If you look online you will see almost all the professional reviews stating wonderful things about this game but I sometimes feel as though they people that are paid to review games approach major releases such as this game with trepidation. They are afraid to say what they really think because of potential backlash. I have no such fear and will tell you what I really think.

pros

• The game is absolutely beautiful. If you are playing this on PC you better have a relatively high-powered machine. This game actually resulted in me finally upgrading my GPU for the first time in 5 years. This is because the graphics are intense. The game is truly well done in this regard as the environments and cut-scenes are top-notch.

• It is truly creepy: I was genuinely nervous during most of the gameplay. The family in this house constantly stalk you and until you encounter them in a not-so-evident-you-are-in-a-bossfight bossfight, you can't permanently kill them. They remain a constant threat as you attempt to solve the puzzles to advance to other parts of the house

• the story is pretty good: You are Ethan, and are lead to a derelict mansion in Louisiana after receiving a rather vague message from your wife, Mia, who has been presumed dead for 3 years. Upon finding the house it quickly becomes a labyrinth of survival horror, which is what the Resident Evil series has always been about.
  

  

• It has an interesting take on character development: On occasion Ethan will find a VHS tape (that's right, he uses a VCR that is somehow still functioning in 2017,) rather than simply watching the tape, you will actually perform the actions of the person in the tape in order to understand their situation better - which normally includes avoiding a stalker and running away until you are eventually captured or killed anyway. These sequences are kind of like mini-games inside of the game and they are one of the main things I liked about RE7

Cons

• parts of the story are just dumb: Kind of early on in the game a cop turns up at a window investigating a disturbance reported by neighbors or something. Ethan pleads with the cop to go get backup immediately which any real cop would have at least called in but apparently this guy doesn't enjoy following protocol and is a maverick of sorts. he pulls around to the garage and instead is immediately killed. At least you get a handgun out of the deal.

I don't know if you know much about police protocol but you ALWAYS at least call in a potentially dangerous situation. This guy didn't do that and although it is presumed that it is a long time before you finally get out of the mansion, the police department never investigates why dude is no longer reporting in.

I would have preferred if the cop hadn't been part of the story at all because it is just silly to include this.

• The AI is a bit stupid: You can't permanently kill the family members of this mansion who have been infected by the virus outside of "boss fights." Since, just like in all Resident Evil games, ammo is a rare find, your best bet is to simply run away from them. If you simply hide behind a chair in a room that the person pursuing you saw you go into, he or she won't be able to find you, gives up, and leaves.

• The puzzles are extremely easy: I am not suggesting that I want the puzzles to be so difficult that you have to run to Youtube to ever figure them out but when the item you need to unlock the puzzle in a room is sitting on the table in the middle of that same room, you'd have to be a special kind of stupid to not be able to figure it out. I guess I just want to think a bit more.

• very small array of enemies. Mostly you just spend all of your time avoiding whoever the invincible family member that is tracking you at the moment happens to be. There are only like 2 other enemy types in the entire game and they become quickly predictable and it simply becomes a question of whether you have enough ammo or the correct type of weapon on you at the time. If you are old enough perhaps you recall the dogs jumping through the window in the first RE and also the horror you felt when you first encountered the giant spiders in the billiard room. Terrifying

• The combat system is pretty lame: I understand that this is not an FPS game and when the Resident Evil franchise attempted to make it so in an earlier release it fell flat on its butt. Perhaps that is why they didn't try to incorporate a more meaningful control system in combat. Perhaps it is because your character Ethan is not meant to be an elite special operative and is actually just a normal dude with very limited combat skills? That is how i would justify it i guess. In my mind it is just clunky.

Overall, I would say that RE7 - Biohazard is a decent game with excellent graphics and quite a few scares. It loses points with me on gameplay that becomes repetitive and it only took me about 10 hours to finish. The good news is that I didn't expect much from Capcom since most of the RE games haven't been that great aside from their gore and survival horror aspects. In that regard, this is one of the better Resident Evil games, but certainly not the best.

7 / 10