This time it’s his infant daughter who must be saved after she’s kidnapped by a wicked cabal of monster maniacs: Lady Dimitrescu, a vampire tall enough to play center in a Space Jam sequel Donna Beneviento, a dollmaker with a walking, talking Bride of Chucky sidekick Salvatore Moreau, a thoroughly repulsive merman and Karl Heisenberg, a magnetically powered lunatic who runs a factory assembly line of Frankenstein’s monsters.Īll four report to the mysterious head witch, Mother Miranda, and although admittedly none of them managed to coax out the same kind of genuine scares as the southern-fried psychopaths in Resident Evil 7's Baker family, I found the lot of them to be entertainingly twisted in a slightly cartoonish, Batman villain kind of way. Dragged to hillbilly hell and back in an effort to rescue his wife in Resident Evil 7, he subsequently finds himself dropped into a distinctly Transylvanian type of terror in Village. It’s a story that – unfortunately for poor old Ethan – goes from dire straits to dire wolves. Resident Evil Village might not break much new ground in its own right, but it successfully grafts Resident Evil 4’s best action elements onto the series’ more modern form established in Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, making for a genuinely engrossing and increasingly combat-heavy continuation of the Ethan Winters story.
It’s an intense welcome that serves as a fantastic flashback to the opening of Shinji Mikami’s magnum-toting magnum opus, and one made all the more frantic in first-person perspective. Almost immediately surrounded by rabid Lycan locals, I scrambled for shotgun shells and bookshelves to block doorways as the horde closed in, only to be saved a split-second away from death. As soon as I arrived in Resident Evil Village’s sinister rural setting, its Resident Evil 4 influence reared its snarling head.