Review after 30 minutes of playing.

[Wicksta]

I must say I only played about 30 minutes, not nearly enough time for a good review.

First Impression:
The game plays differently than the Gamecube or Wii-Edition, the controls are weird, It's dark. It is very poorly lit at present. I cranked up my brightness and even then there was just so much darkness everywhere. The quality of the visuals that are not super dark are amazing. Everything seems to have a lot of detail and the gore is pretty visceral when not looking at a shadow. Melee does not seem as effective as it used to be. You can still shoot crows for loot but certain story elements have changed. The demo is very, very linear, and there is little incentive to investigate every corner. If you were fond of the quick turn it is still there, but the way you execute it is different, before you would pull down on the control stick and push the bottom-face button, A (Gamecube), Cross (Playstation) and do a quick 180° turn, now at least with an xBox One Controller it was pulling down and hitting the right bumper. Reloading the gun is also different, for me (with xbox Controller) it was draw the gun out of the holster which was left-trigger muscle memory tells me O(PSX) or B(xBox) would have been the button to push to reload except for some reason is is actually xBox X button (left face-button) and that just felt akward. I then pushed every button sequence to try to take the flashlight out except it seems this is not something we can do.

Had it not crashed on me I'd probably still want to play it... but since it did, I really don't feel like playing it and so far my feeling is that the Remake is not going to be as enjoyable as the original. We shall see though.

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In the original version the cop was talking to Leon in the car as they drove, I think there were two cops actually. There is no cut scene in the demo, instead you just start in the middle of nowhere with no indications Leon says something about where did the cop get off to? If you backtrack yes, you can find the cop car, and it looked bad...

The first house and events therein play out differently. I found an object to examine, and while I appreciate being able to rotate, flip and inspect the object it felt like it spun around too fast and was more irritating to examine than it should be.

I tried to stagger the first enemy encountered, so that I could go in with a melee finisher in order to conserve ammo, that did not appear to be working as I remembered it did. I was actually only able to subdue the first enemy after 6 shots. I continued exploring and encountered two more enemies. Given that I only had 4 rounds, I again tried conserving my ammo. So instead of bullets I opted you to engage the new enemies with melee. The knife seems far less effective than it used to be and also now appears to be subject to a durability meter... but thankfully I didn't have a dull knife. It still takes several swings to actually defeat an enemy with the knife and instead of a slashing motion, it seems like Leon does more of a stab or thrusting motion which narrows the effective range of the knife. The first enemy went down and the second was still alive and I did somehow stagger him and roundhouse kick him. Yes, Leon can still give Chuck Norris a run for his money in a roundhouse competition.

You can still shoot the crows for some loot. Smash barrels with the knife for some loot. I continued exploring and for the most part of my time during the demo it was least is very, very linear. I found a typewriter and was unable to save. I messed around trying to figure out how to do a quick turn, did about three of those before I moved. Found 100 Pesetas from a crow and saw our good friend the canine trapped in a bear trap... except this time it went differently. I also found 2 boxes of bullets and started walking in a different direction and that's when the game froze.