A couple days ago, I started replaying Resident Evil 7, this time in VR, to get myself ready for Resident Evil Village in a couple weeks. Last night, instead of continuing to enjoy that game, I decided instead to check out the open beta for Resident Evil Re:Verse, the weird multiplayer game that’s coming out alongside Village. This was the last day of the beta and I hadn’t gotten around to playing it yet, so this made sense at the time. But after an hour and a half or so of playing, I’m not so sure this was the right way to spend my night.

Resident Evil, despite being primarily a single player series, is no stranger to multiplayer modes. From spinoff games like Resident Evil Outbreak and Operation Raccoon City to full co-op options in Resident Evil 5 and 6, there’s plenty of examples of multiplayer options in the series. Re:Verse is the newest one. It’s technically a stand-alone game, but as it will be coming with Village for free, it kind of feels like a mode for that game. Capcom actually did the same thing with the Resident Evil 3 remake last year, by including the Resistance game. While not great, that was at least a neat attempt at something interesting, with a group of players teaming up against a single one. This is not that.

Re:Verse is the most basic multiplayer shooter I’ve played in a long time. Before joining a game, you choose one of six classic Resident Evil characters to play as. Then, after loading in, you find the other players and shoot them. There are some things that help liven things up, such as each character having their own “personal weapon” as well as two special abilities, but these really don’t do much to make the game stand out from the tons of other shooters out there.

The one kind of unique thing about this game is that when you die, you transform into a bio-organic weapon, basically a monster from the main games. While playing, you can come across virus canisters, and depending on how many canisters you’re holding, you’ll turn into a stronger BOW. These are very powerful but they slowly lose health over time. When you die as a BOW, you respawn back as your human character. While a neat little touch, it’s also very weird. But I mean, hey, if you ever wanted to be Jill Valentine and shoot Chris Redfield in the face and then watch him transform into Jack Baker, complete with his two chainsaws, well then I have the game for you.

Not helping maters is the fact that the game just doesn’t look too good. I don’t know if this will be true in the final release, but the beta was a Xbox One game, despite the fact that I was playing on a Series X and Village is definitely a Series X game. And even with that in mind, it’s not a very good looking Xbox One game. Environments are just kind of drab, not the typical spooky atmosphere of the main games. Character models are noticeably less detailed than other recent games in the series. It just looks cheap. 

The beta didn’t offer a lot of content, so it’s hard to say what the scope of the actual game will be. There are six characters to choose from, only one map (the police department from Resident Evil 2), and only one game mode (a free for all). Is there a team mode? I would assume there’d have to be, that’s like bare minimum for this kind of game, but I don’t actually know. Hopefully there’s more to it in the final release.

So yeah, I was not impressed by my time with Re:Verse. Like I said before, it does come with Village, so at least you don’t have to play separately for it. If it was a separate thing, this would be a hard pass from me. But since it is included, I’ll probably goof off with it a little bit after finishing the main game. I can’t imagine it’ll be more than that though.