The Resident Evil 3 Racoon City Demo was announced a few days ago and has crashed our systems from March 19th with great risk of further spread from now and past April 3rd.
The story aside now, the game play is what we are here for and what we want to experience. I will be reviewing the Demo that was launched for PC via Steam. The graphical settings are pretty much the same as what we came to know from Resident Evil 2 and if you going to crank up those settings, well make sure you have enough VRAM on your graphics card to handle the STRAIN! The game looks flawless and really pretty when you launch in. It is running off the same Engine as RE2 did with some tweeks here and there.
Moving forward to the game play mechanics, not much has changed here. The weapons, items, controls feel the same as RE2, but the new strafe controls are really helpful and especially when facing off with Nemesis later on in the Demo! The Zombies are still "Tanky" as hell , but from what I experienced, there seemed to be a lot more ammo laying around and gun powder to combine. So there was no short supply in this department which I was really surprised to see even though you still have to exercise caution in your usage (This may change on launch). There is also environmental interaction with exploding barrels that help a lot. You can line up two or three Zombies in a given area and blow up the barrel which sorts them all out and saves you on ammo usage. I really enjoyed this feature add in and so so thankful all at the same time.
The Demo had various routes that could be explored, in no given order, but resulted in the same ending result which ends the Demo off when Nemesis punches through a wall. I managed to play through twice to get a good feel of everything. You get a combat knife, which doesn't break on use, but doesn't work that well against Zombies like it did in RE2. You start with a handgun and there is a shotgun available later on. There was an introduction of collectable Toys again, that you can search for while trying this Demo out.
The best thing about this Demo was when Nemesis was introduced (not saying where) and then the fun starts! He is brutal as hell, he smacks very hard, he is very fast from the get go, but you can take him down with a number of rounds. This only sits him down on a knee for about 5 - 10 seconds and then he is back after you, so RUN!!!! You can strafe avoid him, but he is fast so be warned in timing your dodges. He infects other Zombies with some tentacle creature and they will lash out at you when they get close and you need to shoot this tentacle creature off their heads to kill them. He also has his own tentacle whip so be warned about that as well.
The Demo was a lot of fun, it ran extremely well for me on PC and I did not experience any weird FPS drops or further glitches. It is very similar to RE2 in many respects, but has its own mood and setting which is great. I feel like the mechanics are a lot more refined in RE3: RC compared to RE2. The Demo is a total of 6GB to download, so if you are still interested in giving this a try, it won't take long to download either.
Resident Evil 3 will be launching a "Resistance" Open Beta on the 27th March so be sure to check that out and the full version of the game will launching for PC via Steam, Ps4 and Xbox One on the 3rd April 2020.