mansion. There really isn't a thing bad to say about the game's sound, except that maybe the voice acting is only average.

It's easy to see that this game founded a genre (survival-horror) way back in 1996-- it plays like it. To start, the game is mind-boggingly difficult in stretches; the enemies are a real annoyance to kill, and ammo and healing items are painfully finite in quanitity. Second, the puzzles are largely lacking in creativity and seem like filler. There really isn't much to the gameplay, you just walk around, pick up items, and fire your weapon. The idea of defense weapons is a good one, but this game just feels dated.

Resident Evil just really isn't very fun. It's atmospheric, but to someone such as myself who doesn't really get scared by movies or video games, this doesn't count for much. The gameplay mechanics are simply lacking, and if you can survive the frustration of making it through this game, you'll never touch it again. Try Eternal Darkness instead.