Bit late to the party but I'm playing this now because I'm a sucker for Resident Evil every once in a while. Playing on the hardest difficulty which seems like it might have been a colossal mistake but I'm too deep in now to start over.
Balance is so weird. Enemies take like 5x as many shots to kill as they should. I get why Resident Evil games aren't balanced like tactical shooters where you can kill everything in one headshot. But I feel like 2-5 is the normal average amount of shots to the head with a handgun that every normal enemy takes in every other RE game. In Village the first enemy takes FUCKING TWENTY HEADSHOTS to kill. This is completely moronic.
What's weird is that the whole game is this way. Like, you actually find 20 bullets to fight the first encounter with. Not that I did so, eventually figured out you run inside the house to despawn the first fight and I did the 2nd fight with the knife. Don't ask how many hits it takes to kill something with the knife, it's awful. But in general you'll run around loaded with Doomguy levels of inventory with 150+ handgun bullets and 30+ shells and rifle bullets and be like "yeah, still don't feel like spending 5 mins to slowly plink apart these 6 guys in this area with my pistol and spend over half my pistol ammo." The game would feel pretty alright if they just decreased the number of bullets you got by 80% and the enemy HP by 80%. In particular whoever balanced this game must have really hated the pistol. Maybe a pistol murdered his mother or something? For the most part anywhere you COULD use the pistol (have enough room to move around), you also don't need to and can just run by enemies. Anything actually difficult is practically suicide to use the pistol in. To a certain extent I wonder if I should just drop the pistol so that the game's adaptive ammo system gives me more shotgun and rifle ammo, because those are the only weapons that are useful in a pinch.
Worse yet, there's no reliable hitstagger. It seems to be HP threshold-based, so they'll always stagger after x number of shots when they hit 25% HP left or something. So every enemy you fight consists of firing off a headshot as they rush towards you, doing an immediate 180 with your pro fps mouse sensitivity at 2x normal, and running 5 steps backwards to dodge their attack and do it again. God bless the souls of consoletards who have to rely on the slow 180 turn button which sucks ass, I can't imagine how they play this game. Even with the shotgun a square headshot at point blank as something charges at you at 50 MPH generally leads to the enemy not even flinching and you getting hit. I think there's some kind of super-armor mechanic preventing them from being knocked out of attack animations? Shooting them in the chest at mid range knocks them down. But again, the fricken HP bloat. Even if you do score headshots with the shotgun it takes 2 shots to the head AND THEN you need to lay a few shots into their face with the handgun as they lay on the ground to get a kill.
Also, regenerating health in an RE game. What a joke. You always regen enough to take at least one hit from anything (whether its a common enemy grab or a 5 ton monster slamming a 500 lb ontop of you). The only downside is that you run at about half speed while waiting to regen. But this is still fast enough to get away from ~95% of enemy attacks if you just run away. This same mechanic was present in The Evil Within 2, where enemies were specifically designed to never be able to hit you even if you were hobbling away at half speed. It's so fucking bad and is part of why enemies are so pathetic and need to be HP sponges to be any threat, because if you could kill an enemy in less than 30s with a pistol then you'd trivialize the game by not needing to run around a ton. The only time you actually need that full speed is to dodge/bait attacks out of enemies in front of you so you can run by them, or (obviously) to buffer your HP if you make a mistake.
I also need to spend a lot of time raging about the 3rd fight in the game (the village survive sequence), because by god is it badly designed. Let me go through my experience in order.
- The game just tells you to survive. You have no idea if this is purely timer based, or timer + kills based (like the first big fight in RE4, where killing a bunch of stuff could shorten or immediately end the sequence), or whether it's completely kills based (like the cabin fight in RE4 where you just need to murder a bunch of stuff).
- I start out by trying to fight a bit and having a really bad time. So I figure that it's probably a timer. After a few failed attempts I then hit upon the good idea of just staying on a ladder where enemies can't hit you and trying to run out whatever clock there is. Doesn't work.
- So because it's not timer based, I try fighting. Again, it's really fucking hard. I eventually get a run where I've literally used 100% of my ammo killing things and the event just isn't ending. So I end up looking at a walkthrough for some tips.
- Turned out it IS timer based, but fucking Capcom decided that since they can't be assed to give their enemies the ability to hit you on ladders (something that RE4 had, I might add), they just disable the hidden timer from ticking while you are on the ladder. What the fuck?
Eventually I do figure out a strategy to run out the clock without using the ladders. Still took about another hour of playing, and involves a fairly specific routing, aggroing certain enemies at a certain time before going into a place, standing in a certain location that seems to bug enemies out and give you an extra 30s or so, and some other things. Managed to win with only 5 bullets fired and one HP item used. If anyone is curious I can post a map with some arrows and an explanation of how to pretty easily do this event but it's a year and a half old game at this point so I'm not going to do that unless someone is interested. Mostly just want to bitch about this stupid fucking event that took me about 4-5 hours total to beat.
Anyway, just finished up giant lady boss fight. Thankfully the game immediately gets massively better and there's no more bullshit so far. Getting hunted throughout the castle and avoiding her is fun, even though the actual hunting part is a little short and it's obvious what to do.
