You just reminded me that I completely gave up on Code Veronica after blowing nearly all of my accumulated ammo (which I was actively trying to be conservative with) on the Tyrant fight in the plane, only to discover that there was fuckall in terms of supplies upon entering the Antarctica base, every room was just chock full of enemies, and there wasn't any place to save between the start of the section and however far I managed to get in before eating shit due to low ammo supplies and no recovery items.
Hey, let's make that even worse.
You know those
new-fangled grenade rounds you get three of in the entire game and seem useless? Each time they explode, they knock down all lesser enemies in the room and the current HP of all T-Virus infected enemies in the room is cut by
half.
The Tyrant on the plane is vulnerable to these. Use all three and he becomes one of the easiest bosses in the game.
I keep debating with myself whether I want to play Code Veronica. Judging from this thread it's incredibly divisive. I've seen people love it, some critics calling it just another Resident Evil, and some flat out hating it. I've never seen such a spectrum of opinions over one game and it's
fascinating. What I've seen seems okay; the move from pre-rendered backgrounds to fully 3D environments is interesting, even more so since it's the only classic RE game to do that, and it is important to the overall story of Resident Evil, what with the re-introduction of Wesker and all. The enemies don't look all that creepy though; the zombies are remarkably less grotesque than usual and that Stretch Armstrong-looking thing just looks silly. And then there's the fact that it's way easier to softlock yourself than the previous Resident Evils not because it's challenging but because the game will fuck you over hard if you're not prepared for it.
Also the cutscenes seem really silly, even by Resident Evil standards.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=k6dNIimDDus
I'm genuinely conflicted because it seems to me this game is just all over the place and I don't know if it's worth my time.
It's a hard sell. There is good here under the bad, but the bad is....
Really bad. I would absolutely recommend playing it once, if only that, and before you do, I encourage you to listen to me about the game's development, because it will make everything about Code Veronica make so much more sense.
During the development of what would become Resident Evil 3, Capcom was working on both a port and sequel to Resident Evil 2 for Sega Dreamcast, and for some reason, it just didn't work. Capcom ultimately wound up combining the ideas, but Capcom's RE team, at the time, was working on what would become Resident Evil 3. The result of this was that Capcom took Mikami's design notes, grabbed a massive outsourced team from Sega, and got to work. This is what we call foreshadowing.
Unfortunately, as I've mentioned a few times, Code Veronica came out during the Time of Suck, when Japan's government was having a brief outburst of political correctness and basically forbade graphic depictions of cruelty for like 3 years. This didn't just censor the violence in Code Veronica; it ultimately fucked over a gigantic amount of the game's atmosphere and setting. Why, you ask?
Because the game's big reveal, initially, was that Umbrella and the Ashford Family both originated with the Nazis, with the family patriarch ultimately being a virologist that escaped capture in WWII. The Ashfords were originally going to be known as the Kreugers. This was originally going to be the whole point behind Umbrella's genetics experiments, and you can actually see a large number of examples of this in-game; for example, the eagle-atop-halberd crest of the Ashford family looks very familiar to anyone who's familiar with Nazi iconography. The tank you encounter in the yard is a Tiger. There's gold lugers you can get as Steve. The Ashford Flag is the same color as the Nazi Flag. The prison camp on Rockfort Island is self-evidently designed like an internment camp, and features an area with crematorium ovens, as well as a torture chamber where unethical experiments were carried out under the supervision of the camp doctor. The camp has guard towers with mounted machine guns and clearly was keeping prisoners in absolutely terrible conditions even before everything went to zombie-ridden hell. Even the official material for the game indirectly references this:
The island was taken over by the Umbrella Corporation in the 1990s to accommodate its growing paramilitary and included a concentration camp for enemies and traitors to the company.
Like the violence being toned down, these elements were ratcheted back considerably, and story-wise, it really wasn't to Code Veronica's benefit.
Go look at the concept art for CV, it's full of stuff that gives hints at what could have been.
Mechanically, Code Veronica, like Resident Evil 3, is running off a heavily-modified Resident Evil 2 engine. Unfortunately, while better graphically, Code Veronica's engine is not as advanced as RE3's. There's no environmental attack objects, there's no dodge moves, and other quality-of-life improvements to the targetting system and weapon mechanics that were in both the special edition of RE2 and RE3 are absent in Code Veronica. This is a big reason the auto-aim in Code Veronica seems to have ADHD and targets enemies across the room rather than right in front of you. One big issue is that like RE2, bigger weapons (and dual weapons) take up two slots.
Most of the weapons in Code Veronica are either straight clones of RE2 weapons with reskins, or are reworks of earlier weapons. The M93R pistol is basically a statistical clone of Claire's Browning Hi-Power from RE2 but with 2 more bullets and the ability to be upgraded into a burst pistol. The shotgun is statistically a clone of Leon's pre-upgrade shotgun, and the Grenade Launcher is a direct port of RE2's rather than RE3's (which makes it a somewhat of a downgrade because RE3's was more damaging and had both improved splash and frost rounds, but it does mean that the standard ammo is Bearing Rounds, which are kind of stupidly effective against groups). The game has a really good magnum but it's easy to miss if you don't put a single obscure item back in the item box when you're done with it. An assault rifle is in the game, but it's nowhere near as good as the M4A1 from RE3. The game does encourage you to actually use it though by giving you a spare mag for it. The bowgun returns and you get tons of ammo for it but it does like no damage and you're looking at 10-20 hits to put down one zombie in a hallway. It can also make explosive bolts that have the best DPS in the game, but the materials are rare enough that you're better off saving it for bosses, which does bring me to one of my biggest beefs with the game's weapons: namely, that all of the new weapons are extremely limited in utility - for example, all of the dual weapons, which include a pair of lugers (that you really only get to use in the game's mercenaries-mode-equivalent), a pair of submachine guns (that Steve mostly gets to use unless you salvaged the lighter for Chris), and a pair of Calico Pistols (that have no replacement ammo).
There are two
really good stand-out weapons in Code Veronica though: The Glock 17 Chris starts with is a completely mediocre weapon until you can find a workbench for weapons in the game. If you have Chris bring his Glock there, he'll ugprade it, and while it doesn't look, feel, or sound any different, it just became the best gun in the game, doing more damage than the original handgun, no longer suffering damage falloff like other weapons, and most amazingly of all,
fucking piercing, allowing it to hit multiple enemies in a row with one bullet, which means if you were a dumbass and shoved all your 9mm ammo into Claire's shiny burst pistol, you just missed out on the most ammo-efficient weapon in the game, that can basically carry you through the bulk of encounters without running out. The knife in Code Veronica is the other standout; it has the ability to do way more damage than it appears to the point where it's easily the best way to save ammo in the game, though it's also the riskiest weapon because it's still an RE2 engine range and the zombie grab range can be deceptive, especially when the camera won't cooperate.
The biggest reason that so much of the game is designed the way it is is because it was effectively made by a team of people who understood Resident Evil, but didn't quite understand the underlying purposes behind why things are the way they are in the series. This means puzzles that have unconventional keys because that is what a Resident Evil game would do. This is very much the kind of design ethos you would see in say, Dark Souls 2, where the game has the trappings of a souls game but not the understanding of why encounters flow the way they do. This is why so much of the game design is player-hostile compared to even the most brutal Resident Evil titles. They thought they were doing it right, and without the guiding hand of the series vets behind them, there's only so much they could do. Throw in janky mechanics, ammo starvation, and censorship, and you have why this game has such a divisive viewpoint behind it. For a lot of players, this was their first RE, and a lot of people did like how big it was in compared to previous games, but for others, it was a fundamental misunderstanding of everything RE had done right.
Like I said, you need to play it for yourself to understand.
