Resident Evil 3 Nemesis (1999)

I've spent time with all three legs of the original Resident Evil trilogy, and RE3 is the one that puts its cards on the table immediately: speed over atmosphere, action over dread, and one single-minded bioweapon that will not stop until you're dead or you're out of the city. That clarity of purpose is both its greatest strength and the thing that divides the fanbase to this day. The setting itself is a step change from what came before. Unlike RE1 and RE2, which mostly confined you to buildings, RE3 plants you in the streets of Raccoon City, giving the environments a more varied, open feel even within the series' fixed-camera format. The pre-rendered backdrops run at a noticeably higher resolution on PC compared to the original PlayStation release, and the character models hold up better than you might expect for a 1999 title. The game is capped at 30 FPS, and you'll notice some of the polygon wobble that defined the era, but nothing that breaks the experience once you've adjusted. Community mods exist for upscaled textures if you want to push the visuals further - the Steam release is compatible with the same REbirth installer that's been doing the rounds since the GOG version dropped. On the mechanics side, RE3 introduced a handful of additions that actually stuck with the series. Quick-turn lets you spin 180 degrees and bolt in the opposite direction, which sounds minor until Nemesis materializes behind you at a run. The dodge move is trickier - timing-dependent in a way that critics in 1999 called outright impractical, and they weren't entirely wrong. When it works, it feels great. When it doesn't, you've just faceplanted into a zombie. The gunpowder crafting system adds a light resource-management layer: you find Type A, Type B, and mixed Type C powder in the environment and combine them to create handgun ammo, shotgun shells, or grenade launcher rounds including flame, acid, and freeze variants. It rewards players who pay attention to what they're carrying. Live Selection events are the other standout addition: timed prompts that force a snap decision, often determining where Nemesis shows up next or branching a cutscene. It's a rougher version of branching narrative, but it gives repeat playthroughs genuine variation - item placement, enemy positions, and certain story beats shift across runs, and the post-game unlockable Mercenaries mode (Operation: Mad Jackal, played across three UBCS characters) gives speedrun-adjacent players something to chase. Eight character-specific epilogues unlock as you clear the game multiple times, making this something of a replay machine for series devotees. Then there's Nemesis himself, the reason this entry has a title at all. He was designed to create persistent paranoia - the feeling that nowhere is safe - and twenty-five years on, that design goal still lands. He runs. He uses a rocket launcher. He can follow you through doors in a way Mr. X never could. The Live Selections often force you to confront or evade him directly, and every encounter carries weight because you know he's going to be back. The story built around him is thinner than RE2's two-disc, dual-protagonist setup - supporting characters like Carlos don't get much room to breathe, and the narrative wraps up relatively quickly - but the game was always more interested in the chase than the exposition. Where the experience genuinely feels its age is in the dodge mechanic's inconsistency and in the overall length: this is a short game by any measure, four to six hours on a first run, and players coming off RE2's layered scenario structure may feel shortchanged. It's worth knowing that going in rather than discovering it at the credits. If you're a series newcomer, I'd point you toward RE1 or RE2 first - the lore context helps, and RE3 assumes you've done your homework on Umbrella's history. But if you already know Raccoon City and want the version of classic RE that trades puzzle boxes for sheer survival pressure, this PC re-release (co-developed with GOG and now on Steam) is the cleanest way to play it on modern hardware.

Alex · Scout Team

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