Finished with everything in the game, can finally give my two cents on the experience:
It's underwhelming in just about every aspect. The models look off, the voice acting cast and performances were hit and miss, the obvious censorship that brings everything down, the technical performance wasn't great, and it's so easy it's boring.
RE Engine just can't do hair right with its weird-ass shading and lighting, it looks better in the original in every way including the atmosphere of the mall, not even mentioning things like aging up Brad in both appearance and voice and how everyone just looks uncanny compared to their original counterparts.
Isabela's VA wasn't too bad, Jessica was pretty good for what it was, Steven's VA definitely tried his best to capture the character but you can't top an S+ performance like that, and regardless of TJ's absence I think Frank's just wasn't right, Brad was definitely the weakest of the main cast in my opinion.
The stuff about the Chinese studio coming to light explains basically everything and it's sad to hear; the removal of erotica, Cheryl's less revealing clothing, Cliff's changed lines, and the whitewashing of Larry just fit.
The game ran kinda bad, and despite Capcom being pretty accessible with graphical settings it just wasn't enough for the general performance of the game; the pop-in on zombies is atrocious and you can obviously tell when they respawn outside of your view because they'll trip as if they were falling in mid-air. I constantly found zombies and sometimes other enemies just hanging out in the walls and even the floors and a majority of my saved photos across my time playing consist of these oddities, they even clip into models like Brock's tank and even each other on plenty of occasions in cutscenes, an egregious one being the opening clip of Connie and Dakota with some merging right in front of the car in broad headlights. On a side note, I had occasions of phasing straight through a zombie and even had an incident where a Special Forces soldier got confused and couldn't decide if he was dead or not, giving me the kill PP but still running after me unarmed and helplessly punching me in the face.
The game is a mess and was piss fucking easy, the only time I ever died was on my first run fighting Cliff because I was reckless about not having food and didn't expect him to play so aggressively now. They nerfed the mini chainsaw. Leveling is marginally faster now, especially with the massive boosts from scouting out PP stickers now. Survivors have AI that's bearable now and have more depth so they can just spoil secrets like secret weapon spots and PP sticker locations, but where's the challenge in that? The only time autosaves ever came in handy was when the game arbitrarily decided to crash on me a few times playing. The timeskip feature makes things trivial as all hell and is the reason I even finished everything in a shorter timespan the the game takes place in, both in game hours and real days.
The beta features that STiP0 constantly sucks them off for including are nowhere near enough to justify the cons the "remaster" brings as baggage. I'll gladly be sticking with the original game's beloved jank and timeless experience over this modernized snoozefest. Nowhere near full price, pick it up on sale whenever that happens if you really wanna try it out.
