Resident Evil 3

Jill Valentine survives an outbreak that's already consumed Raccoon City, only to find Umbrella's ultimate bioweapon, Nemesis, has been sent specifically to eliminate her. Resident Evil 3 rebuilds Capcom's 1999 classic with the same modern engine and visual overhaul that made the Resident Evil 2 remake a genre highlight the year before, and reviewers approaching a review sample of nearly 45,000 are close to unanimous on one specific split: the game itself is fun, and the remake is a disappointment, and those two things aren't in tension with each other as much as they might sound.

A genuinely fun few hours, moment to moment

Reviewers consistently praise the core experience of playing Resident Evil 3, independent of any comparison to its source material. The new dodge mechanic draws specific credit as a satisfying addition to Jill's combat toolkit, letting skilled play feel meaningfully different from simply running and shooting. Visual presentation earns broad, enthusiastic praise, with the collapsing streets of Raccoon City repeatedly cited as some of the most visually striking environments the series has produced. Carlos Oliveira, playable across a meaningful stretch of the campaign, draws specific and repeated praise both for his voice performance and for offering a more traditional, action-oriented counterpoint to Jill's survival-horror sections. Nemesis himself earns real credit during his scripted set-piece encounters, with several reviewers describing individual chase sequences as genuinely tense highlights, even as the same reviewers go on to criticize how he's used across the game as a whole. Performance also draws consistent, if less emotionally charged, praise: multiple reviewers report the game runs smoothly even on modest hardware, a practical point of credit that's easy to overlook next to the more passionate debate over content but genuinely useful for buyers deciding whether an aging PC can handle it comfortably.

A remake reviewers say cuts too much of what made the original special

The complaint that actually defines this review sample concerns everything the game leaves out. Reviewers report extensive, specific content cuts compared to the 1999 original: the clock tower, park and graveyard sections are gone entirely, the Mercenaries mode didn't make the transition, and the original's branching-choice system has been removed. That's not a vague "it feels shorter" complaint; it's a specific, itemized list repeated independently across dozens of reviews, several of which explicitly draw up a side-by-side comparison of what existed in 1999 versus what survived into 2020. A related, equally specific complaint concerns Nemesis's implementation: reviewers widely describe him as a scripted, story-beat threat rather than the dynamic, persistent pursuer Mr. X represented in the Resident Evil 2 remake, arguing that represents a step backward for the exact mechanic that made the previous remake's tension so memorable.

The length complaint that appears in nearly every single review

Beyond specific content cuts, an overwhelming share of the review sample reports the campaign is simply too short to justify its asking price, with detailed, independently reported completion times consistently landing in the 3-to-5-hour range for a first playthrough. Several reviewers explicitly frame this as the deciding factor in their recommendation, stating directly that they enjoyed their time with the game but can't recommend a full-price purchase given how quickly it ends and how little reason there is to return once the story concludes. A related complaint concerns pacing: multiple reviewers report meaningfully less puzzle content and exploration than either the original 1999 game or the Resident Evil 2 remake, describing the overall experience as more linear and combat-focused as a direct result of the content that didn't make the cut.

A support gap compared to its immediate predecessor

Several reviewers also note a specific, verifiable difference in post-launch treatment: Resident Evil 2's remake received free additional modes and content updates that this game did not receive to a comparable degree. That's a useful, concrete comparison point for buyers weighing the two games against each other, since it means the value gap between the two remakes has, if anything, widened somewhat in the years since both games launched rather than narrowing. It's also worth noting the included Resident Evil Resistance multiplayer mode as a genuine, if modest, offset to that gap: a smaller but real share of reviewers credit the 1-versus-4 asymmetric mode with adding real replay value at no extra cost, even if it hasn't sustained the kind of dedicated community some competitive multiplayer modes attract, and even if most reviewers still treat it as a bonus rather than a reason to buy the game outright.

What the achievement data confirms about the campaign's length

Global achievement data supports the "very short" complaint directly. The very first main-story achievement clears an unusually high 94.6% of players who've unlocked anything at all, a strikingly gentle curve for a survival horror game that suggests most buyers who start the campaign finish it without serious difficulty, consistent with reviewers' accounts of a compact, easily completed main story rather than a long or difficulty-gated one.

Verdict

Resident Evil 3 succeeds as a tense, visually excellent few hours of survival horror, with gunplay, presentation and individual set-piece moments that reviewers consistently enjoy on their own terms. It settles at a middling score here because the remake itself, judged against both its source material and its own immediate predecessor, falls short in ways reviewers document with unusual specificity and consistency: extensive content cuts, a diminished and more scripted Nemesis, a short campaign, and less post-launch support than Resident Evil 2 received. Worth playing for what it does well, but wait for a steep discount rather than paying full price, since that's close to the universal advice running through this entire review sample regardless of how much a given reviewer otherwise enjoyed their time with it.